Old Wives

I have turned into my mum. I don't mean that I've shrunk ten inches and gone grey overnight. But all of those things that my mum used to say to me that either made me cringe or roll my eyes, I'm now saying to The Daughter. There was a horror story behind everything when I was a kid, even a harmless slice of toast could have severe repercussions for your appearance. I thought of this tonight after we caught The Daughter giving The Boychild some seeds from dried up bluebells to eat. There he was, plucking them up with his little fingers like a monkey picking peanuts out of poo. Bless him, he doesn't know the difference between the nuts and seeds he gets in his lunchbox and ones that (and I quote) "are poisonous" and "can cause severe discomfort if ingested". Brilliant. I did toy with the idea of telling her something wildly random like 'He's going to have bluebells growing out of his ears every Springtime now!', just to see the look on her face. But then I remembered all the crazy things I'd been told over the years and the effect they had on me..

Eating crusts and/or burnt toast makes your hair curly. This is categorically untrue. Despite 35 years of eating crusts and crucified barbecue food, my hair remains as straight as a die.
If you eat apple pips, an apple tree will grow in your stomach. I mean, seriously??
Eating bogies gives you worms. This feeble attempt at stopping a young child digging in the bogey mines and eating the findings failed miserably.
Touching dandelions makes you wet your pants. Not sure of the biology behind this one, but fairly certain weeds don't cause bladder problems.
If your chin turns yellow if you hold a buttercup under it, you love butter. So, everybody in the world then.
If you have chips and lemonade you get jaundice. Got my dad to thank for that little gem.
"The sooner you go to sleep, the sooner Santa will have been". For years I went to bed at 5pm and woke up at midnight, only to find mum having a go at Santa for dropping 'My Little Pony grooming parlour' on the stairs and making a racket.
Eggs give you salmonella. And if you leave an egg til after it's Use By date, there'll be a chick inside. What a terrifying thought.
Putting on one sock inside out accidentally is good luck. But seeing one magpie is bad luck. This led to years of confusion about whether if you saw the magpie first and then discovered the inside out sock,  would it cancel the bad luck out? And whether if you see one magpie, and then another a bit later, does that count as two? Or does two inside out socks mean bad luck? Either way, I still salute lone magpies with a "Hello Mr Magpie" to this day - just to be on the safe side.

I'm sure there are countless others that have made me into the ball of anxieties and oddities that i am today. So even though it turns my stomach, the next time I see The Daughter burying her finger up to the second knuckle in her nose, I'll just leave her to it!