So did you ever wander off as a child

When I was about 3/4 my aunt was looking after me she took me shopping with her and when she was in the butchers, I got fed up because in my opinion she was chatting too much to the butcher, so I decided to go back to her house and wait for her, I remember thinking shopping is the worst thing ever, being so small it had not occurred to me that the door would be locked. I walked out of the shops across the car park, crossed a very busy road walked about half a mile and got to her house of course when I got there I could not get in, so sat on the step, about 30 minuet's later she finds me and there is murder and I genuinely could not understand why I was in trouble.

kneemos

I wondered off one day and came across a host of golden daffodils.

Mince Pie

I ran away to nursery school on a Saturday in my pyjama's when I was about 4 I think. My mum had to pick me up from the police station. Kinda remember thinking what was all the fuss about.

Gatling

I actually did it once when I was around 3/4 ,we went to a fun fair and some how got separated from my family ,don't remember much other than been found by a search party organised by the gardai according to my folks I was found 6 hours later several miles from the event ,

Scary thought I don't remember a thing other than been in a ditch when I was found

SEPT 23 1989

yes in shopping centres

Greenmachine

Wandered off a small lad on the beach. We went out for a day trip. My mom went to the water with my siblings while I stayed with my dad. I think I was prolly cranky that day. I decided I didn't want to go in the water. At some stage I changed my mind and wandered off to where I thought they were. I ended up lost

SEPT 23 1989

we can all remember that horrible sinking feeling when we cant find mammy

First Up

Of course.
How do you think I got here?

Lollipops23

When I was about 3 and a half we were on holiday in Wales (me, my mam and her friend). Mam and her mate were down in the hotel bar one night, with my mam checking on me in bed about every 20-30mins.

I woke and didn't know where I was, so was bawling at the top of my lungs. Decided to explore, got out of bed, opened the hotel room door, wandered down the corridor to the lift and the only reason I didn't get in the lift was because it was one of those old school grate ones and I didn't know how to work it.

Went back to the room, got back into bed and fell asleep. Was an adventure!

The thing that stuck with me is that I genuinely could not understand what I had done wrong and feeling very perplexed that I was in trouble, one of those adults are so stupid moments that I often had as a child.

Freddie Dodge

I wandered off aged about 3 looking under stones for bugs scurrying away, but where I lived, there weren't any other people around. Took me hours to find my way home.

My ex wife got lost in the city when she was little, and when the cops picked her up they though she was foreign because she spoke no english, just Irish (one of those families) :rolleyes: till she was 6. Some cop from the wesht eventually tried irish on her and then she wouldn't shut up till they got her home.

danniemcq

Uncle was babysitting me when i was 2 or 3. can't remember the exact reason why but I couldn't find anyone so aparently decided to go find ma (i knew she was in the chapel)

walked into town just over a km away before being spotted by friends of my Ma seen me and knew me and tried to get me into the house or car to take me home and i just kept repeating "don't talk to strangers", one of them drove to the house while the other made sure i was safe and eventually was all sorted out.

I was raised well!

SEPT 23 1989

danniemcq wrote: »

Uncle was babysitting me when i was 2 or 3. can't remember the exact reason why but I couldn't find anyone so aparently decided to go find ma (i knew she was in the chapel)

walked into town just over a km away before being spotted by friends of my Ma seen me and knew me and tried to get me into the house or car to take me home and i just kept repeating "don't talk to strangers", one of them drove to the house while the other made sure i was safe and eventually was all sorted out.

I was raised well!

I would say Uncle was popular when Ma found out:D

harry Bailey esq

i was a right bollix for going missing when i was a little kid from what the ma tells me,in fact I've kept it up to this day...which is probably why im single again lol

Obliq

Can't remember doing it myself, but a neighbour brought my youngest home one day having found him (age 2 1/2) striding out purposefully for my aunt's house down the road. I'd thought he was still playing in his room with the lego blocks, while I was washing up in the kitchen. You can't keep your eyes on them all the time unfortunately - same child (same year) was found hanging by his hood off of a high stone wall TWICE, having tried to get down frontways - also escaped his gran into a field with 8 horses and lay quietly among them while she ran frantically up and down the road shouting for him. Some parents do have em

Going Strong

Twice that I can remember.
The first time was in Dublin Zoo when I was about 5 or 6. I wanted to stay at the petting zoo but my parents wanted to move on and we got separated. I don't think I was away from them for long but I remember the feeling of panic and a woman holding onto my hand until my parents came back.

The second one was worse though. I was about 9 or 10 and it was a shopping centre before Christmas and I was too busy looking at the toy section in the supermarket that I never noticed I was alone. I wandered everywhere looking for the rest of my family but couldn't see them anywhere. I spoke to an assistant and, as I did, I started bawling crying. She took me to the information desk, me blubbing away and, round the corner came a pair of my classmates. My name was called out over the speakers and we waited, and waited. So then the security guard came and went out to the other shops in search of my parents and came back with them eventually. I was made to look a right eejit for some time afterwards in school as my "Crying like a little baby" routine was re-enacted for all.

Peter Visibility

I did wander off but it was called 'Playing' in the sixties.

Red Pepper

Coincidentally, when I was 2, I walked out of the house during the day and got about a mile down a busy main road before someone picked me up and brought me to a Garda station.

I Heart Internet

Lollipops23 wrote: »

When I was about 3 and a half we were on holiday in Wales (me, my mam and her friend). Mam and her mate were down in the hotel bar one night, with my mam checking on me in bed about every 20-30mins.

Your surname isn't McCann by any chance is it??

Bold Abdu

When I was 4 or 5 I went for a walk. Got knocked down by a car. Apparently the driver thought I was dead and put a coat over my head. I wasn't.

sbsquarepants

Not when I was a toddler, but when I was around 11 or 12 a group of us would regularly walk up to the hell fire club, about 5 miles from my house, stay there for the day and then walk back - I'd have been worried sick if my kids done that when they were that age, I wouldn't even like them doing it now and they're 18 and 15! We never told our parents obviously and in those days you just left the house in the morning and came back for your dinner, no mobiles and no way of being contacted, anything could have happened!

Red Pepper

Bold Abdu wrote: »

When I was 4 or 5 I went for a walk. Got knocked down by a car. Apparently the driver thought I was dead and put a coat over my head. I wasn't.

Jaysus! Were you badly hurt?

danniemcq

SEPT 23 1989 wrote: »

I would say Uncle was popular when Ma found out:D

honestly she wasn't to bad (from what i was told), He had to go up the back in the field for stones for a wall or path or something and at that time he'd have been out of my FOV so that must have been the time i went looking.

He was pretty distraught about it too plus I guess a happy ending meant a happier ending for him

Bold Abdu

Red Pepper wrote: »

Jaysus! Were you badly hurt?

A few bumps and bruises. I think I lost a shoe too. It happened right outside Crumlin Hosp' so I had a bit of luck that day.

danniemcq

Bold Abdu wrote: »

When I was 4 or 5 I went for a walk. Got knocked down by a car. Apparently the driver thought I was dead and put a coat over my head. I wasn't.

Holy crap,

how long till they found out you were alive, were you knocked out and came round or was the driver just in shock?

ThunbergsAreGo

World Cup Italia 90 homecoming at the age of 5,

Remember getting a free canof 7up, dad found me in the chipper

wispa9

I used to have a habit of standing in the display windows of Dunnes (clothes section) and pretending to be a mannequin. My mother always knew where to find me when I disappeared!

Maximus Alexander

My brother went through a phase of wandering off when he was maybe 2 and a half or 3. He'd get up really early in the morning, push a chair from the kitchen into the hall, then get up and open the front door. Fortunately he bumped into some neighbours who promptly returned him.

Plazaman

kneemos wrote: »

I wondered off one day and came across a host of golden daffodils.

Aww you must have been lonely, as lonely as a cloud to wander off.

During Summer holidays as a kid I could leave the house in the morning and not come back until suppertime. No one came looking for me Different times though, the only paedo about then was the neighbours incontinent dog, Peedo.

Bold Abdu

danniemcq wrote: »

Holy crap,

how long till they found out you were alive, were you knocked out and came round or was the driver just in shock?

To be honest I'm not sure. I was following my brothers. They heard a crash, came to have a look, ran home and told my mother I had "been knocked down and someone put a coat over my head"

youtube!

Many times ! To list a few, when I was about 4 I was just in from school and I went off to play down the road, I saw this huge looking machine which was tarring the centre lines of the road and thought this looked very interesting!
So I walked up to it,saw a ladder up to the cockpit and climbed on up there to be greeted by a nice man who let me come in and see how it all worked,nothing weird in my mind and when I was finished he helped me down the steps,not that I needed it of course, I eventually went back home none the worse for wear!.

Now around a year later I decided rather than to come straight home after school I would just go off with my schoolmate back to his house for a while which turned out to be 4 hrs....my Mam went up to the school worried sick but the teacher had remembered which boy I left with so was able to tell my Mam,who then sent a man who was working in the house at the time and who had a car to collect me, I vividly recall him telling me I was in big trouble,****ed if could figure out why!

I often wandered off to pick berries,catch bees in jars, find a game of football on a new road or whatever, never telling anyone who I was with or where I was going, the reason being I didn't have a clue where I was going most of the time! I just led my life by the minute and didn't plan anything, it was a blissful happy go lucky existence when I look back at it now!

The weird thing is I never let my own kids have that kind of freedom and I wonder if it's the right thing ya know? I would just worry too much about every little detail in a way that my own folks didn't, different world.

emmabrighton

I can barely remember it now but my mom and dad were in a pub in Baltimore, Cork and they were stuffing me full of tayto and club orange when I had enough and wandered down to the sailing boats. This was in the eighties, so was your usual summer holidays with parents in the pub and the kid bored out of their mind. There was some guy cleaning his yacht and I got talking to him and climbed up on it. I remember going into the yacht and having a good nose around.

I think if my son went for a wander and ended up on a strange mans yacht alone I would probably be sick but back then I don't think my parents even knew what the word paedophile meant. Also I am hoping that because I don't drink, baby brighton wont be left to his own devices anyhoo...

I would just like to add that nothing actually happened, I just had a very enjoyable time annoying some guy trying to clean his boat!

The Backwards Man

When I was three, decided to run away from home as I wasn't allowed to keep tadpoles. Threw Bow-Wow in a suitcase and headed off down the road. Got a couple of miles before my Granda got me.

Lollipops23

I Heart Internet wrote: »

Your surname isn't McCann by any chance is it??

Haha, no!! This was circa 1990. Apparently that kind of thing was a lot more acceptable back then!

Calibos

I used to purposely slip away from my mother in the supermarket or department stores in town and go straight to the information/reception desks and tell them I was lost.

....I also flooded the lobby of the grand hotel in Cork in '77 by tearing up beer mats and putting them in the fountain blocking the drain....

Zero recollection myself as I was only 3 or 4.

Also told a Nigerian doctor that he was very lucky because he had a much better tan than my mother. Also toppled a guy with a broken leg by pulling myself up off the floor via his crutches.

FTA69

SEPT 23 1989 wrote: »

we can all remember that horrible sinking feeling when we cant find mammy

Can we? I was f*cking delighted to get away from her from the age of 3 onwards. I used to have to be put in the trolley with the messages because I would have been off down the road otherwise. I was mad for rambling.

Thoie

Apparently when I was nearly 2, someone went out to get something from the garage and left the front door open for a minute.

Off I wandered. Got about half a mile before someone clicked that maybe a toddler shouldn't be out alone Some woman found me, and brought me to a woman who had a playschool in the area on the basis that "she'd know who kids were". And she did!

As I got older I used wander off constantly, but luckily for my parents I was obsessed with pens and paper, so they'd just head for the nearest stationery shop/aisle and invariably find me there.

Akrasia

I went to the shops on my tricycle when I was 3. We lived in the countryside about 3 miles from the nearest shop.
I think I got about half a mile down the road before a neighbour saw me and brought me back.

Another time, in 1992 I was 9 and we went to see clare play Donegal in the All Ireland semi-final in Croke park.
After the match, my dad got talking to someone he knew and the stadium was emptying out. i was wandering around the stand and then I looked up and my dad was gone. I tried to find him but couldn't so I decided to go back to the car myself. The car was parked in some random car park somewhere in dublin but I just followed the crowd and found it after a while

My dad came back 2 hours later after searching everywhere in Dublin and saw me sitting on the boot of the car waiting for them to come back.

dockleaf

Ran away loads of times when I was a child. Was a precocious reader, read all the famous five books when I was four and decided I wanted to run away and live a self-sufficient life on an island somewhere. I tried different directions, once I was caught three miles away by the local pp and brought home. So I tried the other direction but decided to call into my grandda two miles away to say good bye. So he brought me home ( the traitor). Tried another direction, down the fields, my dad found me. I'd say after the first time they took no notice.:P

Menas

Akrasia wrote: »

My dad came back 2 hours later after searching everywhere in Dublin .

Fair play to your dad for searching all of dublin in 2 hours. But I suppose it was smaller back then.

anncoates

Ironic that if the thread was about a child being knocked down or abducted after wandering away, the thread would be stuffed with sanctimonious allegations of bad parenting.

Menas

anncoates wrote: »

Ironic that if the thread was about a child being knocked down or abducted after wandering away, the thread would be stuffed with sanctimonious allegations of bad parenting.

Its a good point. Those of us who grew up in the 60s, 70s and 80s had a lot more freedom then kids nowadays. It was common that in summer time you would head off in the morning and be back for tea that night.
But that does not happen these days, yet surely there were no more or less peados around back then....so why do we feel that it is unsafe to give our kids the freedom we had? Scratches head.

Going Strong

Trigger Happy wrote: »

Its a good point. Those of us who grew up in the 60s, 70s and 80s had a lot more freedom then kids nowadays. It was common that in summer time you would head off in the morning and be back for tea that night.
But that does not happen these days, yet surely there were no more or less peados around back then....so why do we feel that it is unsafe to give our kids the freedom we had? Scratches head.

I don't know if that's quite true though. My childhood was (mostly) in the 1970's. I remember being chatted up by dirty old men, running for my life from gangs of rough kids and risking my neck several times over. We all kept very quiet about it though for fear of our parents getting worried and clamping down on our all-day fun far from home and any sort of imposed supervision. Sort of a juvenile Omerta.

Pumpkinseeds

I wandered off in Quinnsworth as a child, I must have been 3 or 4. I can remember finding an open packet of small biscuits and stealing one, it didn't taste good, turned out they were dog biscuits:o

Going Strong

Pumpkinseeds wrote: »

I wandered off in Quinnsworth as a child, I must have been 3 or 4. I can remember finding an open packet of small biscuits and stealing one, it didn't taste good, turned out they were dog biscuits:o

A free feed is a free feed.

anncoates

Trigger Happy wrote: »

But that does not happen these days, yet surely there were no more or less peados around back then....so why do we feel that it is unsafe to give our kids the freedom we had? Scratches head.

I very much doubt the dangers are any worse these days but the kangaroo court of online comment - whether from judgemental non-parents or competitive parents - foregrounds the potential danger to the extent where everybody over-thinks the danger to a ridiculous extent.

Menas

Going Strong wrote: »

I don't know if that's quite true though. My childhood was (mostly) in the 1970's. I remember being chatted up by dirty old men, running for my life from gangs of rough kids and risking my neck several times over. We all kept very quiet about it though for fear of our parents getting worried and clamping down on our all-day fun far from home and any sort of imposed supervision. Sort of a juvenile Omerta.

Remembering back we did have a flasher in my town in the 80s.
You just dont hear of flashers any more.

castletownman

Never got lost on the bad streets of the scary town but some of my fondest recollections of childhood were the care-free hours spent with the relations wandering around the fields of the locality, playing soccer, tip the can, making bale forts, whatever. Not only did parents not mind us being adventurous for most of the day, they actively encouraged it as it was seen as far more productive than those pesky video games (oh how attitudes have changed towards technology)

Don't see as many blaise parents today, and as a result childhood feels somewhat restricted and uneventful.

yeahimhere

SEPT 23 1989 wrote: »

yes in shopping centres

That was my forte. The manager of the shopping centre automatically knew what name to call out over the intercom when I arrived in the office. My mam taught me our telephone number from an early age I wondered off a lot.

When I was about 3 or 4 I remember going to a home depo place with my dad. One of those that had all the kitchen and bathroom displays set up. My dad goes looking for me in a panic after I wonder off. Finds me quite proudly trying to flush the toilet of one of the displays after using it. Grabbed my hand and dragged me off without telling anyone. Not sure how they cleaned that one up...

Holsten

Yeah all the time, giving my parents and siblings heart attacks weekly.

BUBBLES1978

Not so much wandered off but went "missing" when i was about 4-5
had the whole street out searching outbuildings and fields at the back of my house. my mother was in an awful state it was evening time and i was gone "missing" about 4 hours

and then i appeared from the back bedroom!!!!, i had fallen asleep down between the bed and the wall and hadnt heard anyone shouting or looking for me!!!

got a smack for that!!!