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I was a little monkey when I was growing up. Like, literally. I even to this day have freakishly long digits on my feet that aided me in climbing when I was a youngster. It didn’t matter what it was either. Cabinets? Those were like a small hill. A pine tree? K2 at best. Everest for me? That was the oak tree in our front yard.

Some of the best times of a child were spent clinging to the upper reaches of the branches to this tree. For the most part my parents never stopped me from climbing this tree. My brother Ryan, on the other hand, not so much the climber. Often he’d stand at the base of the tree watching as I climbed to ever-higher reaches.

On warm and breezy summer day my mom came out the front door to find my brother sitting on the porch…I was probably about six years old. My mom expected me to be right there with Ryan, who was 4 at the time and wearing moonboots, as he often did in the summers of his very early youth. So she asked Ryan, “Where’s your brother?”

Ryan just responded by pointing up and saying “There!” Mom looked up and I was about 25 feet off the ground in the part of the tree that later in life I learned had too thin of branches for me to climb there. Mom flipped out just a little bit and started yelling, “David! Get down out of that tree right now!” So I did. Mom then laid into me about how I wasn’t to climb so high in the future.

I think it was a couple of weeks later when my dad and I were outside and dad had gone off into the woods at the side yard for something and I was doing my favorite thing in the world….attempting to get a birds eye true from Mt. Everest. I wasn’t very high, probably six or seven feet off the ground when I slipped. Ok, I feel out of the tree. Flat on my back. From what I am told I even made a bass drum “thump” kind of sound when I hit the ground.

Dad came running from around the side of the house to find me gasping for breath under the shade of mountain. This, incidentally, was also the first time I ever truly had the wind knocked out of me. I still remember it. It. Hurt. I also had tears streaming down my cheeks and dad did his best to calm me down and sit me up and it worked.

Once I was calmed down and could breath and we were relatively certain that nothing was broken dad said to me, “Now David, how about we keep this our little secret. There’s no reason to tell your mom, she’d just get upset and you wouldn’t be able to climb anymore.” Oh Dad, you were a sly one! I learned, years later he didn’t want to get in trouble for not watching me more closely. All that bonding over the secret, and it was entirely for an ulterior motive, Dad wasn’t concerned about me not being able to climb anymore!

Anyway, years went by and I don’t remember if I was in High School or College when the truth finally came out to Mom. It was actually pretty amusing, she yelled at Dad in a playful way, and we still joke about it to this day. I still love to climb stuff too.

Did any of you have a dangerous habit as a child that your parents indulged? I know that in today’s world its unlikely that a parent would let their kid do what I was allowed, which I think is kind of unfortunate…then again I don’t have a kid so maybe that makes the difference. Would you let your kids climb trees? Assuming you are around to watch when they are younger.