Baffled.

Three things that baffled me as a child:

• that a man could marry a woman that was taller than him
• that banana was really spelled like that
• how coupons worked

At a wedding I went to, the man was a good 7 inches shorter than his wife and I was mesmerized by them. My real life and Barbie/Ken examples had only modeled the "guy taller than the woman" option.

I remember being exasperated about all the words I didn't know how to spell and I was begrudgingly filling out a crossword puzzle from Highlights, when the answer for 5 across was banana. My mom said to spell it out as best I could, so I was saying "B - a" and started to get frustrated and said  "n - a - n - a" knowing full well that no word had that many repetitive letters. My mom said I was right and it became my new favorite word.

When I was five I cut out pictures of a set of Christmas dishes from a Penny's catalog. I thought I could just take in my coupons to the store, show them the pictures and get the whole dish set for my Mom for Christmas.