Mommy ought to clean up that potty-mouth
Well, it’s not really a potty-mouth, but when little ears are in my vicinity, I occasionally pepper my language with the well-chosen quasi-curse word. You know, like flippin’, crap, dagnabbit, holy mother of pearl, jeez louise, or sucks. These are PG-rated substitutes for the real thing. Words that, if repeated by one of my children at an inopportune moment, such as with the grandparents or in Sunday School, would cause me to be only 66.6% mortified.
So the other afternoon, my 6th grader got home and the the three-year-old was present. I was riding my older son about his homework and am sure my voice reflected the exasperation I felt as I tried to conduct a root-cause analysis of how he could do an assignment and then Not. Hand. It. In. Like, how does that happen?
So the three year old looks at his older brother and says this:
YOU’RE A FREAKIN’ BOY!
And, while it was certainly shocking to hear a substitute swear word come out of his precious little rosebud mouth, I have to say, all I could do was giggle. (Why would a mother giggle? That’s not funny. I would have made him eat soap.) Because? He used the word properly, as an adjective, in a sentence that he had never heard before, to describe his brother, AND with the proper tone of voice that perfectly matched my consternation. And if that doesn’t point to his superior intelligence and command of his native tongue, than frankly, I don’t know what does.
Filed under: motherhood | Tagged: curse, freakin', homework, out of the mouths of babes, potty mouth, root-cause analysis, swear
Eva (age 3) said just this morning, “Mom, do we say dammit?”
I said, “No! Of course not! We never say dammit!”
“Oh,” she said.
All I’m left thinking is… does she read my blog?
[...] I wrote about an example of that, when the 3-year-old used a substitute swear word he’d heard me say and inserted it into a grammatically…. [...]