Watch Your Mouth! Wait, MY Mouth?

I curse. A lot. I curse when I type. I curse when I talk. I curse when I drive.

When I first had Ella, I worried about this aspect of myself, thinking I'd raise a little sailor. But my best friend explained it best to me. She curses and from that, her kids heard it and learned, from a very early age, they are bad words. In fact, as her experience was, when they actually were old enough to go to school, the curse words were ~so~ blasé to them, she never had a problem with them cursing. She did have the story when they first tried to use the word when very little, as do I, but that's really about it. Or so I thought.

A few nights ago, the girls were playing in their room a little too quietly and Tom went to check on them. (I was out at a friend's house, so I missed the exchange.) Apparently, the girls were whispering a "bad word" to one another.

Ella: "Allison, if you say it, you have to whisper it."
Allison: "asshole."
Ella: "asshole."

Tom was able to contain his laughter long enough to go in, tell them they aren't allowed to whisper it either and we'll talk about it in the morning.

During the talk the next day, I told them we'd make a deal. I'd try to watch my mouth and they would agree to not say the words at all. They agreed and then Ella had an idea for me.

Ella: "Mommy, when someone pulls in front of you, you can just just say 'darn!'."

heh.

"What's a 'bad word'?"

This is a post that I can't help but put on both my blogs. I probably should be more horrified than anything about it, but what the hell.

We were eating dinner and I used the word "dumb". Ella told me that it was a bad word. So we get into the bad word conversation about saying a word vs calling someone a name, etc.

This was the well needed END of the conversation:

Me: "Ella, what is a bad word?" (looking for her child-like definition)
Ella: "Fuck."
Me: "Well, that certainly is an example of a bad word, but not what I was going for"

oh. my. god.