GG absolutely loves Wii. She was on a bowling hot streak one night when she missed her spare. “D@*$ !”
Huh?
“What did you say?” She said it again. I picked up my jaw off the floor and flashed back to the first time I said a …um…chosen word in my mom's presence. Before I continue, you’ve got to understand that my mom was “old school,” in fact, she’d be 84 on her next birthday. Hers was the generation where you didn’t sit down and do mini-psychotherapy to find out why your 6-year-old just cussed like a sailor. You simply spanked her little bottom, and she never said the word again – even if she didn’t know why saying the word was wrong in the first place. Which is what happened with me. But I knew I wanted to do things differently with GG.
“Who have you heard say that word?” Heaven knows that Jamie and I aren’t halo-heads or anything, but strong language is something that just doesn’t happen around our house. In fact, I was 30 years old before I ever heard my own dad swear. Anyway, back to GG the Sailor. “I heard it from my Surf’s Up movie.” Great. Not only did I take her to see that movie, but bought her the DVD too…So we had yet another “talk.” We talked about how she may hear people saying words like that, but it doesn’t mean that she should use them; how she’s got so many words in her vocabulary that she doesn’t have to come up with dirty words to explain herself; how saying dirty words can get her in trouble at school or even cause her to lose friends. And whole bunch of other stuff that took about 10 minutes to go through, as well as a “time out” and an apology to me.
Really…didn’t I just have “the talk” about alcohol with her the other day? Great…and now we’ve moved onto swearing. Guess I better buy a book about the “Birds & the Bees”…that’ll probably be the topic of tomorrow’s “talk” at the rate we’re going.
Anybody have suggestions for some "cover the gray" hair coloring?
I think I'm gonna need it.
