Sunday, December 05, 2010

Kids say the darnedest shit!

Trying to clean up the dark and forgotten places in the kids' room I found a Luke Skywalker action figure whose head was trapped under the post of their bunk-bed. I told Ambrose to pull him out when I lifted it. This particular series of dolls have rubbery heads, and its face was squashed flat.

Ambrose laughed. "He looks like a douchebag!"

"WHAT did you just say?" I said, shocked and amused. He repeated it.

"That is not a good word for kids to use Ams," I told him, "it's one of the 'bad' words."

"But you called me a douchebag last week," he said, smiling.

"No way. That is not possible. I would never call you that."

"You did!" he said.

I went back in my mind and, yes, hazily remember an episode of him not doing something I asked for the nineteenth time and me being late to drive them to the bus and a few of the adults-only words flying out. I've said some bad things to, or in front of, the boys, but calling them douchebags goes past the our-free-spirited-dad-and-his-colorful-temper level of acceptable and closer to the I-burn-my-children-with-cigarettes spectrum.

"Oh, shit" I said.

3 comments:

DB Stewart said...

My wife is the swear-er in our family too.

Anonymous said...

My mom especially loves it when they scream out "god damnit!" after some sort of freak out.
My little guy has a mouth that would make George Carlin cry. One time the letter of the day in preschool was "f".
The teacher made the grave mistake of asking "Sammy, do you know an F word?"
"I sure do!"
We got a LOT of phone calls that evening.

E.C. Hayward said...

Ha!

Beth said I may have potentially made myself sound like a child-abuser in this post, you know, the sort who wears a stained wife-beater as goes that trope. However I assure concerned parents when I called my son a douchebag I was wearing an ascot and holding a copy of Proust.