I realized I never blogged this one: from May 30, 2007.
At the pool this afternoon, Helen was playing with Marley, the teenage girl that lives down the street (we were actually trying to get Marley to teach Alice how to swim, since I can’t get in the pool for another week, but Alice wasn’t participating). Anyway. Marley got up because the phone was for her, and Helen asked, “Where’s Marley?” I teased her that Marley had left since Helen wouldn’t go to the deep end with her, and Helen said, “Well, F***.”
In front of my mother.
With exactly the same inflection I used this morning when I dropped something on my foot in the laundry room. Helen was downstairs and out of earshot, or so I thought.
Charming.
I got up close and personal and said, “I’m sorry, what was that? What did you just say?”
She looked at me. She looked at my mother. She looked back at me… “I said… ‘duck’….?”
“Um, no, I’m pretty sure that’s not what you said.”
She looked down, said, “I’m sorry,” and gave me a hug.
I said, “That’s okay. Just be careful, OK, kiddo?” and dropped it.
Ai yi yi.
(I will admit that when it happened my instinctive reaction was one of pride that she had used the word properly and in context, and then a split-second later I was deriding myself for being proud of my not-yet-five-year-old for dropping the F-bomb.)
4 Responses
Nope, I’m pretty sure you blogged it. It’s still a good story though.
Huh. I couldn’t find it…. I’ll admit that I didn’t look very hard, though.
Oh. There it is. http://messygoat.com/?p=582#content
I just found this entry and was painfully reminded of the day we received a request for a meeting from our son’s kindergarten teacher (a nun). We when arrived for said meeting, she simply handed us a note our dear child had written, which she had intercepted. Apparently he was quite peeved at a classmate and had written “*F_ _ _ Jason. ” It was misspelled, but if you sounded it out, the intent was obvious. I was mortified, but my then-husband (source of the new word) was rather proud. Such is life sometimes.