This is getting out of hand, but at the same time, it’s fucking hilarious…
Thing 1 is almost 3 years old now, and its favorite thing these days is to just pick up on mannerisms of ours, or words we use, and just repeat them or act them out… all. the. time. For example, I do this thing where whenever anyone asks me a question, whether I hear the question or not, I tend to say “what did you say?”, or something along the lines of that. I always hear the question the first time, but for some reason I always answer the question with another question. I’m not sure if it’s just a mechanism to give my mind an extra second or two to formulate an answer or what, but now Thing 1 never answers our questions it just says “what did you say?” Which is super annoying…
In addition to that little quirk I have, my wife and I are both pretty bad when it comes to swearing (cursing). We try to be good about not swearing around the kids, but we also are of the mindset that we shouldn’t have to change who we are just because we have kids. We just have to teach our kids what’s right and what’s wrong. Or what things adults can do, but kids can’t. So we do still swear around the kids in certain situations, obviously never at them, but in certain situations a fuck or shit may come out of our mouths while the kids are around…
And most of the time it’s in the car.
Both of us are pretty bad when it comes to getting annoyed with other drivers on the road. We both tend to swear a lot, get loud, get frustrated, etc. when it comes to other drivers getting in the way of us trying to get where we’re going. And this has lead to Thing 1’s favorite word become ‘fuck’.
I know it picked it up from us and not from anyone else, which means that we are the ones that have to try and put a stop to it now. Which is fine. But it’s so damn hard to do when I can’t stop laughing when it says it.
Thing 1 is very articulate when it comes to its speech pattern and talking abilities, so it’s not like it is just yelling out ‘fuck’ for no apparent reason to see if it can illicit a reaction from us. It actually uses it in proper context, which makes it even harder to keep a straight face around.
For example, I built it one of those Little Tikes car that it got for Christmas a few weeks ago. I was going to wait for it to get warm, but I got sick of looking at the box, so it rides it around the house. As it was riding the car around the house, it stopped, honked the horn and said “there’s a fucking man in the road”.
I wasn’t quite sure what I heard, so I asked it to repeat it…. “fuck theres a man…” was its response.
As it’s honking the horn in its car, it’s yelling “fuck” at imaginary people getting in its way… I was in tears I was laughing so hard.
Fast forward to last weekend when my wife was out of town and I was hanging out with both kids for a few days. We decided that Thing 1 and I were going to watch a movie after Thing 2 went to sleep. So we put Thing 2 down, made some popcorn and sat down to watch “Toy Story”.
Now I haven’t seen “Toy Story” in years, and obviously Thing 1 had never seen it, so I totally forgot that the neighbor kid Sid was kind of scary, and his Frankenstein toys were equally as scary, so of course Thing 1 got freaked out and didn’t want to watch the movie anymore. But being the good parent that I am, I made it sit back down and watch through the scary parts, explaining to it that it was just pretend and that the bad toys weren’t actually bad in the end.
The explanation worked and we made it further through the movie. But once we got towards the very end, where Woody and Buzz are chasing after the moving truck on the RC car, Thing 1 did it again…
“That fucking dog is chasing after them!” it yelled as Sid’s dog was chasing after Woody and Buzz.
I had to pretend I was going to the bathroom I was laughing so hard…
Honestly, as a person, I don’t see what the big deal is with swear words as long as they aren’t being used in a hurtful way towards someone. So in the case of Thing 1 using it as a way to describe a mean dog… all is fine in my book. But we still have to reel this thing in before it does say it in the wrong context.
I’m just waiting for the call from school saying that Thing 1 yelled out about the fucking cat in the hat, or something along those lines, while at school… It’ll be a conversation I’ll have to try my hardest not to laugh through, and then try a little harder to make sure it knows it can’t use that word.
And believe me, we’ve tried to tell it that it can’t say ‘fuck’ until it’s older, but a few days will go by and it’ll come up to us and ask “so when I’m older I can say fuck right?”
And we just have to nod our heads and say yes…
