Saturday, April 30, 2011

An Every Day Thing

Like other young children, mine are interested/obsessed with body parts. THE body parts. To the point where we had to declare they are not to talk about other people's body parts. The conversations were starting to go:

Me: Hey guys! So-and-so is coming over to have dinner with us. Isn't that fun??

The Three: Is he a boy or a guwul? (They would already know the answer)

Me: He is a boy.

The Three: Does he have a p----?? (Again, they already know the answer)

Me: Yes, but we aren't going to talk about it with him. We don't do that.

The Three: Yes. We don't talk about other people's p------, but he does have a hiney! (Big Smiles)

Me: Yes, everyone has a hiney. But we don't talk to people about their hineys.

And on, and on.


So I've been trying to teach them for a few months that there are words we don't shout out, especially in public. But then baseball season arrived and their school had a fun Opening Day celebration where the kids dressed up in our team's colors and I'm not sure what all they did, but BOY! were they excited. We were talking about it all after school and I asked them if they sang "Take Me Out To The Ball Game". They said no (I'm sure they did). Horrified, I immediately felt called to stop the world from spinning and teach them something practical. Everything was going swimmingly until I reached the "buy me some peanuts and cracker jack" part and Lizzy flipped out. "Mommy! We don't say p----!". I had no idea what she was talking about. So I started singing it again. Same line, same reaction by Lizzy AND Johnny this time. They were freaking on me. What the...no_waaaay. "Guys! It's not p----! It's PEANUTS! PEANUTS!! Buy me some PEANUTS!!!!!" Even Ainsley was trying to help me out.

After a few more tries I gave up because even though Lizzy still knew in her sweet little heart I was saying something else and shouldn't, Johnny and Gracie had figured out I really was singing about peanuts and the conversation became obsessed with the fact he is allergic to peanuts and he would have to go to the hospital if he ate one.

And so it goes.

2 comments:

cbeck said...

haha! That is funny! I stayed with some people just before I started college. They had a 4-5 year-old boy at the time, and his favorite activity whenever someone new came over was jumping in front of them, dropping his drawers, and then hopping up and down screaming "WIGGLE WIGGLE WIGGLE!"

This went on for several months, despite the punishment he got afterwards. He would have loved the "take me out to the ballgame" song had he thought of that substitution...

Anonymous said...

This reminds me of Megs when she was little. One day when Megs was maybe 3, she asked if all boys have p----. I told her yes, and she said, "Even daddy?" When I again said yes, she burst into tears b/c she thought we needed to rush him to the hospital--he is very allergic to peanuts!--holly