“Look daddy, it’s a fire truck!” Tristan spontaneously shouted as we were driving in the family van.
As parents of a 2 ½ year old we were used to spontaneous vocal eruptions coming from our son as he loved to exercise his new found talent, talking. He did this quite often and at the decibel level of a low flying jet airplane. The only problem was that his pronunciation was still a little off. Tristan wasn’t able to master the use of the “tr” sound in “truck” so he simply used the first letter of the first word, “fire”. This feat delighted his older siblings who thought it was hilarious that their little brother could get away with uttering words in public that would have resulted in a mouthful of soap for them. They would repeatedly ask him to say “fire truck” over and over again which he was happy to do as he saw it delighted his brother and sisters so much. Their parents didn’t think it was so delightful and put an immediate halt to it.
This was not the first time one of our children has mispronounced words and sounded like a construction worker nor would it be the last.
Ashley, our number three child and second daughter was very impressionable.
After her first week in kindergarten she came home with some new and shocking adjectives that she learned from the little beasties she shared the classroom with. These were the unfortunate children that, at no fault of their own, were burdened with parents that were less than stellar in social skills and proper parenting. I suspect it was from those parents, that probably spent more time watching Jerry Springer than with their children, is where these poor kids picked up their vocabulary.
Ashley uttered the “D” word to express her displeasure with something. Her mother promptly sent her to her room and informed the father as soon as he returned.
This was one of the normal daily routines for me as every day, when I would come in from work; I would get a rundown of the day’s offences from the inmates of our little sanitarium.
I went into Ashley’s room to find her sniffling on the bed, dreading the emanate end of her little life. I said to her:
“Ashley, mommy tells me you said a bad word today, is that true?”
The reply was her bursting into tears and collapsing onto the bed. Ashley was always known as our little melodramatic actress and she was living up to her reputation perfectly.
“Don’t you think that we should talk to Jehovah God about this and ask for forgiveness?” I asked.
She nodded yes and I said a prayer out loud for her asking for help and forgiveness. I asked her if she would like to say her own prayer and she agreed. This little five year old sobbing child kneeled next to her bed and began:
“Jehovah, I’m sorry I said the “D” word. Please help me not to say the “D” word, and the “H” word, and the “S” word….” and continued on through the alphabet with her shocked parents looking on.
Another of our potty mouthed offspring, Benjamin, once commented on a Volvo car that went by our van and his older sister gasped as he had mispronounced it as a lower part of the female anatomy that she had just learned about herself in the mandatory anatomy lesson the state requires in the public school system.
Tristan called ice cream “ass cream” and another memorable phrase came from Ben when he announced to the family one evening:
“Wow! My glands are huge!”
Ben also innocently but very inappropriately asked his 16 year old Aunt Brandy how her sponge bath went during one of our family trips to the cabin in Oregon.
Recently we were over at some friend’s house and we were discussing their children. They had three boys. The first one was a good musician and the second one was a computer genius. The third son, Steven, lacking the credentials of his older brothers blurted out to the gathering:
“Aww man! I guess I just got screwed in the genes!”
Today, our children will utter inappropriate words just to hear their mother inhale sharply. They are very easily entertained. Angie, however, is not innocent to the use the use of inappropriate words herself for, as she puts it:
“I’m swearing a lot more now that I’m getting older”.
In her defense, she usually has a good reason for it. Mostly it deals with the “@*$# dogs” we had at the time, Jack and Moose. Jack was a boxer/pit bull mix and Moose was an extremely large Great Dane.
The dogs are obsessed with her and follow her everywhere she went. She would turn around in the kitchen with an armload of boiling hot creations from the oven and almost trip over the inevitable large beast lurking in her shadow.
“@*%&^!” would fly through the air as she attempted to prevent becoming a poster child for the Shiners’ burn center.
I would call out from the other room:
“What was that you said”?
“Nothing” would be the muttered reply through clenched teeth.
Her most famous improper utterance happened on a motorcycle trip to the wine country with several family members. All the riders and passengers on the motorcycles were tied in through a two way radio system hooked up on our helmets, as was the chase car being driven by our oldest son with his fiancé.
On a sharp turn Angie thought I was leaning the motorcycle too far into the other lane that had a large truck coming our way.
“Oh @*%&^!” blurted Angie with her favorite inappropriate word that refers to excrement.
Little did she know that the radio system was on “vox” which meant that her potty mouth was loudly heard by the entire group. She didn’t find this out until she heard our nephew, Joshua, say over the radio in a sing song way:
“Angie said a bad word”!