Tuesday, November 16, 2010

On not taking your own advice


Jake and I haven't been out today.  And we won't be going out now.  It's only 3:15pm, but the light is already fading and it is very very cold.  Not to mention the fog.  (Excuses excuses.) 

I did think about it.  The sun had been shining beautifully all morning.  But Jake & I had a happy couple of hours playing in the light coming in through the windows of his "ni room"...


...and then we had the business of lunch to prepare and eat, and then I couldn't face it. 

He's going through that phase that makes being two so delightful.  Disagreeing with everything I say.  Refusing to do anything I ask.  Saying no to the things I give him, especially food he's asked for.  Doing things I ask him not to, over and over again.  Deciding that he needs cuggles as soon as I start cooking or washing up or have my hands elbow deep in crap and then crying like he's been assaulted when I tell him I can't.  Changing his nappy and getting him dressed every morning is an ordeal.  Just the thought of trying to get him ready to go out was too much for me today.  Which was fine.  But then, there are consequences.

After burning my batch of peanut butter cookies and after an already fraught few hours, I started to swear but then stopped. “Oh f….”

Just as I was feeling proud of my restraint, Jake chimed in and finished it for me, “F**k hell!” punctuated with a big grin.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. I’d overheard him saying, “Buddy hell” to his trains earlier and I couldn’t help laughing. So he decided to make Mummy laugh even more by using all of his colourful language in one go, but most especially Shit. (And then, when we were singing Horsey Horsey, his clippetty-clop kept coming out as kicky-cock - unintentionally I might add.)

So I did it. I descended a little bit further into the I’ll-never-turn-into-my-parents quicksand pit. (The important point about quicksand being that the more you fight it, the quicker you sink. The double doozy is that my Mum had quite a foul mouth when I was growing up too.) Anyway, I told Jake that he couldn’t say those words, only Mummy can, because she’s a hypocrite. He just nodded cheerfully and said, “Okay!” and trotted off singing swear words like a nursery rhyme.  (At least b***ocks comes out as box.)

As to the word hypocrite, I can’t wait until he starts using that one. Perhaps he will even choose to debut it on the occasion of being told off by one of his grandparents for using bad language. And he hasn’t even started school yet.

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