Teaching your kids new things is tough. The toughest thing to teach? Language. Okay, besides how to not poop in your pants, it's language. We've had two of our three kids in speech therapy. The third one didn't quite make it because she decided to bust out ten brand new words on the day of her evaluation. This is what kids do to you.
Sometimes, I feel like we're not teaching the kids how to speak as much as we're teaching them how not to cuss. Take the boy. One of his first words was "Fag." It's not because he's hearing homophobic rants at home, it's because the "L" sound is ridiculously hard to say. The boy loved flags. He had a world atlas and would just study the flags of the world. The lack of a clearly defined "L" was never much of a problem until we took him to his first 4th of July parade.
"Dad, see those fags? That's a huge fag. I've never seen so many fags." While the other parade goers stare, I say "FLAG" loudly just to make sure nobody confuses me for one of those Westboro nuts.
Of course, no cursing repertoire would be complete without the "F" word. No, not this F word, the F word. Both the boy and the girl have had problems with this one. Caleb preferred to drop the F bomb in the middle of words--like Kentucky. Change the "t" to an "f" and you have yourself a fine curse word. Don't believe me? Listen for yourself:
Why the school taught him a song about fast-food joints eludes me. Now I don't feel so bad about the school cutting music. Learning value aside, it was hilarious. Leah's F bombs weren't quite as funny, at least not at first.
I heard her sitting on the couch one day, saying f*** over and over. I knew she had overheard me attempting a simple DIY project the day before--a project that ended with the hammer introducing itself to my fingers and my tongue introducing the niceties of the french language to the girl.
Figuring I should go explain to her why she shouldn't use that word, I headed towards the couch. When I saw her, I let out a sigh of relief. She was waving a fork around in the air. "R" is another tricky letter to master. After a few days of practice, she got it down...kind of:
Leah butchers words. Many of them are hilarious and rather than submit to my inner grammar-nazi, I've come to enjoy them. There is one in particular though, that needs to be corrected immediately. It could land me in jail. Lee is a tech kid. She loves playing on our Nook, texting on Momma's phone, and using the computer. The problem is she can't say computer.
It's comes out as "peter". She's always asking to play with my peter. It was funny the first few times, but now I'm worried she'll go to school and tell her teacher.
Teacher: "Leah, what did you do over the weekend?"
Leah: "I played with Daddy's peter."
I can already hear the phone call from the school. At least I'd get some peace and quiet in jail.
That's great. lol.
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