The Safety Swear

I can swear.  I do swear.  I shouldn't swear.  I swear way too much.  I really need to break my swearing habits.

 It's almost impossible to not make exclamations in some way.  You're surprised, you stub your toe,  You want to emphasize something.  Dang, drat, darn, crap, ow, arrrugh work.  Those exclamations do a good job, but sometimes I need something with a few more syllables to get my true meaning of surprise, indignation or pain expressed.

But there are children with mimicking ears.  Children who silently listen to you say something over and over again.  Something you don't really realize you're saying until one day when they've processed it and, bam, they have a new vocabulary word and there's no way you can take it back. 

So I've been working on my safety swears.  Some of them I've had for years, such as "God bless America."  I have one, "I swannie" that always reminds me of my Aunt Pat, because I can just hear her in my mind every time I say it.  Then there are funny ones, such as, "mama pajama" from the movie Mystery Men.  I even manage to get in a, "son of a gun" from time to time. 

I hope I'm doing an okay job of curtailing my language.  I fear however, that in just a short while my son is going to blurt out a terrible, dirty word and look at me with the biggest smile because he's just managed to use his new word correctly in context.

The Big Boy Update:  Tummy trouble.  Last night at the conclusion of dinner he started telling us his tummy was bothering him.  He communicates with us fairly regularly about his skin being itchy by showing us where it's bothering him and asking for lotion or medicine or powder, but this marks the first time he's really communicated an unexpected ill.  We can see him scratching and watch his face get red.  We wouldn't have known his stomach was bothering him.  I was hoping he hadn't contracted the stomach virus that was going around school.  I was doubly hoping he wasn't going to throw up his dinner in the back seat of the car.  I loosened his diaper and told him we would have a bath when we got home.  He held on to his stomach and repeated bath and, "tummy hurt" several times.   When we got home the issue had apparently been resolved...in his diaper.  A right mess it was too.  But he felt better.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Here's your baby, ma'am. At pickup at school today the other teachers were telling me to look at my daughter.  She was coming from the classroom, in the teacher's arms, completely limp and laid out.  She was completely asleep.  It was a tiring morning.

Someone Once Said:  People who pass up temptations have only themselves to blame.