You know those times when you know you’re being a crap parent and you think, well, whatever, surely she won’t notice! She’s too young for it to REALLY matter!  I can just modify my own behaviour next week/year/month, sometime when it really has an impact! And then in an instant, all that stuff you’ve been thinking you’ll deal with later suddenly blows up in a LATER IS NOW BITCH right in your face? That.

This morning, my two year old was digging in the tupperware cupboard. I like to pretend that I leave that cupboard completely disorganized because hey! She’ll trash it anyway!  But the truth is it’s no more organized than any of my other cupboards, so. She reached her chubby toddler arms in and pulled out random items – an ice cube tray, a water bottle, a green tupperware lid.  As she wrestled with the awkward plastic, a tupperware dish suddenly tumbled and hit the floor. She shunted the rest of the stuff in to one arm and bent over to pick up the lid, grumpily muttering  “shit” as she leaned down.

Shit.

She said shit.

At least it sounded like she said shit.

And not only did it sound like she said shit, it sounded like she said it in context.

I couldn’t help but laugh. Of COURSE she knows how to swear at age two. She can’t put on her shoes or use pronouns properly, but cursing? She’s got it nailed. I put down my coffee mug and pondered exactly how to deal with this new and disturbing development. For the record, I don’t exactly have a problem with most curse words if used appropriately. This would be obvious to anyone, given my own peppery language. But there is such a thing as age-appropriate behaviour, and it is apparently up to me to ensure that my child acts like a two year old while she is two, and I suspect this does not involve a Jersey Shore vocabulary.

Yet – how to nip it in the bud? My instinct says not to call attention to it but rather to ignore it, that if I leave it alone the behaviour will burn off. However, there’s a weakness in this tactic: it will only work if I also stop modelling it. And given that the presence of a two year old in the house hasn’t caused me to modify my vocabulary yet, this could be an issue.

Sighing, I turned to the internet in a brief bid to ignore the problem. And as the internet often does, it provided an entirely new perspective when this showed up in my feed.

Why yes, baby doll’s just babbling random babble that coincidentally sounds just like “Hey, Crazy Bitch!”

The manufacturers say it’s all a coincidence, that it just sounds like something it isn’t.

Suddenly, I seized on the answer. Perhaps that’s what’s going on here, too: It just *sounds* like my child knows how to swear in context. But she really doesn’t! Honest!

Yeah, I don’t believe me either.

Still, I took heart. Perhaps she’ll get a lucrative job providing voice recordings for the next Offend-o-baby.

The powers-that-be at Sesame Street have been denying for years that Bert and Ernie are, you know, a couple – those separate beds should be the giveaway, no? – but here’s a thought: just because they’re not a couple doesn’t mean that one or the other of them isn’t gay, right? Which means that this mysterious tweet from Bert – which the LA Times caught and reported and speculated wildly upon – could be a little bit coming-outsie, right? RIGHT?

Now, the question here is: is Bert up enough on gay slang to know that ‘mo’ is shorthand for homosexual? Is Bert really that sly? Sure, we’re supposed to understand that the clever minds behind Sesame Street actually do Bert’s tweeting, and I’d put nothing past them – they watch True Blood, after all – but does Bert really strike you as the kind of Muppet who’d have underlings do his tweeting for him? Really? He wears a turtleneck. Creatures who wear turtlenecks do their own tweeting.

HOWEVER, this is Bert that we’re talking about. If I had to pick one of the citizens of Sesame Street that I thought was most likely to occasionally hand off his tweeting to underlings, he’d be it (I mean, seriously: if Malcolm Gladwell hates Twitter, how do you think Bert feels about it?) He’s also the one that I’d peg first to be closeted. Luis would be a close second, just for those pants that he wore throughout the 70′s and early 80′s, but Bert noses ahead because of that sad, frustrated look in his eye. Unrequited love for Ernie? The pain of being unable to fully express his true self? Bert’s got secrets, I can tell.

COME OUT OF THE CLOSET, BERT. IT GETS BETTER.

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Last night, Emilia and I were discussing raccoons.

“Raccoons are nocturnal,” I said. “That means, they usually only come out at night.”

Emilia thought about that. “Like skunks?”

“Yep. Skunks are nocturnal, too.”

“And bats!”

“That’s right!”

“And Daddy!”

“Daddy?”

“Because Daddy works at night. You always say, Daddy works so late, we only see him at night! So, Daddy’s nocturnal! LIKE A SKUNK.”

Indeed, my love. Indeed.

This week at the totally awesome Living Well Mom Moments site, you could win an awesome prize pack and a chance at $5000 if you upload a video or submit a written entry about the darndest things your kids have said. (Next week, the topic will be something new, so stay tuned.)

(Disclosure – I’m a spokesperson for this. So that’s my dorky mug on that video at the site. Go, watch, laugh.)

Mark this down as just one more reason to not refer to yourself as a MILF.

(I actually love that ‘MILF’ is right up there on the Google auto-search blacklist with ‘nipples’ and ’4chan’ and pegged as more potentially disturbing than ‘tushy’ or ‘dirty pillows’. Google GETS IT.)

I LOVE a good children’s book. Years before I ever had kids, or a husband, I would buy my favorites knowing that one day, my little people would need some good bedtime stories. Luckily, my children share my love of books and reading. We read together all the time, share stories every night and it’s not uncommon to find them huddled somewhere together, reading. It is all kinds of cute.

Besides the classics like Dr. Seuss and Robert Munsch and Shel Shilverstein, whom I think kill it in every book, we have some favorites we think are great books.

GREAT BOOKS:

Scaredy Squirrel  by Melanie Watt: This book series (four in all right now) is all about a squirrel who suffers from anxiety, and is totally afraid of everything. They are hilarious and really creative. (We also enjoy her Chester series about a cat that tries to change the story, being told by a mouse, to suit him. (I promise that will actually make sense, if you read it).

365 Penguins by Jean-Luc Fromental:  This is an oversized book about a family who begin to receive these deliveries to their home, all of which are penguins. It promotes numbers and math and is really fun and just a gorgeous book to look at. Love it and wish I had thought of it.

The Incredible Book Eating Boy by Oliver Jeffers:  I adore this author. These books are beautifully illustrated, and so different from any other children’s books that I’ve read – they are that inventive. This book in particular is my son’s absolute favorite, and he giggles right through to the end.

Llama Llama, Red Pajama by Anna Dewdney: Who loves a book that rhymes? A kid in footy pajamas, that’s who! My three year old is all over this one, and I think it is full-on adorable. Never get tired of reading it.

WORST BOOK:

GWOT! Horribly funny hairticklers by George Mendoza:

When I was in public school,this book appeared in my house one day, and I still have no idea where it came from. It was the creepiest damn book, and after reading it, I remember being too scared to sleep, and even kept seeing some of the characters after I would wake up. Seriously, this book is whack.

The weirdest of the three stories in the book is called THE HAIRY TOE. It’s about this old woman who finds a hairy toe, uses it to make a hairy toe stew, eats the hairy toe, and then gets haunted by the hairy toe’s owner – seriously. And the illustrations in this book are beyond creepy.

What are some of your favorite great books? How about the absolute worst?

Hey, kids! What are some of your favourite things to do with Mom?

We feature a lot of different crafts and activities here at the Bad Moms Club, from decapitating stuffed animals and making questionable festive holiday treats to making creepy interesting knick-knacks out of placentas. But what about word searches, one of the best ways to pass the time on a rainy day? I’ve always been a big fan of them, and this one in particular looks like a great one to do with Mom:

21st century word jumbles – now with more orgies!

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“They’re just crazy. Listen, everyone says to us, ‘It gets better. It gets better.’ That has not been my experience. It seems to be worse and worse. My wife and I were talking about splitting up but neither of us want to take the children – that’s our joke.”

~ Jerry O’Connell, on raising 19-month-old twin girls Dolly and Charlie with his wife, Rebecca Romijn

Perhaps those parents of twins that gave both their children the middle name ‘Danger’ were on to something?

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My husband and I both grew up reading Dr. Seuss books, a tradition we’ve carried on with our kids – our bookshelves hold several Dr. Seuss titles. The kids love it when we read them Fox in Socks (though it’s all I can do to get  halfway through it) and Green Eggs and Ham; ever since he was a little boy, my husband’s absolute favourite has been In A People House.

I recently happened upon a short article that discussed ten Dr. Seuss titles, and the meanings and rumours behind them. It included a few titles I’d never heard of – for example, If I Ran The Zoo, published in 1950, is the first record instance of the word ‘nerd’. Dr. Seuss wrote The Cat in the Hat because he thought Dick and Jane books were insufferably boring (and right he was!), and Green Eggs and Ham was the result of a bet – that he couldn’t write a book using just 50 words (clearly, he won that bet).

A couple more interesting tidbits: The Butter Battle Book is one of his less familiar titles, which might have something to do with it being taken off of library shelves for a while due to its Cold War and arms race references. Oh The Places You’ll Go is the last book he published, and probably one of his most popular – it’s given to around 300,000 high school and university graduates each year.

This spring, my four-year-old son started reading, using his copy of Hop on Pop – a tried and tested crowd-pleaser in this household. I’ve always liked One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish and And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street myself. What about you – what’s your favourite Dr. Seuss book?

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Being a teacher is a demanding job, but it does have its perks – one of them being, at times, grading papers. It’s time consuming, sure, but every once and a while a real gem comes along – an unintentionally funny drawing or spelling error, or a really, really wrong answer – that makes up for the monotony of marking the same test over and over again. I know this for a fact – both of my parents were teachers; my mother, in particular, was an elementary school teacher. There were times when she’d laugh so hard at certain test answers, she wind up in tears.

This attempt at re-wording a scrambled sentence had me in tears, too. Unless this kid’s teacher was a robot, I imagine their reaction was the same.

Below is a rather creative way to avoid answering a test question. Clearly, the large bear (that looks more like a cross between an oversized black sheep and the Goodyear blimp to me; good thing this paper wasn’t for Art class) is preventing this poor student from responding.

Long live education.

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Are you up on your slang? Do you speak the language of today’s youth?

I was at a concert with my (much) younger brother and some of his friends a while ago when I realized that I probably wasn’t as up-to-date on my slang as I prided myself to be. While we waited for the show to start, I happened to mention that I was “totally stoked” to see the headlining band live.

“Totally stoked?” one of my brother’s friends quipped. “Stoked? Who even says that anymore?”, and I was all, Wait, stoked isn’t cool anymore?

I’ve picked up a lot of the more recent slang from trolling the Internets – thanks to various web sites, I know what secks, pwned, flamed and quite a few others mentioned in the article below mean – but the Teen-Talk Buster is making me feel like a bit of a chomper, because there are one or two a handful several terms on this slang decoder list that I’ve never heard before.

Back in my day, a cigarette was a butt, but the youth of today are calling it a durrl. I think of chili as a meal that gives me the runs, but according to this list it’s an attractive girl. The term ‘phatty’ has new meaning; when I was in high school we spelled it with an ‘f’ and it meant something entirely different altogether, but nowadays it’s what you say if something is incredibly good. And since when does lush mean cute? A lush is a cheap drunk; everyone knows that!

Yet reading this list made me feel the way I did back at that concert: OLD. I used to pride myself on my strong command of Slang – I thought I was the shiznit when I told the other moms at the playground that we had to bounce so I could get home to chilly chill with my boo – but it’s not bounce anymore, it’s ‘dip out’. And the kids today, they don’t hang out, they ‘pez out’.

The only pez I know is chock full of sugary goodness and is spit at me by a plastic Daffy Duck head. A right dinosaur, I am.

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