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The new playroom
When you are raising children, there are certain distasteful things you find yourself saying out loud. It starts right off the bat when they are mere babies, when diapers and their contents are explicitly discussed. It’s why childless couples stop being your friends when you have children: they can only take so many descriptions of how much, how often, and what consistency. That’s okay; among all the life changes children bring into your world, language is but one part.
It gets a little worse when the babies become toddlers and you have to start instructing them. When teaching our kids, we have to describe behavior and go into specifics. Unfortunate, but true: saying “Please don’t put that cookie in your underwear” is much better than “stop it!” Potty training makes things harder in that respect. I distinctly remember having a discussion with my daughter about places where the potty is Not carried after use (the kitchen, my bedroom). Around this time, you are also introduced to more generic expressions, such as “stop hitting your brother”, “stop hitting me”, and the ever-popular “stop hitting yourself”.
Then there are the comments you don’t want to hear yourself make, but have to: “Please don’t put your toothbrush/comb/soap/fill-in-the-blank in the toilet! Gross!” This is often followed by a frantic search for said objects whenever you hear a toilet flushing somewhere in the house. I am a writer as well as an avid reader, and I have a degree in Literature; in short, I love words. Nonetheless, since having children I often find I can go for a whole day using a very limited vocabulary. I stick with “No” a lot, as well as “Hey, you”, “Stop it”, and my old stand-by: “What’s wrong with you?” My husband, who is a therapist, says I can’t use that last one. He claims that the more often I say it, the more they will believe there really is something wrong with them, and they will develop low self esteem. Luckily, I recently caught him using that same expression himself, so I’m off the hook.
Language doesn’t improve when it gets thrown back at you. Things that seemed perfectly okay to say back when you were in college don’t sound so nice when coming out of a four-year-old’s mouth. Censoring one's self is mandatory when there are little ones around; a lesson almost every parent has to learn the hard way.
I vividly remember starting to say something ugly while I was driving (as always, it was the other driver’s fault), swallowing it half way and thinking I had done a good job, only to have my daughter finish my sentence for me. Oops. This phenomenon isn’t limited to bad language, either. You only have to hear a toddler say: “Are you kidding me?” once, and voila, a new pet peeve is born. Never has it been more important to monitor your conversations, unless you want your Kindergartner telling your neighbor that it's high time to lose some weight or get a new haircut.
For more great diapers-and-what's-in-them sites, see upside up, Deeker's diaper page (comes with stats!) or, if you haven't had enough yet, try Robyn Kurth, Orlando Parenting Examiner. Yes, she writes about other things too.
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