Me: A miner?

Him: Yes. A miner.

Me: You want to dig mines or you want to actually mine coal?

Him: I want to be a miner. I read about it in “Boys Life”.

My Internal Monologue: “Boys Life” his encouraging scouts to become miners when they grow up? The economy isn’t that bad.

His Dad: You mean you want to explore caves? That isn’t really mining, that is spelunking.

Him: I want to be a miner. I want to carry around a pickaxe and collect gems.

Don’t we all?

Now that I work for Disney I can probably use this graphic without getting sued or SOPAd, right? RIGHT?

* * *

I got to thinking about how if his job was carrying around a pickaxe and collecting gems his life would be a lot like Gem Hunter.

Which of course made me think of Die Antwoord’s “Enter the Ninja” which actually contains the lyric “My life is like a video game.”

It also implies that I let him watch "The Simpsons waaaaay too much.

This card also came with what I would call a coupon, but my son insists is a credit card, that gets me “one free set the table’.

Sweet, right?

When dinner time rolled around I called him inside from playing.

“Yes,” I said “I have a coupon here that entitles me to a free setting of the table. I would like to use this now.”

He smiles at me.

Then he says “Sure, can I see some I.D.?”

Normally I don’t mind getting I.D.ed at all. I generally it flattering or occasionally a good security measure, but in this case I was caught off guard.

“Um, I don’t have my wallet on me.”

“I can wait.” he said.

So I went back to my bedroom and got my wallet out of my purse. I brought my wallet in to the dining room where he was waiting patiently. I took my drivers license out of my wallet and handed it to my six year old son.

He studied the identification.

Then he looked at me.

“Okay.” he said, and then he started with the napkins.

* * *

How was your Mother’s Day?

I can hear the boy chanting under his breath.

Sack of C. Sack of C. Sack of C.

Awesome.

If any of you have children and a potty mouth, you might have realized long ago that words that you think aren’t curse words sound terrible when they come out of a little kid’s mouth.

Those words include, but are not limited to:

• Suck
• Crap
• Pagina
• Nuts
• Friggin’
• The lyrics to “My Sharona”
• Bastages
• Fugly

The phrases “Oh my God”, “pisses me off”, “shut your hole”, “bloody hell”, “What the eff?” and “mother of Christ” sound really bad too. I could go on, but you get my point.

I got Mother of Christ from The Sopranos. One time Tony said “Mother of Christ, Carmella!” and it has been one of my go-tos ever since. Bloody hell is the fault of Harry Potter and Gordon Ramsay.

Anyway, my six year old is chanting “Sack of c, sack of c, sack of c…” when he suddenly yells up from the bottom of the stairs “Hey Mom! Can I say the C Word?”

Now, I know that in this case the C word is crap, because I stopped using the exclamation “son of a whore” and replaced it with the more innocuous “sack of crap” in front of the children.

My mother-in-law however, doesn’t know this, and I can only assume that she  thinks he means a the more commonly known C-word.

My mother-in-law is pretty cool. She isn’t stuffy or a prude and she has heard her share of bad words, but that doesn’t mean this isn’t going to reflect poorly on me if I don’t hurry up and rectify this situation, and she is looking horrified, so really quick I say “Yes! You can say that C word. One time.”

And so my darling boy yells up the stairs “Sack of crap. Heh. SACK OF CRAP! SACK OF CRAP!”

1)  I know there is an ongoing debate about the status of the word crap as a curse word, but it sounds foul coming out of a child.

2) I yelled “I said you could say it one time!” and then I started laughing, because I can’t help it. Little kids saying bad words is funny and everyone knows it.

3) It gets worse.

So Ian is at the bottom of the stairs laughing, and then he says “Huh. Ass.”

But he says it more like “Aaaahhhhsssssssssssssssssssssssss.”

I yell “HEY!” and he stops.

Temporarily.

This isn’t over yet.

Three minutes later he is putting on his shoes and he starts saying “eff you see”. Then again “eff you see, eff you cee, eff you cee” and I am trying to ignore him because obviously the laughing was just egging him on, but his helpful and suddenly literate sister says in a really snotty voice “Ian, don’t you mean eff you see kay?”

All the adults yell “HEY!”

I said “That is enough. I don’t want to hear any more of that kind of talk.”

Because I am a hypocrite, but in this case a justified one.

Lessons Learned

1) There is more than one C word.

2) Don’t get him started.

3) They are all bad words if you use them in the correct context with the right inflection.

4) I am very lucky to have a mother-in-law that also thinks little kids saying curse words is funny. VERY LUCKY.

This morning I needed to access one of my old e-mail accounts since it is tied to my paypal. I called cox and had the passwords reset again and in my inbox was about 30 e-mails for Nordstrom, some other junk mail and two e-mails inviting Ian to birthday parties.

One of the e-mails was for a party this Saturday. That was a close one! I RSVP’s yes, he would love to go and then I saw the other one. One of Ian’s best friends. The party was on Jan 22.

We missed it by two weeks.

Ian missed an awesome karate birthday party for a really good friends because I was too lazy to check an old e-mail account.

I feel sick.

I sent an immediate e-mail to Phillip’s mother explaining what I had (or hadn’t done) and how terrible I felt, and I do. I feel awful. Phillip probably thought Ian blew him off and Ian – poor Ian, probably thought he wasn’t invited.

Parenting fail.

We will invite Phillip over and buy him a birthday present, but it won’t really fix it. Ian can never go to Phillip’s sixth birthday party and it is sort of all my fault.

This gets easier, right?

The thing is, since I am going all the way to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to sit outside on January 1st and root for the Capitals I clearly needed a jersey.

Aside: Am I supposed to be calling them sweaters? They aren’t really sweaters, but they aren’t really jerseys either. So far nobody has corrected me, but it took people a long time to tell me that the word was “leggings” and not “leggins” so maybe you are all just being kind.

Whatever. My point is that I asked my parents to buy me a Caps jersey (or sweater) for my birthday, and they did and it is awesome.

Suck it, Pittsburgh.

And I have chosen Alexander Semin as my guy because:

1) He is awesome.

2) Heh. Semin.

3) One time he DMd me.

Fine, he DMd me or Laurie, but that is food enough for me. And he likes our Draft Day Suit. I guess he doesn’t watch a lot of basketball.

And you know that I love to spend money on athletes that contact me on twitter.

Oddly enough, all this gloating is just a vehicle to tell you that I got a superfly Caps jersey for my birthday and when I opened it my son almost lost his mind.

“You got a Capitals shirt! AWESOME!”

Then he said, “Can I have it when you grow out of it?”

I told him it was my 38th birthday and I wasn’t planning on growing anymore. I was particularly not planning on getting big enough to grow out of a shirt that a medium sized man could wear hockey pads under.

But since I am a good mom I also told him that he was welcome to borrow it.

As soon as he grows in to it.

* I guess technically Kim got the tickets. She was just gracious enough to sell one of them to a lowly Caps fan. Kim was also kind enough to fix my photos so that they weren’t all mirror images (curse you photobooth!) even though I titled one of my pictures “Semin, bitches.”

Aside: I couldn’t find any good images of Harry Potter looking confused, but if you search for Harry + Potter + Confused this is an option.

…and now you’ve seen it too.

I asked him how it was.

“AWESOME!” he said.

The I asked him what part was is favorite. What was the coolest thing he saw? I mean, fire stations have everything: fire trucks, ladders, poles, cool uniforms, dalmatians- you know, fire station stuff.

Ian says “THEY HAD A WHITE BOARD. IT HAD MARKERS AND BIG ERASERS AND EVERYTHING!”

I said “You went to a fire station and the coolest thing you saw was a whiteboard?”

He said yes and promptly changed the subject to Harry Potter and swordfighting.

According to my husband they saw a 2000 foot hose, huge fuel tanks and a rescue boat and Ian’s favorite part was the living room. When I revisited this question 45 minutes later I was lectured on how the markers were Expo markers just like the ones in his classroom at school.

I will never understand boys. Never.

When Ian got off of the bus he informed me that he got a bunch of Gs and Os and that G stood for good and O stood for awesome.

I told him that I was pretty sure that O meant outstanding.

He insisted. “No, G means good, O means awesome and S means sort of.”

So I pulled out the report card, a sure enough, O was for outstanding, G meant good and S represents satisfactory. There was also an N for needs improvement.

I asked Ian what he thought the N stood for.

He said he didn’t get any so it didn’t matter.

Claudia thought that the N probably stood for narrow.

I asked her if she thought “narrow” was a good grade or a bad grade. She just stared at me.

Then my iPod that had been playing innocently on shuffle in the background came across “Party and Bullshit” which has somehow become a singalong* song at our house.

Parenting = Needs Improvement

(image)

* It has become quite the favorite since it is the only case in which my children are allowed to say bullshit. They think it is the greatest thing ever.

“I’m just trying to think of something to write about for my MamaPop post today.”

He thought about it for a while.

“Why don’t you just type random letters?”

“Just like 10th grade geography papers?”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

*

This involves me setting the timer on my iPhone for 10 minutes. For 10 minutes, there is only playing – no cleaning whatsoever. It is important to start with a playing segment. When the alarm rings I start the timer again. For 10 minutes there is fast cleaning. We get as much accomplished as we can in 10 minutes.

Sometimes we do it in 20 minute increments, if the house is really trashed we’ll do 20 minutes clean, 10 minutes play. We do this over and over until either the house is clean or we get distracted.

Generally it is the latter.

Either way, we were playing The Cleaning Game today and I was doing dishes for my 10 minutes when Ian came into the kitchen crying.

“Claudia gets to do all of the fun cleaning.”

“No cleaning is fun.” I said, “I mean, what kind of cleaning is fun cleaning?”

“She gets to clean the bathroom!”

“And you think cleaning the bathroom is fun cleaning?”

He nodded.

“I’ll tell you what,” I said “If you do a really, really good job on the living room and getting all of your toys out of the hallway I will let you clean my bathroom.”

And he said “Yes!” and did that thing with where you make a fist and pull your elbow to your hip – like he just scored a touchdown.

It doesn’t seem to happen that often lately, but for today everybody wins.