Mr. Moose likes to say good words

So I was reading about the exploits of a certain young cowboy over at A Little Pregnant, and was painfully reminded of my own parenting faults. Because, you see, Compaito has a nasty little habit, which is that whenever he wants to express his extreme displeasure, he lets loose a big ol' "FUCKIT!", which when I am lucky, sounds more like "Puck It" or "Bucket", but which, deprived of any context where loudly announcing the presence of a bucket were called for, might as well be a neon sign over my head with a big alarm going "WOO! WOO! EXTREMELY BAD PARENT! TOO YOUNG! PROBABLY WATCHED CSI MIAMI IN HER SON'S PRESENCE WHEN HE WAS AN INFANT TOO! AND I'LL BET SHE DIDN'T WAIT TOO LONG TO INTRODUCE PEANUT BUTTER AND SHELLFISH! WOO!"

I have tried a number of strategies to curb the FUCKIT, including the popular "Ignore it and it will go away", but when you're in the middle of an elevator full of parents twice your age with kids at home half your son's age, and which couldn't open soon enough, "eventually" is tooo long to wait.

Now, as it happens, I am a really good parent. Like, not to boast or anything. I bring my kid apple picking, and to the zoo, and the multicultural festival, and the park, and to the old farm museum, and dagnabbit, if field trips were a course, I would get an A. And, while I have a goodly potty mouth outside his presence, I make gargantuan efforts to make sure my around him language is rated G. Except this once.

And that's the frustrating thing. Because I'm sure, if I said FUCKIT all the time, he wouldn't have picked it up, like all the other bits and pieces of pedestrian language he has yet to pick up, like, say, prepositions, and the proper use of the possessive. But noooo, I said it once, and so my son, recognizing a rare jewel, quickly claimed it for his own. Well FUCKIT.

I did an informal poll among my friends, who quickly reassured me that they too, succumbed to the lure of the swear word as mere tykes, much to the chagrin of their parents. One friend gleefully bandied about the word "shit", whilst another crawled around under the table at a family gathering brightly repeating "Dammit! Dammit!" It was her first word. Her second was "helicopter."

The use of FUCKIT is, thankfully, fading in the Compa abode and more importantly, outside its walls. I'm sure at some point I'll find the whole thing amusing. Like maybe when he's sixteen.

But as for the little cowboy in Julie's post, I can't forgive whomever introduced him to the words fucking bitch. Because, as I intend to compromise when Compaito becomes an unwieldy teenager, "we don't swear at people. We swear with people."