You Are A Fro-Ron

I know I have been amazingly apathetic on blogging lately (did you like that alliteration??).  I do have lots of fun things to talk about - a great Spring Break trip to Colorado, babysitting my cute niece and nephew overnight, an upcoming 4 year birthday party, but first things first...

In the past month, my son has developed a new vocabulary and with that, he has discovered the power of words.  I think I mentioned how he started using the word "stupid" (and by the way - the movie that did it was Aladdin.  Every other sentence in that movie uses that word).  I thought we had nipped that one in the bud.

Well, we pretty much cut it out at home, but he felt the need to use it at school too.  Apparently, it is a pretty major offense, so he got sent to the office after calling his buddy Aiden "stupid" and spitting at him (the raspberry kind of spitting).  Then, if that wasn't enough, he called the teacher's aide stupid while he was being punished.  Lovely.

We spent most of spring break talking about kind words and unkind words and words that hurt your ears and I really thought we had made some progress.

Then we watched Ice Age, where a character in the movie says, "You moron."  Hmm...  I really thought that one went over JD's head, but then a new word started in our house - Fro-ron.  I finally figured out that he was trying to say moron.  Back to square one! 

And let's go ahead and add "shut up" into that mix.  His older cousins informed him that it isn't nice to say that one, even though he never actually said it.  But let me tell you, now he has!

So now we have stopped saying that there are "bad words" and instead are trying to focus on how any word can hurt somebody if you are saying it unkindly. 

And when we went back to school last week, guess who took another trip to the office?  My son latched onto the word "stinky" and couldn't stop saying it, even when the teacher repeatedly asked him to stop.  And while he was spending some quality time in the office, guess what word popped up AGAIN?  The old classic - stupid. 

Since he really seems to just like saying that word for the shock value, I mentioned that there is a kind word that sounds a lot like stupid, but means "awesome" that he could say instead - stupendous.  So now I hear that one cropping a bit.  Tiny baby steps toward progress.

In the big picture of child-rearing, this is a minor thing, but I am really ready to move on to a new phase!!