One night this week, I was in the family room listening to Squirts and his mommy go through the nightly pre-bedtime ritual: brush teeth, use mouth wash, go potty, and head to bed, all narrated with a steady chatter of dialogue between the two. But then, as they moved from bathroom to bedroom, the normalcy of the routine was broken. Squirts punctuates the ongoing conversation with an appropriately confused, “What the hell?!”
Yes, our four-year-old son busted out with “What the hell?!” And, I later learned, he had used the phrase in a correct, though totally inappropriate, context. The outburst was, of course, followed by his mommy’s calm, but insistent explanation about the evils of words like that. Squirts apparently understood the potentially dire consequences of the phrase he’d just used, because the last thing I heard him say before the bedroom door closed was, “Mommy, please don’t tell daddy what I said.”
