Lessons I'm Going to Learn for You

So you thought that last post was pretty bad, did you? Well you are in for a treat. I've done something monumentally stupid. I taught my kid the word "asshole".

I'm kind of notorious for being a bit of a klutz. So was the case last week, when I bumped Caitlyn's head on a doorway. For the third time. Rodolfo made some jerky comment to the end of "Caitlyn is in danger every time she is with you", which probably doesn't sound THAT mean, but you see, I was PMSing. And Rodolfo is notorious for being an asshole.

Naturally, I reacted by telling him he was being an asshole. And then I turned to my 13 month old daughter; "Caitlyn, tell Daddy he is being an asshole". Caitlyn responded without missing a beat: "Asshole" (Yes, in fact, she DID say it with a capital "A". She's gangsta like that.). And so began the watching of my mouth.

Now usually when Caitlyn starts saying a new word, she needs to be prompted in some way to get her to say it. She sees the cat and says "kitty'. I'll sing a song to her and she sings back (doo doo doo, doo doo doo to the Rocky theme song when my dad started singing it to her this weekend, and the same while I made the "dun-dun dun-dun dun-dun" you-are-about-to-be-eaten-by-a-shark Jaws theme while we were in the pool). And Da-DEE. Oh how she loves to call her Da-DEE every time she sees him. So what, you might wonder, would prompt her to start saying "asshole" 25 times a day?

The dog. I'm starting to see a theme in my mommy failures. I have no choice but to take the credit for prompting her to say asshole, but my husband refuses to recognize his involvement in all of this. If I haven't mentioned it before, here it is: Rodolfo hates the dog. HATES. Really. Before Caitlyn's birth, he merely tolerated the dog, but now he constantly reminds me that I "don't have time for a dog and a baby" and presses me almost daily to find a new home for him. Whatevs dude. My point is that he has a little nickname for the dog. Can you guess what it is? Yup, that's right. He calls the dog "asshole". All. The. Time.

All of these elements led to one inevitable conclusion. With such an exciting new word in her vocabulary and the nearly constant prompting to say it (I mean, that's what Daddy says every time he sees Joey), Caitlyn has come to call Joey "Asshole". She seems 100% convinced that this is his name, which explains the capital "A", I guess.

I'm doing my best to correct her when she does say it, reminding her that, in fact, the dog's name is JOEY. But to no avail. And when she does say it, she says it like 10 times in a row. It's really hard not to laugh. Rodolfo is significantly less amused.

Lesson? Learned, my friends. Let me take this one off your hands for you. Don't tell your kid to say asshole, okay? Ever.