Potty Train Your Mouth Before Potty Training Your Toddler By Erin Pistilli puter keeps shutting off while you are writing an important paper, nothing sums up your frustration better than a plain old “dammit” or “ah, hell.” But you can’t say those things anymore, because, take my word for it, there is another set of eyes and ears out there that will be more than likely to repeat what you say. So if you haven’t started a family yet, you might get some of the same or very similar advice from friends and family as we did. But here’s my take on it: Giving up a social life? Not really. I mean, there are adjustments: Saturday nights will be spent cuddled up with your toddler watching Dora the Explorer reruns. Giving up your freedom? Again-not really. It will just take you a little bit longer to plan trips, and pack up baby gear, but you are free to go on social outings with friends that have kids your age, where you will discuss the newest Brad Pitt movie and breastfeeding. The one
San Diego
Woman
When my husband and I decided that we were ready to start a family, our decision was met with many cautionary tales of how the birth of a child means the death of a social life. In other words: we could kiss our Saturday nights cruising the Pacific Beach bar scene good-bye. My husband and I had long since decided that we were getting a little long in the tooth to be bumping elbows with the young twenty-somethings in Typhoon Saloon anyways-so no problem there. We were also told that freedom would be just a word to us. No more picking up, coming and going as we please. Las Vegas would become a destination we used to go to when we were younger. My husband and I were ok with this too (besides, my mom would watch the kids for us if we really wanted to go, right?). If these were the worst things that life would throw at us for deciding to have a baby, well-bring it on. Nothing was going to sway our decision. We were ready to have a baby. We had a beautiful blue-eyed angel, Caitlyn, whose eyes, even at birth, were inquisitive and full of curiosity. Little did we know then that those eyes would watch us intently for the next three years, and that her little ears would soak up every last word we would say. By the time she was one or so, she was this cute little mimic, chatting away on her Disney princess cell phone, having conversations with daddy or grandma. By one and a half, she would put her hands on her hips and demand that daddy open a window if she smelled anything remotely foul. It was cute. It was precious…until the fateful day my husband stepped in a gopher hole. Mark had taken her out to enjoy the beautiful San Diego dusk that was upon us. The air was sweet, the sky a chorus of reds and purple, and Mr. Gopher was hard at work, destroying our front yard. As my husband turned to go inside, he stepped into one of the holes that decorated our yard and the mother of all cuss words flew out of his mouth as he stumbled and kicked a cloud of dirt all over the place. Once he had recovered from his blunder, he looked over at our little girl who smiled sweetly at him and said, “F***”. Unfortunately, that word became her favorite and for the next week or so, it would slip out of her mouth We didn’t laugh or react (which by the way is super hard however which way you look at it). If Mark was frustrated at traffic, Caitlyn would give a sympathetic “F***”. We would look out the windows as if she said nothing. If her uncle got frustrated getting one of his game consoles to work, Caitlyn would give an almost obligatory “F***” to sum up his irritation. (I had to banish my brother from the room on that one because he was overcome with the giggles). So what do we do now? Our friends had warned us that our social life would be over, we would lose our freedom, but they never warned us that we would lose our ability to let out a good cuss word here and there. I am ashamed to admit it, but every once in awhile, when the occasion calls for it, I like to let lose a colorful expletive that describes exactly how I am feeling. Mark and I didn’t realize how hard it would be to replace some of our favorite “feeling” words with something like “darn” or “fiddlesticks”. Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s not like we go around cussing and cursing at every little thing, and we’re not saying anyone should, but when you stub your toe or your com-
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thing you will have to give up: bad word usage. Words and phrases that you didn’t view as bad before become very bad when you have a mouthy toddler (ex. ‘Shut-up’).Take it from us…they start listening at a very young age. If you are even talking about starting a family, cut back on your love of cuss words. And if you haven’t noticed by now, pretty much all channels (including the ABC Family channelwhich I find really ironic) have shows that constantly use words like “bitch” and “ass“, so you will definitely have to monitor TV shows. The last thing you want is an angel-faced, foul-mouthed child. As for us, we have cut back drastically on our usage of foul-language. We aren’t perfect by any means, and every once in awhile a curse might slip out, but we have learned to channel our frustration into more useful words, like “darn” (we just couldn’t bring ourselves to use “fiddlesticks”) As for Caitlyn? With lots of patience, and ignoring her when she did use a bad word, she eventually stopped all together. Well, almost: last week she did mutter ‘dammit’ after losing a riveting game of ‘Memory’. How did we handle that? Now that she is three, we explained to her that nobody in the house, including mommy and daddy, should use words like that. Then we spent the rest of our Saturday night playing Memory with our little girl while our smiling 9-month old son watched us intently from his bouncer.
March/April 2011