This is real-ly awesome

I’m blaming it all on Macklemore and Ryan Lewis.

With their song “Thrift Shop” playing on every station every five minutes for the past few months, my heretofore ignorant-of-bad-words children have turned into little cuss monitors.

Jeff and I go through phases where we say a lot of curse words. (Jeff especially. I’m just trying to keep up, really.) But, we save the potty mouth for our friends and never let anything slip in front of our kids. Honest to goodness, we never do.

Well, maybe Jeff did once but who cared? Not Darla and Zane. They didn’t notice.

Now! They notice. Oh boy do they notice every time someone says even a pseudo-bad word, or the radio beeps out a bad word, they notice. Yesterday, for instance, they heard Jeff on the phone with a friend. He didn’t realize the kids were within earshot so I  guess, from what they told me, he was letting ’em fly like gang-busters.

That was embarrassing.

Which has led us to our newest family challenge: can we, including the grown-ups who love to swear, give it up completely? Could you? As Gandhi said, “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” If we can’t handle this challenge ourselves, how can we expect our children to?

My angels are old enough now to be hearing bad words at school and on movies and radio. Therefore they feel they are old enough to use them. However, we’ve been explaining to them that it isn’t a question of age which allows one to spout profanities. It’s more of an image issue: classy vs trashy.

I give them alternate colorful words to use, like Samuel Jackson. (Not as in copying his diction, as in saying his name in place of a swear word. “SAM-U-EL JACKson!” Good, right?) And instead of just saying nothing during the f-bombs in “Thrift Shop” while your brain clearly thinks the word. I told them, just sing “This is real–ly awesome” instead. It helps. Try it:

Now you have the idea, do you have some other stand-in lyrics for the other potty words?

PS: I LOVE THRIFT SHOPPING!

PPS: check out the tags on this post. Epic.