Burning Vapor

What the F*@(#!!

We knew it was only a matter of time, but even when you know something is coming it sometimes surprises you when it arrives.

Jennifer and I made a conscious decision early on to put the boys into public school vs. homeschooling them. Now there are a thousand pros and cons to this decision (like my wife’s sanity and health) and I’m not going to get into it here. We decided on public schooling the boys for 3 main reasons: 1. Language Immersion, 2. Honor, 3. Culture.

Quickly, our culture is so different from Ethiopia that we thought it would be good to have them exposed to boys their own age doing normal boy stuff. And it is a high honor for the boys to go to a school in Ethiopia and to home school them would have been a little demeaning. That’s number 2 and 3. Believe it or not #1 is the dicey one. While they have been learning a lot of language there is some language they need to know is not appropriate. Now we are not of the mindset to ‘shield’ the boys and try to raise them in a bubble. We want them to hear language that they are not supposed to use, so that they can identify it. I guess we could have just sat them down with a list of all the bad words that they shouldn’t use, but we were not that industrious.

The other day we were one the way home from working at Kingdom Kids and Noah accidentally knocked Caleb’s papers on the floor of my truck. Caleb promptly responded with, “What the F@#&!”

“WHOA man, what did you just say?” So he repeated it…”What the F@#$*!”

“OK, that’s what I thought you said. That word is not OK to use.”

We then had a discussion of what slang is, what that word was implying (which grossed him out and he was shocked), and why it didn’t honor the Lord. Noah and Josiah were laughing at him the whole time, and although it was a little funny I asked why it was THAT funny. They told me that Caleb had been saying it for the past few days and they had told him that they didn’t think it was a good word because one of the ‘bad’ kids at school was using it. Caleb, very indignantly replied, “What, now you know English? When you know English better than me, then you can tell me what words to say or not to say!”

Now I was laughing. “Easy man, it was an accident. Just don’t say it again.”

“Well these ones know nothing. I am speaking better than they.”

“Caleb, seriously, you are fine. Just don’t say that word anymore, OK?

“Yes Dad…”

This entry was posted on Monday, June 9th, 2008 at 12:14 am and is filed under Family, Funny, Parenting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.