Chaela Speaks

Woo hoo!  Look at me, two blogs in less than a week!

Anyway.

For those of you who don't have the opportunity to be around Chaela on a regular basis, let me just say, she is verbose.  The child never stops talking, not from the time she wakes up in the morning to the time we force her into her bed at night.

Lately, Chaela has picked up some new words.  Some she's heard from us, some from TV, and others, I assume, from being out and about in the world.  When I was growing up, there were two kinds of words: "bad words," and "all the other words."  Now that Chaela is meandering through the labyrinth of language, however, I find myself making up categories.

It all started with "Stupid is a mean word."  Because it is, and Chaela will tell you so, because it's the only context in which she can use the word 'stupid' without getting in trouble.  I didn't want to tell her it's a bad word, because it's not.  'Stupid' can be applied to situations without a problem.  It's when it's applied to people that we don't use it, but for now, Chaela is too young to understand the difference.

She's sworn before ("That's my medicine, it goes on my a**!") but she was too young for explanations.  A few weeks ago, however, we were presented with a parental teaching moment.  Will and I were watching a comedian one night after she was supposed to be in bed, except she wasn't.  The comedian swore, and Chaela said, with a question in her voice said, "Sh-?" only to be cut off by Will's hand clapping over her mouth (and me leaving the room because I was laughing so hard).  That's when she learned about 'bad' words, which are words we never say.

The next category is "serious" words.  These are words we never use unless we mean them.  Mostly it was brought on by Chaela screaming "HELP, HELP!" every time we go out in public, but it's also been applied to the word die/dead, which she's begun using in an unintentionally morbid fashion ("I'll just go be DEAD in my room, MOM.")

Lastly, we come to "words only grown-ups can say," or "words Mommy uses frequently and doesn't think she can stop saying."  In this category: the word 'crap.'  I know, it's a gross word, and I really should drop it from my vocabulary, but seriously, I NEVER swear.  I feel like I should have something to say when I'm mad!

In our house we now have mean words, bad words, serious words, and grown-up words.  I don't know if it's her personality, my paranoia, or a combination of both, but I am a much less laid-back mother than I thought I would be.