I Kiss My Kids With That Mouth

Another gem from the archives below. I hauled this one out for you because it is funny to see that I have not come very far in my quest to purge swearing from my life. I have learned that when I am moderately successful, a well-placed F-bomb has a much more powerful effect.

How Many Times Have You Used Profanity This Week? Originally posted 1/9/06

I was going to post this yesterday, but the day went by too fast. So pretend this is from Week 1 of no swearing.

Fifteen. Mostly shits and damns, with one bloodcurdling “GOD! FUCKING SHIT!” I know this will make my grandmother’s stomach turn, sorry Nana. But I don’t think God will mind. This is what happened.

Our little family traveled back to L.A. on Wednesday night. The flight was uneventful besides the enormous poop that Kyle laid on us just before takeoff. Once we got to LAX, however, all Heck broke loose. The place was a zoo with post-holiday travelers. Our elapsed time from plane landing to arriving at our house was 2.5 hours. We live 40 minutes from the airport. Grr.

Kyle only slept for three hours and was awake at 4:15 AM at which point he commenced a day-long repetitive whine that made its way into my body via my ears and spread to the base of my skull and reverberated until my whole body was tense and humming. Thursday was just one long effort to get Kyle to sleep again. I finally wound up driving him around the foothills until he fell asleep in the car. Then I pulled into a Whole Foods parking lot, put the seat back, and took a nap myself.

The above nap was short-lived but at least we got one. Then we went shopping, something Kyle usually loves, but the whine started up again five minutes into the produce section. Maybe Kyle doesn’t really like to go organic. Oh well. I gave him a jar of Earth’s Best butternut squash with sweet corn to play with. BAD IDEA, PEOPLE. I know it seems intuitive, but you shouldn’t give glass jars to a 9-month-old boy. I guess I was just so tired I didn’t think it through. Kyle launched it like a 5 oz. missile down the baby food aisle of Whole Foods, where it smashed on the floor and created a brilliant orange splatter pattern near the end cap with the free range eggs. I flagged down a worker and apologized for the mess. He simply shrugged and said “It happens.”

Back at home, during dinner, during which he emphatically rejected a replacement jar of Earth’s Best butternut squash with sweet corn (geez, Mom, didn’t you get the HINT?), Kyle had an enormous blowout in his diaper of the type we call “sh*tting up the back.” I definitely coined that term before I read it in Jenny McCarthy’s remarkably unfunny book, just so you know. Not that I’m allowed to use it anymore, so we’ll say “pooping up the back” from now on, even though it’s much less descriptive.

So I hauled the offending baby into his room and proceeded to change his diaper. Remember that he whined incessantly that day, and the whine accompanied us to this event, complete with kicking and the occasional scream. Stewart was off in the kitchen, doing I don’t know what. So I got Kyle on the table, undid his foul diaper, and he instantly plunged his fat little hands into the steaming mess. That’s when I screamed. Then I reached for the wipes container, which is flimsy and annoying and the whole container comes WITH the wipe when you try to yank one out, so when I did so, the whole container flipped OVER the changing table and BEHIND it, out of my reach. THAT’s when I uttered the unthinkable profanity above. And THAT’s when Stewart came running to help me, knowing how hard I’d been trying to erase such words from my vocabulary. He knows that when I swear now, I really mean it.

The offending child in January 2006