So I know a lot of people homeschool to keep their kids away from “bad influences,” but that has never described our reasons for homeschooling. In fact, sometimes I wonder if my kids are the ones spreading the “negative element” around the neighborhood.
I have to consider where we are going to fall out on the parenting bell curve every time we move to a new neighborhood. Our kids play with toy guns and they pretend to shoot each other (when they aren’t beating each other with sticks, nun-chucks or other weapons), but is new neighbor family anti-violence? That totally makes it sound like I’m “pro-violence,” but I like to think of it as “pro-freedom in playing.”
Is mom X going to think I am raising a troop of future Columbine shooters because I haven’t outlawed guns or put perameters on play like “never point your play gun at people or animals”? Or because I say things like, “please don’t hit anyone who isn’t related to you!” Or will her kids be picking up swords and hacking away at each other like the rest of my crew?
Does family Y say “crap” or “fart” and do they talk about wieners? (And not the hot dog variety.) Those things all happen regularly at my house. Yesterday Josh had to tell one of the boys that he couldn’t sing a song about his privates until he had written it down on paper first. And knowing this child, that won’t ever happen. Win. win.
I actually don’t care what others think about how we do things, but I want to be sensitive to other people’s rules for their families. We’ve always told the kids, “In our family we do/don’t do _____”, but sometimes we forget that our rules aren’t like everybody else’s.
For example, we were having lunch with my sweet nephews and niece one day and one of my boys called his brother a “butt-head.”
shocked cousin and aunt: “we don’t call people names like that.”
sheepish me: “um, they say that because I call them butt-heads all the time. Sorry. Boys, don’t call anyone else a butt-head. Only I get to call you that.”
skeptical and surprised aunt: “Um, OK.” But she was probably thinking, “I can’t believe she lets them talk like that . . .”
Me thinking: “Wow, am I really that far out of the normal parenting parameters? I might need to do some research on this . . .”
At our house, butt-head is a benign term of endearment — one that I am ok with. I can understand how that would be shocking to someone else, but in a world where we watch Project Runway or Top Chef, they’ve heard lots worse than that. And we talk about those words and what they mean and why we shouldn’t say them in anger. But are they curious about them? Sure. Do I care? Nope.
And that is how I end up with a situation like this:
This morning Carter was playing with a phonics toy we have for the baby. Somehow he figured out that if he pushed the letter buttons fast enough it would say the sounds close together and sound like it was saying the words “cat,” “mat” and “ram.”
Then he moved on to “dam.” Yep, he had that little word worm saying, “dam, dam, dam” and he thought it was totally hilarious. Finally, he moved on to his ultimate: “a**.” Except those fine folks at LeapFrog were one step ahead of him — it would say “aah” and then when he pushed the ‘s’ it would insert a giggle sound instead.
:sigh: Look out MQ (the neighborhood we move to next week) . . . here we come . . .