Today Caleb is flopping around and pouting at the table because he doesn’t want to write the 5 or 6 little words I asked him to write. Since I’m not going to argue with him about it, I go in the kitchen to see how Lucy is doing and to check on Camille. I come back and Bob hands me a scrap of paper with this written on it: blTe Hll
He asks, “Mom can you read that?” Using my best decoding skills I guess, “Happy Birthday?” To which he replies, “No. It says ‘bloody hell.'”
Really? You fight me when I ask you to write “when,” but you’ll write British curses of your own initiative?
I ask him where he heard that phrase and he says, “Harry Potter.” Of course. Thank you so much Harry. So I explain to him that he shouldn’t say that because in England that’s kind of like saying the s-word or the f-word. He says, “Dad already told me that, but I was trying to spell it and Carter was trying to figure out how to write the f-word on his paper.” Carter protests that he already erased it from his paper so it doesn’t count.
Great, now I have two writers who specialize in cursing. They’ll probably grow up to spray paint graffiti on freeway overpasses. Good thing they’re both horrible spellers. If you ever see the phrase, “fog you!” on a wall you’ll know who wrote it.