Thanks for visiting! If you're new here, you may want to sign up for my RSS feed or automatic email updates - it's free!

When I was a kid, my dad would load me and my older sister up with his own tailor-made version of “summer school.” We read from the dictionary, completed math drills and wrote essays. So, while our friends looked forward to their summer vacation, we looked toward June, July and August with total dread.

Despite how painful those summer months seemed, the experience developed my genuine love for the written and spoken word. In fact, after changing my major six times during my undergraduate years, I ended up with an English degree and a dream to pen a best-selling book one day. (By the way…that dream has recently shifted to a “dream in progress.”) Those childhood lessons have also crept into how I raise my children. Don’t worry! I’m not subjecting my children to such a stringent academic regimen this summer.

But I do hold them to a higher level when it comes to verbal communication. As such, I’ve rarely spoken “baby talk” to my children, even when they were infants. As a result, my 7, 5 and soon-to-be 3 year old have a fairly hefty vocabulary.

Most recently, my son (he’s 3) has been going through on-again, off-again bouts of potty training. In addition to mounds of laundry, our home is filled with giggling voices of children who find great joy in words like, “poop,” “pee,” “butt,” etc. So the other day, after my son pooped in his training underwear and I was dumping it in the toilet, I exclaimed, “Ew-w-w-w-w…this is some stanky dung!”

My girls stopped in thier tracks and asked, “Hey mom, what’s ‘dung?’” So I told them and ever since they won’t stop using the word!Hey mom…I gotta go dung. Oh yuck…that fart smells like dung.

Oh geez…what have I dung? I mean done.

Related posts

• Say What?! (0)
• Fight for Kisses (0)
• Raising a generation of impatience (1)