F-Bombs and Other Disasters

I knew it would happen one day. I have a pretty bad mouth myself, so I shouldn't have been so shocked when Marley said her first swear word.

"Christine!" My mom (let's just call her Margaret) yelled, as she marched into my kitchen. "I was playing with Marley in her room and she just said the F-word!"

"Marley said f-ck?'" I asked, bewildered. Really? I thought I had cleaned up my act a little bit. Except for this morning on the way to preschool, when some dumbass pulled out in front of me, resulting in some swearing and a double pump of the finger. "Are you sure?"

"Well, actually, she said f-cky," said Margaret.

"F-cky? With a 'y'? That's not even a word," I declared.

"I know, but Marley said it, and she said it like she knew it was a bad word. She knew." Margaret wasn't backing down.

Hmm. Yes, I've been known to release more than my fair share of expletives. Prime opportunities include (but are not limited to)
-interactions with other drivers on California roadways (as mentioned above)
-accidents posing great physical harm, ie, ramming my toe into the highchair. Mother f-cker!
-accidents creating messes of a large nature, ie, knocking over a full glass of wine. Holy sh-tballs!
-heated conversations with my husband. The house IS clean! I just vacumed! What the f-ck are you talking about?

Clearly, the world offers up a multitude of prime opportunties to engage in the colorful use of language. Among adults. Ahem.

I decided to go straight to the source.

"Marley, did you say f-cky?" I asked, holding her little hands in mine. She looked up at me with a big smile, and said, "Yes Mamma! F-cky!"

Uh-oh.

I decided to let it pass, and hope that it didn't happen again. But around dinnertime, Marley was jumping up and down in the kitchen, yelling "F-cky, f-cky!"

Then I saw what she was pointing at. The DVD of Disney's Princess and the Frog. She was saying froggy.

"See froggy! See froggy!" she said. She wanted to watch the DVD. So you see, of course my little angel wasn't using the f-word. Now I'll just have to call my mom.

Have any of your kids dropped f-bombs or other bad words? How did you handle it?