Sludges

3 Funny Moments.  One Horrific Moment.

I asked Elyse what she was going to say if someone made fun of her for not matching.  Without a beat she said, "I would tell them matching is boring."

Andy asked me if God "needed" the devil so that he had somewhere to put the people that didn't believe in Jesus.  Probably the first theological question I didn't know how to answer with my kids.

Elyse was pretending to be an angel and she found a dried out palm branch and said it was her broom.  Andy said, "Why do you need a broom for Elyse?  You're an angel not a witch." And she said, "To sweep up all the lies off the floor."  Which sounds like the super-emo lyric of a super-emo band to me.

This one is controversial, brace yourself, but this is the kind of stuff that you get thrown at as a parent so let's be honest.

So Elyse drew a picture of short little shorts crossed out with the word NO! written all over the page.  At the bottom she wrote, "There are no sludges in this house!"  So I was like, "Cool pic - what's a sludge?"  She's like, "You know, girls that wear those really short shorts, or clothes that show too much of their body - sludges!" 

A moment passed.  And then I realized the word she was searching for was "Sluts".

A couple things went through my mind,
1. Horror that my daughter has heard this word.
2. Horror that my daughter is judging other girls and using that word.
3. Pure joy that she wasn't asking for those short little shorts any time soon, at least not yet.

Of course I told her that sluts wasn't a nice word, that it was a curse word that's specifically designed to be disrespectful to women.  I told her that a better way to approach the situation would have been to say there are no short shorts in this house, not to unkindly talk about people that wear them.  But the situation itself was just a reminder that my kids are exposed to so much when they hit school age years.  It's such a strange phenomenon when they start picking up things that you didn't teach them.  You spend the first 5 years in charge of every influence, every thought, every word or activity.  Then they get thrust into the school system where you are at the mercy of the parenting of 300 other kids.

Most of the time it's super funny to hear what tumbles out of the mouths of babes and I love that they are exposed to all different types of people and cultures that she's learning to be comfortable with.  But every once in awhile you hear stuff like that and want to yank them from school and move to a deserted island to protect them from all the ugly.  Raising kids gets harder every year.