Put your $ where your @%#! is

Somehow, despite my best efforts, and despite being of the opinion that people who use curse words lack imagination and an adequate vocabulary, I have slipped into the habit of occasionally swearing. I'm no potty-mouth, but my occasional "dammit"s and "what the hell?"s have attracted the attention and wrath of none other than Mr W. OK, there was the time when I was canning the peach jam a couple of weeks ago and everything was happening at once and I let fly some words that I really shouldn't have. But those episodes are very rare. I swear.

I spend enough time with him to see where he is coming from. We go around and around on him watching Youtube videos. Some are fine and age appropriate (and fun, too). But some are on the topics that he likes, the Bionicles, and now the game Minecraft, and are made by older kids or adults for all I know. That's the thing with Youtube. You can't really tell ahead of time. So our compromise has been for him to watch these things while I'm around, sitting on the couch or in the kitchen so I can hear the dialogue. If it gets racy or they use swear words, he knows he needs to turn it off and find a different one.

He thinks this is a great system. I think this trial and error stuff stinks, and I'll sometimes just say, "no, I don't want you watching any of them at the moment, go find something else". The other day, were sitting in the living room, and he picks one and it's full of f-bombs and the like. He says, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry" and turns it right off. I say, "See? That exactly proves my point. You don't know what you're getting, and you're going to be exposed to stuff I don't want you to see or hear".

So now, he's taken this idea that the swear words are really bad (although I'm probably more concerned with something racy coming up. Or really violent). And he's been calling me on it. Mom, you shouldn't swear. Mom, I already know all those swear words, so it's OK for me to watch the videos. Not on my watch, pal. They think they know everything there is to know.

But I don't want to be in the habit of swearing. Maybe it's some vestige of wanting to sound cool (at some level. Yes, I get the contradiction). So I proposed the jar. The Swearword Jar.

Now, every time I swear, I have to put a quarter in the jar. He gets to have the money at the end of the month. I imagine he'll make a little bit of dough, but this sort of thing is a good motivator for me.