Toddler Swearing – When 'Time Outs' Don’t Work, Send Them To Jail

It’s not as if my 2-year old daughter has been watching Eddie Murphy Raw on late night TV, hanging out at the local Jr. High, or listening to rap music and throwing around F-bombs like Dora and her pet monkey Bubbles.

Nope, she’s been watching DVD’s like Pixar’s “A Bug’s Life”, Disney’s “A Goofy Movie” or a number of the so-called kid friendly movies which happen to use words like “idiot”, “stupid”, “shut-up” and “bad-Ass” in them (actually not the last one, but give Dreamworks some time and I’m sure they make a Quentin Tarantino & George Carlin animated “buddy” movie…)
Who would have thought these movies can cause a toddler to begin spouting off a kid’s version of swearing and use them correctly in context? Not me.

These days when she’s mad, angry, upset, tired, or when gravity doesn’t conform to her will she’ll yell out things like “Stupid (insert person’s or inanimate objects name)!!” or “Shut up, (insert person’s or inanimate objects name)!!”
What a far cry from her original version of swearing just a few months ago -- which was clapping her hands and yelling “HERE! KITTY! KITTY!” followed by a raspberry noise.
Maybe my uncontainable laughter at the act caused her to look for something with more authority?

Nonetheless, this needs to stop. So now I’m upping the ante with some good old fashion discipline to control this and a host of other “terrible two’s” behavior.

The traditional toddler discipline methods:
Time-Out – Which work most of the time, but doesn't quite work outside of the house.
Take-Away – Toys, princesses, crayons, Tupperware, etc.
Spanking – I still can’t do this. I’m not opposed to it and want the option just in case things get really bad, like if she pulled a knife at the ice cream truck.

Now I’m resorting to--
The non-traditional methods:
Jail – This works while in the car. I’ve told her jail is a place where people cry all day, no magic exists, and they play Mike Meyer’s “The Cat in the Hat” all day long (that movie makes her upset and cry.)
Monsters – Usually at night before bedtime I tell her that if she doesn’t behave, monsters will come and eat her legs while she sleeps. And Princesses need legs to be ballerinas.
Evil Bunnies – For some odd reason jackrabbits have started popping up around my neighborhood. I’ve told her that these bunnies can be nice or can chase bad children who don’t listen to their daddy’s.
Upset Princess Call –I pretend I’m talking with Cinderella on the phone and she asks for her Princess clothes and toys back because my daughter has been bad.

She’s been pretty upset with Cinderella these past few days. I just hope she never runs into her at an ice cream truck…

When Do You Take A Toddler To The Movies? My iPhone Experience, And Parents That Buy Kids Expensive Things.

On summer Fridays, the J.O.B. let’s me free at 1pm. “Summer hours” they call I; the wife and I call it “A chance to go see a movie while our daughter is at the sitter until 5:30.” The last real movie we saw together in a theater was that Harry Potter movie (the one that came out 2 years ago.) Although I did try to take my daughter to see “Meet The Robinson’s” a few weeks (or months) ago only to have her tell me “all done daddy – I want home! I wanna play!” 20 minutes into it. To be honest I wanted to leave too, that movie was really boring and didn’t make sense.
So last Friday, the wife and I wanted to see Ratatouille and we were really struggling whether or not to take our daughter. Her current movie watching record is about 25 minutes of Cinderella, then she’s off to pretend cook lemon-crusted pork chops with rice, or sing to the dog.
Fellow parents, when did you first take your to the movies? 3? 4? 13? I lost my child owners manual and I want to know.
The first movie I can remember was E.T. at a drive-in. I remember watching for awhile and then somehow, I ended up at the swings eating a Fudgesicle. I wish more drive-ins were around these days... parenting would be so much easier.
My quick review of Ratatouille – I really liked it (so did the wife.) In my Pixar favorites, this is #2 after Finding Nemo. The story is great, the animation and art direction are stunning. It makes the Shrek movies look like “Dude, Where’s My Car.”

That was my Friday afternoon, guess where I was Friday night? Standing in line with about 600 people in front of me waiting to get an iPhone at the Apple store in the Sherman Oaks mall (and I thought nobody would be there because it was the valley – boy, I felt pretty dumb.) Two and a half hours later, I finally made it to the front (about 10 minutes before they sold out), bought the thing and then the Apple employees high-fived me on the way out while hooting and hollering “Whoo-Hoo! All right! Way to Go! You da' MAN!” (they were high-fiving everybody… I guess to make you forget the amount of money you just spent...)
I went along with it. Then when I got to the car, I felt dirty.

I didn’t have any problems porting my number from Verizon, I was able to start making calls from the iPhone in about 2 hours, and started receiving calls on Sunday. I played with the thing all weekend like a kid with Pokemon on a new Gameboy.
I have to admit – the thing is freakin’ cool. It really feels more like a computer than a phone though, which isn’t so bad. I do have a few complaints, which are more techie problems (Why can’t I get any notes on it from my computer like my Treo? AT&T EDGE is really, really slow. The WiFi helps when strangers have open routers. I want games on the thing and I want to use my music for ringtones.) I hear all of those are suppose to happen sometime soon in a software update.
Good things? The maps (and real-time traffic), the Internet works really well (full access to Blogger), the camera is pretty good for a phone, video looks amazing, oh - and the phone part works pretty good too.
The oddest thing while standing in line - there was a mom and her 11 year-old son ahead of me. The mom was buying one for her son. Say what? What kind of parent would buy an 11 year-old a $600 phone!? I sure wouldn’t. What’s wrong with parents? No wonder kids live at home well into their 30’s. I bet that kid will be living at home until he’s at least 40.