Last week, we were playing a board game together as a family when my husband blocked our six year old son’s next move. Our boy saw his dad’s defensive strategy and proclaimed, “Damn it, Daddy!”

He didn’t realize he had said anything wrong, so we explained that it was bad, and he need not ever say it again. We didn’t need to ask him where he learned it. We knew he had picked it up while playing games with his dad. My husband’s competitive nature has also been responsible for teaching our son the words, “sucker” and “crap”.

My husband, the sailor, also taught our daughter her first curse word. When she was about two years old we were driving in the car when, out-of-the-blue, we heard the “F” word come from the back seat. Before we had a chance to stop her, she had said it about ten times in a row. At least she used it in the proper venue. Clearly, she had heard that while driving in the car with her dad.

But, I can not blame my husband for the time my daughter did not fling curse words, but instead assaulted us with attitude.

I was extremely hormonal tired, and had been working all day while my husband played with our daughter, who was just a toddler at the time. They sat down to have a snack together as I flopped my exhausted body onto the couch. No sooner had I sat down, than my daughter asked, “Mom, can you get us some napkins?”

Irritated that she asked me, instead of her father, I angrily said, “Oh, sure! Dad’s been playing all day while I’ve been working, but I’ll get up to get the FREAKING napkins!”

I returned to the room and tossed them a couple of paper towels before falling back into my seat.

Then I watched as my daughter climbed onto her dad’s lap and put her face a mere inch from his. She held that position as she stuck her hand into their snack bag, then glared at him and yelled, “Dad! These are FREAKING cheese puffs!”

But all things considered, I don’t think my “F” word is nearly as bad as his.

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My ten year old daughter has always battled me at mealtime. She was born 10 weeks early and was fed through a tube for two weeks before I begged the doctors to let us try bottle feeding her. I have a home video of that first bottle and halfway through you can hear the monitor sound an alarm to let us know her heart rate was dropping dangerously low. Things have only gone downhill from there.

If she was permitted to exist on popcorn, chicken nuggets and Ho Hos there would be no problem at all. The girl is totally doomed when she gets to college. Let’s hope she continues to play three sports.

When she was a toddler she would pick at her plate and it would take her an hour-and-a-half to eat a meal. People thought I was kidding until they saw it for themselves.

After Thanksgiving one year, we even received a note from a dear great-aunt who told us how impressed she was with the way our daughter sat at her seat and ate her food, while her cousins left the table and played all around her. For an hour. We didn’t have the heart to tell her that it was only because there was turkey and, for crying out loud, she has to chew turkey 136 times before she would swallow a bite. At least it made us look like good parents. For once.

She was so picky in kindergarten, that she would come home with one quarter of her sandwich eaten, and nothing else. I could hear her stomach growling from three blocks away.

Now that she’s been around for over a decade, I have learned to work with it.

Tonight I made salmon, which is one of her favorite things to eat. As we always do, we went over our best and worst parts of our day.

And darn if I don’t have to work a little harder, because when I asked my daughter to tell us the worst part of her day, she didn’t hesitate in saying, “That this salmon has no flavor.”

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We were sitting in a restaurant last night enjoying a family dinner, when my six year old son heard a song he liked. As he often does (especially at church when the choir is singing), he cocked his head back, opened his mouth and began to lip sync. Though it doesn’t look as much like lip syncing, as it does an open-mouthed howl minus the sound.

I turned to him and rhetorically asked, “You sure do like to be dramatic, don’t you?”

He then gave his eyes a big roll, threw up his hands and sighed deeply before asking, “What’s dramatic mean?”

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The kids were sitting at the table the other day, reading messages on little candy hearts, when my son asked my daughter a question. She didn’t know the answer, so she asked me, “Mom, what’s a soul mate?”

I replied, “Well, it’s when two things are meant to be together. Like with me and Daddy. It’s love like no other love, and nothing can ever come between you.”

She thought for a second about how to properly relay this information to her little brother, then she turned to him and said, “It’s like how our dog feels about her bowl of food.”

And just like that, I went from someone’s soul mate to just another piece of meat.

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