Halfway

There are days I question my sanity. Yesterday was one of those days.

See - here's the thing...I homeschool my darling dears, and the money I could be using to place them in a very nice private school all goes toward paying for their tennis lessons and tournaments. 

Which is fine. No problem. They have a dream, and all that. Whatever.

So, on days when they stare out the window and only get 1/3 of the work done for school that they were supposed to get done, I find myself quaking with irritation or, as it probably should be called, rage. And that's when I find myself struggling to deal with the best way to deal with impressionable children without using any actual curse words or phrases. Because that kind of rage irritation just brings out the drill sergeant in me.

I find myself saying things like, "If you insist on doing things in such a...ah...errr...well, as Papa Ray would say, 'half-assed' way, then I have no choice but to..." 

Yes. You heard it here first - yesterday, I actually used my dad's poor word choices to mask my own. Sorry, Dad - but thanks. I would have used my mom's instead, but she just removed all the vowels from her curse words to make them appropriate, and it kind of made her sound like she was having some sort of aphasic episode..."Ddhhmmmmmt!" "Shhhhhhhhhht!"

My dad, on the other hand was more likely to throw the full word out there, vowels and all, and then punctuate it by throwing a hammer. You know the dad in A Christmas Story? When he works on the furnace? Yeah.

I ended up with something that falls in between my parents. Back in the day, before I had children, my language was quite...well...colorful. I could string together a series of curses that were so unique that entire dictionaries were written in order to contain them. Once faced with the prospect of hearing my children quote them back to me, however, I straightened up and tried the vowelectomy that got my mother through child-rearing.

It lacks a certain, how do you say, je ne sais quoi...

So now, I shall blame all my curse words upon my father. I will preface each one with "As Papa Ray would say," and then my children will rise up and praise my ingenuity tact and deviousness respect of the English language.

I think it's going to work great - "What do you mean, you didn't pass your history test? As Papa Ray would say, 'Dammit, son!' Sit your, as Papa Ray would say, 'ass' down in that chair and redo the whole, as Papa Ray would say, 'damn' thing!"

Situation...solved.