Sunday, January 24, 2016

Creative Parenting

Eli has been exploring a lot of the music on Amazon Prime on his kindle. He's got incredibly eclectic tastes, unless you know that most of his choices have at some point been used as background music in some WWE event. But he's obsessed with Fallout Boy, loves Katy Perry, and also listens to Devil Went Down to Georgia (singing along) pretty regularly. A few weeks ago we realized that 1) he had been downloading explicit lyrics and 2) was "unconsciously" singing said lyrics pretty regularly. It's a loophole in our "grown-up words" rule. Also, I blame C, who has a Sir Mix-A-Lot poster featuring a naked woman and an anaconda hanging on our bedroom wall (choose your battles, right?) So we made a rule that he could download songs, but no explicit lyrics.

Fast forward to this week. Eli is doing something, probably pushups, and starts singing "It's another way to call a cat a kitten." For those of you not fully immersed in 90s hip-hop culture, the lyric is from Naughty by Nature's "OPP." C stops Eli and says, "I keep telling you not to sing that! It's not appropriate!" And Logic Boy looks back at him and says, "But why?!"

I should probably not parent at the end of a long weekend. Or perhaps I need more warning to the fact that my son has been singing OPP in public. But the words flew before I could catch them. "Eli! That song is about VAGINAS! Do you mean to be singing about VAGINAS? Because if you want to talk about VAGINAS then I will help you research VAGINAS and then you can talk about VAGINAS all that you want. But you cannot sing about VAGINAS if you know nothing about VAGINAS. Would you like me to help you look up information on VAGINAS?" 

This kid was born in Portland and has been raised in a very body-accepting house, but both he and his dad would have done just about anything to make me stop saying "Vagina." It was a beautiful moment, and I haven't heard that damn song since.

3 comments:

  1. You. Are. My hero.

    I have nothing to add. Awesome. Ten out of ten.

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  2. I can totally picture that scenario. Love it. Love that boy.

    ReplyDelete