Day 507: Rhymes with crass

So the other night Fernando and I, ignoring the fact that we are on day 10,000 (or thereabouts) of renovations and still are no closer to having a kitchen or washroom, were curled up on the couch watching Supernanny. I remember tuning into that show all the time when I was pregnant, smugly confident that no child of mine would ever be such a little monster. Well, needless to say, times have changed. I think you need only live through one toddler-induced session of public humiliation to understand that sometimes these kids just have minds of their own. Maddie is a sweet and wonderful little girl, but let's just say she can hold her own.

Anyways, this episode was particularly painful. The couple had two sons, aged 4 and 7. She ran a daycare and he was a stay at home dad. Although, the fact that he seemed to drop the kids off at said daycare each day made me question whether he is eligible to hold that title. He was more just a guy who didn’t work. The boys were complete terrors, of course: aggressive, disrespectful, rude. Your typical Supernanny family.

There was a point where the father was at the breakfast table with his 4-year old and the kid says, “Hey Dad, I’ve got a new nickname for you.” Now, this being a show about nightmarish children, you know he’s not about to say “Lovebug” or “Muffinhead”. So I braced myself. The dad, sadly, did not. “Yeah? What’s that?” was his optimistic reply. “Ass,” says the kid. He’s nicknamed his own father Ass. Something about that just horrified me. I think it was that he didn’t say it in that way that kids do when they’re trying out new words that they know are bad. It wasn’t an experiment. It was a dismissal. Ass – it doesn’t get much worse than that.

So of course we got into a discussion of what our automatic response might be should the day come when Mads nicknames one – or both, likely – of us Ass. Fernando seemed sold on a menacing form of “Pardon me??” that made him sound sort of like Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver. I didn’t come up with much. Honestly, I think I would just be trying hard not to laugh – or cry. Hopefully we’ll have a few years yet before we have to decide!