Guns and Poo Holes and Chickens, Oh My!

So yesterday mid-morning I got the following email from one of my 4-yr-old's silicon valley preschool teachers:

Your son has been testing the school boundaries on acceptable language. After we explained to him that "we don't talk about guns at school" he repeated the gun talk as soon as the teacher turned her back. When she turned around to look at him he was smiling at her.

xxxx

He has been doing the similar behavior with bathroom words (pee-pee, poo-poo, poo-hole), after the teacher has explained to him that we don't use those words at school.

I know our language guidelines are probably tighter than those at home. But, I think he has successfully found our boundaries.

Now, my kid is not violent or angry. He is, in fact, a very happy-go-lucky 4-yr-old version of John Belushi. When I got this in the middle of my very happy morning work time, my heart sank. It's not like my guy to be naughty. But, I know he has recently enjoyed the rise he gets out of folks for mentioning guns (which are NOT allowed even in water gun form in our house) and of course, poo-related items (which, admittedly, we do allow mild discussion of in our house).

Quickly though, my heart rose and I began to laugh heartily. Sure, I planned to sit him down and have a serious conversation with him after school, and to appropriately make him cry with shame for breaking the rules at school, but really the seriousness of this email note sent to me in "real time" during the day to alert me to my son's fairly normal 4-yr-old behavior was quite funny. Just imagining his teacher saying "Now, I've just told you we don't say POO HOLE at school!" made me giggle.

After showing it to a few friends who, instead of laughing alone, laughed and said they would absolutely freak out if they got this note, I realized that wow, I feel bad for those parents who encounter something like this and feel like they have somehow churned out a bad seed, and I started to wonder how appropriate this note really was. When I got it, I just saw that my kid is limit-testing, and I knew that I would deal with it. For example, this morning he was serenely looking over his book of 300 birds complete with audio of each of their calls, he said "Hey Mom, this one looks like a chicken. I'll shoot it."

He was promptly talked to and sent into some quiet time to think about his use of "gun language". I'll bet there are moms out there though, that would have been prompted to called up the local psychiatrist to discuss sociopathic tendencies. I don't allow guns of any kind because I hate them. But I know that little boys are going to talk about them, and while I do teach my kids that I don't like hearing anything related to shooting, I know they are not damaged goods for testing out this ground. I just hope my little guy hasn't been listening to any Sarah Palin speeches on the sly.

This is an original post to Silicon Valley Moms Blog.