My son the potty-mouth

Today when I picked the boys up from preschool, their teacher pulled me aside to explain an "incident" during circle time. (It was all I could do not to say "Oh, shit," when she said she wanted to talk to me.) It seems one of their little friends was absent, and after sending her good thoughts, Chas raised his hand to elaborate. "I thought poop," he told the teacher, or something to that effect. Wisely recognizing that this was going to set off a veritable poop-storm of such utterances from the whole class (as "poop" is just about the funniest word in the English language when you are in preschool), she told him it was bathroom talk and inappropriate. He apparently got quite red-faced, teary-eyed and she said she was pretty sure he cried.

I tried to be sensitive and reassuring, prompting him to tell me all about school, hoping he would volunteer and thus give me an opening to talk about it. The closest he came to 'fessing up was to blurt out "I didn't cry" when I asked if anything upsetting happened during circle time. So I just told him I knew the story, which probably wasn't the coolest thing in the world, reminding him of what must have been a mortifying moment and worse, letting him know that someone told his mom about it. Anyway, I told him about how we all make mistakes and that he wasn't the only kid in his class who has done this. I also told him the truth: that I was as much to blame for it as he was because it's my job to teach him when words aren't appropriate and that I've just laughed along at the poop jokes for too long. We then agreed we would try to help each other clean up our vocabularies.

I figure this is just practice for dealing with the inevitable F-bombs that are in his future.