Not What I Expected During Candy Land

As Lincoln and I sit playing candy land last night I had a moment I'm not sure I will forget anytime soon. He was winning and I had just picked a double purple card.  I was quickly catching up.  My three year old not happy at the thought of losing the game. "Oh F**k," he said. My heart sank.  Panic set in.  What did he just say? Did I hear that right? What do I do? Ignore it? I felt like I needed to address it.  How do I do that and not over react? OMG!!  So many thoughts raced through my mind in a period of what I'm sure was only two seconds but felt much longer because of the chaos and panic in my mind.

I tried to remain calm and yet direct. "What did you say?" I asked.  Dumb, I thought to myself. Why did I just tell him to repeat it? I guess it's because I almost didn't believe my three year old had said that.
Next I asked, "do you know what that means?" I don't know what exactly I was expecting him to say at that point. Luckily he said no.  I proceed with, "where did you learn that?"  Of course he learned it at school.  We don't talk like that at home but I guess I just needed confirmation.  He replied, "Miss XXXX taught me that."  Well clearly I know his preschool teacher didn't teach him that so I just said, "so you learned it at school from the other kids?" To which he responded with, yes.

Okay, so now that I got the useless question and answer session out of the way now what do I do?  I clearly explained that we don't say that word. It's not nice and we don't say bad words. I told him that if kids say that word at school we don't repeat it and that we tell them that's not a good word to use.  Then we continued our game of candy land.

I was not expecting that at all when I sat down to an innocent game with him. I think I did good to not over react and not to make a huge deal out of it.  I guess that was okay.  The hardest part about parenting is that there are no black and white text book answers.  I figured I would have to address that some day but I was not quite prepared yesterday.  Hopefully we won't have to deal with that again for a while.