My seven year old son came running through the room yelling into his walkie-talkie, “Abort the mission. Abort!”
My five year old daughter’s walkie talkie didn’t have batteries so although she talked into the walkie-talkie she knew she had to stay close enough to hear her brother. “I’m going into the lair,” she yelled.
“No. Abort,” he yelled. “I repeat. Abort!”
She stopped in her tracks. “Dad!” she yelled. “He said a bad word.” (I’m not really sure why she was still talking into her walkie talkie but she was.)
“I didn’t,” he yelled, defending himself.
She insisted he did.
And then comes the moment which I’ve still never figured out how to handle. Trying to get a child who can’t spell to explain to me what the bad word was that someone said. She realized the same situation because she just looked at me confusedly. We were at an impasse.
“I think she means the word “abort,” said the boy.
“Aha,” she yelled and pointed, her eyes wide. “He said it again!”
I told her that “abort” wasn’t necessarily a bad word.
“But what about the March for Life?” she asked.
I explained that aborting babies is bad. Terrible. But aborting a mission is fine, especially when the lair was filled with zombies as seemed to be the case here.
“Oh,” she said.
Over the next two hours I heard the word “abort” screamed into walkie-talkies about 79 times as she delighted in the newfound freedom of a word taken off the bad-word list.
