Near our back door, we have a rather large basket full of shoes. Lots and lots of shoes. All of which belong to the two kids. Yesterday, I told my son to go get a pair out of the basket and put them on for school. I was folding laundry in the other room, and kept yelling, “Did you put your shoes on?” He would reply, “Not yet!” And, I would say, “Well, hurry up! It’s time for school.” We did this over and over before I finally went to check on him.

I found him in the back hallway, completely surrounded by shoes. He had dumped the entire basket onto the floor. But, that wasn’t what surprised me. He often dumps all of his trains, cars, and books all over the house, so why would shoes be any different?

I stood there silently and watched him hold a shoe up to his face and smell it, then put it down, pick up another shoe and do the same thing. After he did this a few times, I asked, “What are you doing? Why haven’t you put your shoes on yet?”

He looked up at me with a disgusted look and said, “These shoes all smell like Michigan.”

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Truly, I am not making this stuff up. My son is obscene in his honesty. He is positively audacious and blunt. He seems to always feel the need to comment on everyone’s looks and compare them to someone, or something. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come off as rude as I hurried him along, in order to avoid having to offer up an apology.

I actually live in constant fear of what he’ll say. He has compared people to fish, asked a rotund, MALE, friend of ours if he had a “baby in his belly”, told a cousin she has a huge chin, asked another friend why she was so big, and tells middle-aged people they’re old. Men are called women and women are called men. I have to avoid anyone overweight, as well as people with birthmarks, scars, strange hair, tattoos, bald heads, and prosthetic anything. He will gladly tell men in pink shirts that “pink is a girl color”, and boys wearing earrings are promptly told that they’re not supposed to. Taking him out in public is like getting a sharp booger. It’s unavoidable and painful, yet inevitable.

So, I shouldn’t have been surprised, when a very wrinkled, older woman was behind us at the store the other day, and he pointed and said, “She’s like Sam-I-Am!”

I tried, HARD, to play it off and said, “Yes! She looks like Gram.”

Or…what Grammy would look like in….oh, say, 100 years. But, I figured this woman would think she resembles his Grandma, and we would all go merrily on our way.

But, it was a futile attempt, because he emphatically said, “No! Sam-I-Am! Sam-I-Am! Not Gram! Sam-I-Am!”

I quickly paid, then picked him up and tickled him a little in order to get him to giggle instead of making another comment. Then, I tried to alleviate the situation as any sane person would…with humor and bad poetry. As I tickled his belly I said, “Oh, please excuse him, Ma’am. His Gram likes Green Eggs and Ham! He’s really into rhyming, because her name is Pam! You DO NOT look like Sam-I-Am!”

Thank goodness, she laughed. Another predicament handled with ease. But, as I made a break for the door, I vowed to NEVER AGAIN take him out of the house. I can not take him here, or there. I can not take him anywhere.

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This morning, I handed my son a rinsed-out bottle of laundry detergent to put in our recycling bin. As he was walking into the other room with it…because of a past experience with Poison Control, I yelled, “Don’t drink that!”

He stopped and asked, “Why?”

I said, “Because, it’s yucky. It’s gross. It’ll make you sick.”

“Yucky like poop?”

“Yes. It’s yucky like poop.”

“Yucky like a skunk?”

“Yes. It’s yucky like a skunk.”

And, although I knew he had another analogy ready to toss my way, I wasn’t expecting him to ask, “Yucky like Michigan?”

He’s getting his allowance doubled this week.

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While visiting with an employee of my husband’s today, my son looked at her and said something I’ve never heard him say before…”Poopee-Head”.

I said, “Hey! Do NOT say that again. We don’t say that because it’s not nice. Do you understand? Do NOT say that again”.

Because, in his mind that means he has permission to proceed, he looked at me and said, “Poo…”

I glared at him and waited for the rest, but it didn’t come. My husband’s employee and I had continued our conversation, when my son got up and came over to my chair.

And, I truly believe he thought he wouldn’t get in trouble…like he had created a completely different word…when he looked at me, finished what he started, and said, “…pee-Head”.

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