867-5309

*Please be warned that this is not a PG-13 sub­ject how­ever, I’m try­ing hard to be as dis­creet as possible.*

With that in mind I need to nick­name a device that is the cen­ter of this inci­dent. I’m using a nick­name because 1) I really don’t want to offend any­one and 2) I hate creepy spam­mers. So let’s use TNS = Twist-N-Shout in place of a vibrat­ing device. {Oh boy, my armpits are already sweat­ing.}

I never real­ized I would have a story about a TNS and my son…at 6 years old. {…sigh…}

Dis­clamer: When I was try­ing to decide on what name to use for my youngest son on this blog, it came down to either Imp or Grem­lin. Not because he reminded me of a lit­tle demon, but because he’s so mis­chie­vous. Imp sounds too degrad­ing so I chose Grem­lin for his blog name.

A cou­ple of weeks ago some good friends called to inform me of a sit­u­a­tion that came up at school with Grem­lin.  It went some­thing like this:

Mr. Jan­i­tor over­heard Grem­lin talk­ing to some other kids about a pink TNS. Mr. Jan­i­tor asked him sev­eral times to repeat him­self to make sure he was hear­ing him right. He then sat Grem­lin down by him­self and went to go get Ms. Counselor…a female. She asked Grem­lin what he said and he con­fi­dently told her the word and what it meant. She asked him where he had heard that word and he said, “Oh we use it all the time at home!” <WHAT?!> Thank­fully, Ms. Coun­selor felt like this was an issue of mis­com­mu­ni­ca­tion and just told him that what he was say­ing sounded too much like another word that’s not so nice and asked him to just not say it anymore.

Because Ms. Coun­selor thought it was just a mis­un­der­stand­ing, she didn’t call me on it. Which is fine by me.  How­ever, Mr. Jan­i­tor thought it was too funny not to tell the cafe­te­ria ladies. What he didn’t know is that one of those ladies was a good friend of ours.

I was a bit hor­ri­fied because I had been at the school vol­un­teer­ing a cou­ple of times since the time it hap­pened and the time I heard about it. Here I thought I was get­ting big smiles because every­one was just that nice! Stu­pid, stu­pid Jen!

Thank­fully, my friend who worked in the cafe­te­ria told him that she knew the par­ents and really didn’t think they would have those kind of con­ver­sa­tions with Grem­lin. And she was right!

We did talk with Grem­lin about the sit­u­a­tion and come to find out he was try­ing to teach his friends how to talk in Tamil (a South Indian lan­guage) but he wasn’t say­ing it right.  What floors me is that he was tat­tled on by a cou­ple of the other 1st graders at that table who DID know what a TNS was. Hello…!!

Thank­fully Grem­lin had no desire to find out what word they thought he was say­ing. He said, “I have no idea why they were freak­ing out. Adults just do that some­times.” *snort*

{And this is where you tell me how typ­i­cal this is and you have tons of the same kind of stories…right?? }