Swearing For the First Time

"Shit."

It was a good thing Neil wasn't drinking or eating anything in that moment, or he would've choked upon hearing that come out of his three-year-old daughter's mouth. As it was, he dropped his fork onto his plate and stared, dumbfounded and with his jaw hanging open, at Grace as she scowled at the spilled ground beef from one of the lettuce wraps on her own plate.

And then he threw his head back and laughed, which made Grace start giggling.

"Neil!" he heard Eva exclaim from her seat at the dining room table. "Don't encourage her!"

"I'm not encouraging her," Neil managed in between guffaws. "It's just—man, now I've heard everything!"

It was a good few seconds before he could stop laughing. Wiping at his eyes, Neil couldn't help the grin still on his face as he returned his attention to Grace, who was beaming at him as if she hadn't been annoyed about two minutes ago.

His grin, however, was quick to disappear once he saw Eva glowering at him.

"Uh...I mean..." Neil cleared his throat, trying to sound as serious as he could. "Please don't say that word, princess."

"Why not?" Grace asked, now looking confused.

"It's a bad word," Eva explained.

"But I heard Daddy say 'shit.'"

"What?" It was now Neil's turn to be confused. Yes, no one could accuse him of having a perfectly swear-free mouth on him, but he'd been careful about how he spoke around Grace for the past three years. When could she have ever heard him cursing?

"Grace, stop saying that," Eva told her firmly. "And since when are you teaching her those words?" she demanded, fixing Neil with an accusatory glare.

"Since never," he insisted, raising his hands up in a defensive gesture. "Seriously, Eva, I don't know how Grace learned that one."

"I went to show Daddy my kitty," Grace said. "Then he said 'shit.'"

"Grace!" Eva scolded.

"Oh, wait, now I remember," Neil said, lowering his hands. "I got a message about a catastrophic error on my computer earlier. Must've said the S word right before Grace came into the den."

In fact, Neil had been in the middle of running an antivirus program when Grace came bounding to him. She'd been eager to show off her stuffed cat and tell him all she knew about cats in general—that they meowed, that they were soft and fluffy, that they came in different colors—and he'd been all too happy to listen to her while his computer sorted out its issues. The possibility that his daughter could have heard him let loose with a swear word never even occurred to him until now.

"So you did teach her that," Eva said flatly.

"Not on purpose," Neil argued.

"Maybe not, but she still heard you say it."

"Shit!" Grace exclaimed; Neil looked at her again to see that she'd accidentally spilled another lettuce wrap onto her plate.

Eva groaned. "And we'll have one horseradish of a time getting her to stop saying it."