So my three-year-old taught me
how to smoke today.
Personally, I find this really creepy. In that it's abouuuuuut 12 years too early for our kid to come home from school and show off the exact fingering for holding a cigarette and insist that all his friends smoke. Yes, he really said that. Smoke cigarettes? Yes. Do I believe that? Hell no, but I could see a bunch of three and four
year olds trying to convince him they do. Sure, yeah, I keep 'em at home and just smoke when my mom's not around. They're great right after
naptime. Jesus goddamn.
He was sitting in the back seat on the way to preschool and I glanced at him and saw that he had a long straw in his mouth. I asked him what was in his mouth and he said a stick. I suggested that he take it out of his mouth now, and he said "nooooo, it's myyy stick."
So I asked
him where he got it, and he said on the grass at preschool. I pointed out that if he got it on the grass, everyone had been stepping on it, so putting it in his mouth was a lot like licking the bottoms of everyone's shoes. Then he said he wasn't licking everyone's shoes, he was smoking. I told him to take it OUT of his MOUTH, please,
now, and that he shouldn't smoke because it was really bad for you.
He said it's not, because his friends smoke. I said, "your friends
do not smoke cigarettes" and he said "They DO! They do smoke
cigarettes!" Then he said "see? your finger goes here and your other
finger goes here and you hold it like this" and I looked back there
again and he was holding the straw between his index and middle
fingers, smoker-style. (I might add that, regardless of what his fascist
little classmates think about how pink is for girls, they have the single
most effeminate smoking style ever.)
It's funny, and yet it's not funny. I told him as many of the short-
term reasons for not smoking as I could think of: it turns your teeth
funny colors, it makes your breath smell *really* bad, it makes you
cough a lot, etc. Then I told him the big long-term one, which is
that it can hurt your lungs and make it so you can't breathe and then
you die - my toddler-level description of lung cancer. He was highly
impressed by this and said that that would be "really bad."
Hopefully, the next time his friends are pretending to smoke, he will
bring this up with them.