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.

Log in or register to write something here or to contact authors.