The Al SwearenJar

Confession:  My husband and I are potty mouths.
Issue: We don’t want Tuco to have a potty mouth.
Our Solution: The Al SwearenJar.

My husband and I realized that we have to break our bad habit of swearing. We’re trying not to be “do as I say and not as I do” parents, so we can’t be swearing up a storm all the time and expect Tuco not to do the same. We have to break our habit now before Tuco has the verbal skills to repeat what he hears, though I fear there is a pocket of his brain that retained all the bad words he’s already heard us say.

After discussing how we can’t be s!@##y parents and continue talking like f!@#ing a**holes all the f!@#ing  time, we decided a swear jar is the best solution. The brilliant phrase “Al SwearenJar” came out of my husband’s mouth. Of course this is a reference to Al Swearengen, a character on HBO’s series Deadwood. (I know the reference really should be to Al Swearengen, a figure in American history, but our only connection to him is television.)

Though he was a villain, we fell in love with Al Swearengen immediately. This guy could speak a string of cuss words that sounded like a Shakespeare soliloquy. Really, I’ve never heard swear words sound so eloquently beautiful.

And yeah, we get the irony of  Al Swearengen being the face and inspiration of our Al SwearenJar. That’s what makes this dumb idea so fun.

Here are the Al SwearenJar rules:

1. Every time a bad word is said in front of Tuco, we have to pay 25 cents.
2. This rule does not apply if Tuco is not in our presence.
3. It also does not apply if a profanity is exclaimed as a result of an accident like stubbing a toe or closing a drawer on a finger.

You can tell how much time I had to invest in the jar’s creation by the crudely applied scotch tape over the picture and label. My husband says it’s awesome, so I guess it’s a job well done.

As soon as the jar was created, my husband immediately put in a dollar as a down payment on his inevitable swearing. He currently has a credit of 25 cents on that dollar. I’m down 50 cents and still have yet to put my money in. I will keep you posted on our progress.

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