Cheese is Christ

As many of you know, I was raised by a fairly religious mom (understatement).

While raised in the Catholic Church, not only was I made to do all the Holy Sacraments that occurred while living under my parents' roof, but I was also dragged to Aglow meetings where large groups of white middle class women spoke in tongues and I was sent to Awana Bible Meetings where Leslie Trotter and I competed to see who could memorize Bible verses more quickly. All that said, I left all religion when I left my parents' roof at age 18 and have never looked back. I figured I had had enough crammed into me by 18 that I could live to 90 and still have gone to church more than most and would still know more Bible verses than most, so I could take the next 3/4 of my life off and then reassess.

By the way, did you know I had to answer the phone "Praise the Lord, Lori speaking" until I was about 14? Yep.

Anyhoo, I have been working diligently to clean up my potty mouth. There is something that happens when your work environment = students saying "f*ck" "p*ssy" etc etc all day long. The words do really lose their shock value. Next thing you know, you can curse like a 14 year old from the worst projects in Brooklyn and YOU DO. Pretty funny when you're single and out drinking beer on a Friday night; not so funny when you have a parrot for a child.

While I have extracted many a bad word from my mouth, I still tend to take the Lord's name in vain (my poor mom...). "Jesus Christ!" is obviously still in my repetoire b/c this happened last night:

Alexandra was on the couch, and out of nowhere said, "Cheese is Christ!" I was bathing Nico and heard this and asked her to repeat it. Again, she said, "Cheese is Christ!" Adam and I were trying not to laugh, but it was hard. She has no idea who Jesus or Christ is, or that he's a person/prophet/messiah, or anything. Obviously, she thinks he's a type of cheese. And while we are big cheese people in this house, cheese has not yet reached messiah status (bacon is definitely above cheese in the running).

I stare at Adam in horror (as my mom is about to visit in one month) and say to Alexandra, "You mean, cheese and rice?" Oh no, she is not to be fooled. For the rest of the night she ran around screaming "Cheese is Christ!" over and over and over.

Guess I have some more work to do on that mouth of mine. Sigh.