Chickenbutt

Sam called me a chickenbutt the other day.

It came out of nowhere. It was a word I'd never heard her use before. And I was suddenly caught in a discipline area I didn't expect to hit for at least another year or so.

The story starts when I was trying to get Sam dressed to go to day care. She goes for about five hours a day, and she loves it. She calls it "going to see my friends."

In the last couple of months, she has become a champion dawdler. What used to take her five seconds to do now takes almost a minute. Just making it out of her room, down the stairs and into the kitchen -- roughly a seven-second trip for the average short-legged person -- can last for minutes.

Anyway, she was dawdling, and I was trying to get her to move faster.

Me: "C'mon, Sam. Please go get your shoes from your room while I get dressed."

Sam (continuing to make a stuffed bear dance on my bed): "OK."

Me: "NOW, Sam."

Sam: "Mommy, you're a chickenbutt."

I almost burst out laughing. Hearing the word "chickenbutt" in her cute little 3-year-old voice is, to be honest, pretty funny. It just sounds so wrong.

But then I remembered the big reaction I had the first time I heard her do an impression of her daddy hammering a nail, which included a swear word at the end. Thanks in part to my major reaction to that, it took us weeks to get her to stop.

So I very calmly turned away, hiding the smile on my face, and said, "That's not a nice thing to say at all. That hurts my feelings. Where did you learn that word?"

Sam: "I just sayed it."

Me: "Did one of your friends at day care say that word?"

Sam: "No. I just sayed it."

Can she possibly be able to put "chicken" and "butt" together on her own to make an insult? If so, I feel like I'm falling down on the job here.

How do you feel about name-calling? Is it something you allow your kids to do? Why or why not?