Sounds like you'd save a lot of time if you just kept the jar in the car...

My nine-year-old son heard about the concept of the "cuss jar" and gleefully danced out one morning with one he'd rigged up himself. It has a sign on it and everything. He insists that we keep it out in the living room, so everyone can see just how evil I've been.

We keep having fights about what, exactly, qualifies as a finable offense. For instance, I had to take it to a higher court (my husband, who is reluctant to participate in this kind of debate) when my son insisted I had to shell out a quarter for referring to a bad driver as an ass. I did it in such a G-rated way, too! All I said as the guy careened by me after some scary tail-gating was (in a perfectly conversational tone, other than the last two words, which I belted out as if the guy could hear me), "Hey, I wonder if that guy's ever heard of Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night's Dream. You know, the one where one of the characters gets turned into an ass!” My son was completely offended. I thought it was hilarious. My husband refused to pass judgment, and I refused to pay.

But the worst cuss jar event was one morning a few weeks ago. We had run downstairs and out the front gate to the car with all our stuff for my son's French class. We were already running late. I had a headache. And thanks to the fact that my car is falling apart and I can't spend a penny on it just now, I have to have my sunglasses whenever I go driving because I don't have the driver's side sun visor any more. It just fell off one day, and I couldn't get it screwed back in. And I didn't have my sunglasses. They were out the garage door, through the gate, through the courtyard, up the stairs, and behind the double-locked front door. And we were going to be two minutes later than we already were. Damn it.  

I didn't just think it, either. I said it.  

"We have to go back up," I said to my son. "I have to get my sunglasses and put a quarter in the cuss jar."

Here's what freaked me out. My son, who wanted me to deposit a quarter for saying that someone was an idiot, said, "Don't worry, Mom. Damn isn't so bad."

So then I had to explain (like I wasn't having a bad enough morning) that as a matter of fact, "damn" is one of the baddies and I'd better not hear him saying it at the park unless he wanted CPS to come and find him a new mommy.

Okay, I've heard about GIRLS getting cycle-locked, but this is ridiculous!

My son was being snippy -- nothing really awful, but it was a day that I had already claimed as my personal property when it came to 'tude. After he gave a particularly saucy reply to a perfectly civil question, I snapped and said, "Okay, are you about to get your period, too?"

My husband gave me his patented "I don't live here, I don't even know these people" look and asked me if RBM was hurting for material today. "Not anymore," I said.