A Three Year Old...

Anna is quickly becoming a three year old.  By that I mean, well, uncensored and lacking a brain filter.  Yesterday we were at Target.  I was standing with Nana as she looked at some things and Anna was standing next to me...not in the cart.  I noticed that she noticed a man and a woman walking towards us far down one of the big center isles.  The man had an eye patch.  A, for real, eye patch.  You know the ones... His was black.  I could see out of the corner of my eye that they were closing in on us as I watched Anna's every move.  As soon as I saw that she was about to raise her arm over her head and point at the man with her index finger just as he passed us, I swooped down and covered her mouth as tight as I could while still allowing air to enter and escape her nose.  A very loud, but very muffled, "MOMMY, THAT MAN IS A PIRATE!!" came out of her mouth.  The man was intense in his conversation with the woman he was with, but passed by us so closely that I felt my hair move as he walked by.  I thought, "Phew!", and I'm sure he gets that all the time from other toddlers.  I'm sure he either saw me cover her mouth and/or heard her muffled observation.  

Still, there's no way I will be able to watch that closely and be able to cover her mouth when she says whatever comes into her mind all the time.  I've tried to tell her that if she needs to tell me something about something or someone she sees, then it needs to be in her quiet voice.  I don't want to teach her to talk about people behind their back, but I also don't want her to yell something that's incredibly hurtful and her not even realize it.

(Anna didn't draw this pirate picture, got it off of google images.)