Never Washed

Oh, I just keep getting better at this parenting thing.

It's dinner time one night last week, I think a soccer night, so the girls and I are bolting a pizza and E. isn't home yet.  The girls are giggling and acting like their usual uncivilized ape selves at the dinner table and Addie starts to talk about how she needs to pee out her butt.

1.  We don't allow potty talk at the table, but it happens.  Obviously.
2.  I got real concerned that she thinks pee comes out her butt.

So I got out this great book called The Way We Work.  I've kept this bad boy in the kitchen for years hoping the kids would say something anatomically incorrect and then we could pull it out and teach us all a little somethin' about the human body (myself included.  I have no idea where anything is).  But these kids never say anything interesting and so the thing has just gathered dust under the apple bowl.

Until now!  Gleefully, I whip that thing out and open it to this page:

The kids are looking at me pretty funny at this point and wondering why in the world I'm so excited about this topic and then I talk them through all the holes--the butt, the vagina, the urethra.  I hopefully make it clear which one the pee comes out of, though at this point the blank looks are really winding up.

I don't know what happened to me next but there's the picture of the guy and the penis right there so I just think to myself why not and we talk about how the man's pee gets from the bladder out the penis, and how daddy has a penis.

And then...you can see it coming can't you?...I just decide, what the hell.  It's Tuesday night and E. isn't here and we have five minutes until we have to be at soccer and Nolie is almost six so I'm just going to go ahead and do the birds and the bees.  Because that's how I roll, with lots and lots of forethought and consideration.

In my feverish state I decide to just go ahead and tell them that mommy is going to tell them how babies are made.  Addie all of a sudden gets interested and starts to tune in a little bit.  I continue:  "So, when a man and woman love each other, the man puts his penis in the woman's vagina!  See, there are these little things called sperm, like little fish, and they have to swim up into the eggs--remember how we talked about your eggs, Addie?--and they are going to go right up to those eggs and break on in and form a baby.  HOW ABOUT THAT, KIDS?!?"

Utter.  Pandemonium.  Pizza crusts everywhere.

Because WHY IN THE WORLD WOULD A PENIS GO IN A VAGINA.

Then silence.

THEN I go on to explain--and this is the real deal, friends--that mommy and daddy loved each other so much that they wanted to have some kids and so daddy put his penis in mommy's vagina.

No joke.  I said this.

Yes.  This is the worst birds and the bees talk ever.  Except for the ones that don't happen, of course.

More chaos.

Then silence.

Reflection.

Then Addie clasps her hands together, like Mary Pickford in one of D.W. Griffith's melodramas, and she bats her eyelashes, and she looks up at the ceiling and in her most sing-songy falsetto she says, "I bet you'll never wash your vagina again!"

And when E. came home a few minutes later, he was so excited to be asked if he had put his penis in my vagina.

The end.