Boy Parts

When we were pregnant with our first baby, before we knew its gender and we still referred to it as the alien, for obvious reasons, my Beloved and I made an agreement that whatever parts the kid had, the parent with the same parts would have to have all future conversations and care taking of said parts. Notice I use the term parts here because before I had kids I rarely if ever said the clinical name for boy parts out loud. There were lots of euphemisms though. And then one day in Santiago, Chile, where we were living at the time, we saw our son's penis and testicles so clearly on the ultrasound that there was no doubt he was a boy. We were far from friends and family, before the world of Facebook, so I sent out a group email to tell the good news of our ultrasound. And then I spent a good ten minutes trying to figure out how to write what we saw. Do I just say he's a boy? Do I mention that we saw all his "junk". I am pretty sure that was the first time I wrote the word penis in an email or in writing ever!

Well since that time we have added to the penis count in our house and have had many penis related conversations:

Get your hands out of your pants!

Aim your penis INTO the toilet.

Bedrooms and bathrooms!

Go show your penis to your dad. I don't know what it is supposed to look like but it does seem red.

Recently we have had some new topics of discussion and they all seem to happen when my husband is traveling or at work. My favorite was when I was told recently, "Mommy, sometimes my penis gets stiff. Why?" Oh how I wished my husband was not in Florida at that moment.

I really want to help my boys develop a healthy understanding of their bodies. I want to be able to have open conversations with them when their hormones are raging which means I can't just tell him to wait until his father gets home in 4 days to talk to him about his penis being stiff. He was not asking for the entire sex talk in that moment. Penis for him does not mean sex at all. He just wanted to know why it gets stiff. My response seemed to satisfy him at the time. "I don't know but it does sometimes and it is totally normal. It happens to all boys. When Daddy gets home we can ask him about it more."

We also had a very amusing talk yesterday about what happens when your penis gets hit with a hockey puck. Middle Man is getting ready to start wearing full gear which means a hockey cup. He liked the shorts but wanted me to take the plastic piece out because it was uncomfortable. Thankfully Hockey Boy was right there to explain to his little brother the importance of the plastic piece. Turns out if you get hit with a hockey puck in the penis it might fall off and then you would die. I had to step in with a few corrections to this information explaining that if you got hit your penis might be damaged and it is an important part of a boy's body. There were a few more funny comments but I think I will keep those in the family.

I try to follow Dr. Phil's advice and answer only the question asked which is good advice because it keeps me from scarring my kids forever with too much information. My boys know that God makes babies and that they live inside their Mommy's uterus and that eventually they come out. Just recently they asked how and we got to have that lovely conversation. But thankfully they have yet to ask how the baby actually gets inside the Mommy.

Who knew how quickly I would go from being really modest and never saying the word penis to saying it way too often. I think I have written it at least a dozen times in this post alone. I wonder what this will do in google's search engine.