I need to stop giving my kid honest answers to every question he asks. We've been enjoying a short and silly on-line game together, and in the first real puzzle screen you have to figure out that Mr. Hash Pipe needs to smoke up all his hashish so that you can use the pipe as a key. A little while ago, Eric found a tool associated with our fireplace (it's for taking the faceplate off), and after using it for many purposes, including converting saltines into wheat thins (which he prefers but which we are out of) by smashing them into smaller pieces on the living room rug, he starting puffing on it. "I'm smoking hashish!" he announced cheerfully, making me regret not only that I had been honest about "what's that guy doing?" but also making me wonder if my answer to the follow-up question ("What's hashish?") might not have been better-thought-out ("It's a drug that people smoke because they like the way it makes them feel." Somehow I couldn't make a logical connection from there to "but it's bad," so I stopped there. Bad mom, bad mom, bad mom.)
The saltine incident was one of those unfortunate things that can happen when a child is playing so quietly you forget that "quietly" doesn't necessarily mean "appropriately." Later, I discovered that, instead of munching down the pasta he had requested for lunch, he was feeding it to a teddy bear. His dad's teddy bear, to be precise. Pasta everywhere. Intermixed, it turned out, with plastic food from his toy box.
A mothering magazine I read recently did a reader poll about "your one most essential piece of parenting equipment." I couldn't think of one, but now I realize I know my answer: a dog. To clean up both the saltines and the pasta all I had to do was open the door and let the dogs in. I don't know what people with small children and dog allergies do. Though perhaps some of them are simply better housekeepers than I am, which wouldn't be hard.
Yesterday, as I was dressing Eric, he had a few things to say about his penis (mostly, "That's my penis!") I suddenly felt inadequate because some of his little friends also know "testicles" and he doesn't. So I said, impulsively, "Yes, and those are your testicles!"
Again, I should have anticipated the follow-through: "What do my testicles do?"
All I could think of was sperm production, and it just seems a bit early to talk about that. So I sputtered and stumbled and finally said, "Let's ask your daddy when we see him later."
David, bless him, had a good answer handy: "They make chemicals that your body needs." If it weren't for him, who knows what damage I'd be doing to the poor kid these days.
Posted by Su Penn at February 11, 2004 01:49 PM | TrackBack