Dinnertime

"Look! My boobies are poking out!"

Full stop mid-dinner. Did my small, innocent, boy child just say what I think he said?

"Look, Mommie, look! [He gestures toward his bowed-out chest, bare at the table for some reason I have yet to hear and don't remember approving.] My boobies are getting bigger!"

There's a pause, as neither parent quite knows what to say. I flinch first.

"Honey, little kids don't have those. And boys don't really grow... um... boobies. You have a chest. That's what we call it. Only grown-up girls have chests that stick out, and we try not to use that other word, remember?"

"But I do have them! Look!" [He pinches a tiny boy nipple.] "Little kids have boobies that stick out when they fill them up with food. Look at mine! They're poking out!
Yum, yum! I am SOOO full!"

OH. MY. And what could we have said to that? As best I recall (this was last night, but the old gray brain just ain't what it used to be...), we nodded and resumed adult conversation. There might have been a brief tittering before we pulled it together, but no out and out laughter. (I CANNOT, in good faith, laugh at anything that encourages a 3-year-old to use the word "boobie.")

Do the parents of infants have ANY idea what they're getting into? The parents of boy infants, especially? Maybe other people do -- but we simply didn't know. We did not.

...And thank God for surprises! (It WAS funny, the whole posturing to best show off the after-eating "boobies"....)

We're switching to a shirt-mandatory policy for mealtimes at Sherry Lane. It won't keep Miles from showing off some OTHER bit of body or vocabulary we'd rather he not take public, but it will help me not crack up every time I see him rub his chest and hear him say, "Yum! Yum! I am SOOO full!"