When Ben was about two and a half he still took baths with his older sister. As I was watching them I noticed Ben staring at the obvious difference in anatomy between them. I couldn’t resist and asked him
“What you looking at Ben?”
With a concerned look he pointed at his sister’s lack of one of his favorite toys, the “PeePee”.
He asked “what happened to her?” I thoroughly blame the great comedian Bill Cosby for this as I replied
“Oh, that, well, she played with hers and it fell off.”
His look of shock and horror was priceless. I’m a bad dad. A very, very, bad dad.
One day I was out in the garage, trying to make a semblance of order out of the debris of life that usually ends up in the garage when you can’t find anyplace else to put it. On this occasion, as I was working, I could swear I could smell smoke. Looking around I noticed that my new work lights were facing right next to the wall. Sure enough, they were on. Two 500 watt halogen lights face first against plywood siding. No wonder I could smell smoke! After I turned them off and unplugged them to assure no further risk to my homeowners insurance I went into the house to question the children as to how this happened. After assembling the motley crew and lining them up by size, I proceeded with the questioning.
“Who was playing with my new work lights in the garage?”
Silence, accompanied by four pairs of eyes staring straight ahead, was the answer. This is standard kid behavior, say nothing and stare straight ahead until you find out what he knows.
“Well?” the interrogator asked, “Who was it? You know you could have burned the garage down?”
I still got nothing but silence and blank stares off into oblivion. I studied each face closely but they maintained their statue like poise.
“Rats!” I thought to myself, “They’re getting good at this, time for another tactic”.
“Ok” I said, “must have been someone else.”
As I walked out of the room, in my peripheral vision, which is an acquired talent of all parents, I noticed the looks of disbelief from my children. They were thinking
“He’s given up! He must be getting old.”
I had my suspicions as to the guilty party as the garage was the favorite haunt of Benjamin.
It was several weeks later that during a trip home from the local Blockbuster with a movie and a game rental I casually asked Ben
“So, were you just curious as to how bright the work lights were in the garage?”
“Yeah”, he replied “They sure are bright”.
I nodded in agreement and remained silent while I observed my son sitting next to me in the car reminiscing on the dazzling display of light as a look of concern slowly came across his face. As I get older I just love the things you learn. Patience and a long memory are two of those things.
Silence is dangerous when children are concerned. Give me a houseful of noise and I’ll show you relaxed parents. Any length of silence is concerning, especially when you have one of the kids in the bathtub. A standing rule in our home was that the bathroom door was never to be locked when the occupant was less that 5’ tall and not of drinking age. My sister in law is the exception, but the she is a free spirit and never locks the door anyway, we‘re fortunate if she closes the door at all. This time it was Ben in the bath. I noticed that the usual noise had ceased emanating from the bathroom and I grew concerned. Not that I was actually concerned with the boy’s well being as I had already come to the conclusion that this boy was nearly indestructible and his last words would be ,
“Hey everybody, watch this!”
My concern was for the bathroom. Surly this silence did not bode well for the fixtures. I crept up to the bathroom door and opened it suddenly to reveal my eight year old son standing bent over on the vanity closely examining in the mirror the spot on his backside that is used for the exit of all things stinky. I was delighted, he was mortified.
“What are you doing?” I calmly asked.
With a shocked look he replied “Jumping”.
“Jumping?” I repeated “Jumping where?” His reply was pure Ben.
“The tub, I was trying to jump from here to the tub”
It was the best thing he could come up with that sounded reasonable to him. I smiled again and said
“Stop jumping and get back into the tub, by the way, you know if you put your butt up to the mirror you can get stuck there. It’s like a big suction cup.”
A look of horror came over him. I wonder if Angie has ever had to clean off strange round 8 year old suction cup sized marks from the mirror.
When our first child, Marisa, was 3 years old we were attending a district convention of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Reno, Nevada. I was standing in line at lunch time to get some food and was holding my little daughter in my arms. As all little children at that age she was always asking
“Daddy, what’s that?”
So when the familiar question came out I causally looked around to see what had caught her interest. To my horror I saw that she was pointing to the black man standing in line behind us. He had an amused look on his face and I could tell by his slight smile and beaming eyes he was anxious to see how I was going to answer my little girl. I apologized to the man and explained that while we did live in Idaho, we were not the foaming at the mouth racist types. It was just that he was the first black man she had ever seen. He quickly broke into a big grin and extended the bare skin on the back of his hand to my daughter and said
“Its real honey, see? It won’t rub off.”
She tentatively extended her little hand out and gave the back of his hand a vigorous rub then looked at her fingers with amazement.
”Wow!” she exclaimed while holding out her little pink fingers to me “he’s right daddy, Look!”
Marisa’s curiosity continued to be a source of delight in our home. One year, when she was about 9 years old, we had a friend named Bubba who was a painter. We had hired him to paint our home and Marisa was watching him as he was working on the garage wall in the backyard. You could best get an idea of what Bubba looked like if you imagined and old Hell’s Angel biker with a fondness for beer, lot’s and lot’s of beer. Let’s just say that Bubba hasn’t seen his feet for a while. Due to Bubba’s large overhang I don’t think he was able to maneuver a belt through his pant loops as, on this day, it was painfully made clear. Marisa called out to her mother
“Hey Mommy, what is that big line going up Bubba’s back?”
Ashley, our third child, was also very inquisitive. She had an older woman that she called on in our family ministry. Being Jehovah’s Witnesses, our entire family participates in the door to door ministry that Witnesses are so well known for. After several months of calling on this woman Ashley went to the door as usual with one of her siblings and came back to inform us that the nice lady was ill and away at the doctor’s.
“Oh,” her mother asked “did her husband tell you what was wrong with her?”
“I don’t know” she replied “he said that there was something wrong with her eyes.”
Her mother continued the questioning out of concern for the poor woman. “Do you remember what he called it?” she asked Ashley.
“It started with the letter G “she said “Oh yeah, I remember! Gonorrhea!”
It seems that the age of three is the most curious age as my youngest son, Tristan, proved to us during a visit to Disneyland with my brother and his wife, Tammy. We were standing in one of the stores when Tammy noticed Tristan leaning down from his stroller trying to look up her shorts.
“What are you doing Tristan?” she asked him.
“Just trying to look up your shorts Aunt Tammy” he casually replied. She looked at me and I just shrugged and kept walking. We learned not long after that to not let him near the mannequins in the dress shops either. To our relief he grew out of that stage quickly.
The most famous question asked by our children at that wonderful age of three came from Benjamin. We were again at Disneyland with another couple, Paul and Michelle, who did not yet know the joys of having children. Our hotel rooms were connecting and they offered to have the kids sleep over in their room to give us a night of privacy. We, of course, thought that was a great idea as were not even sure how to spell that word anymore, let alone actually have it. About fifteen minutes later there was a polite knock on the adjoining doors. When I answered it Michelle was standing there with a big grin on her face and tears in her eyes.
“I’m sorry to disturb you two,” she whispered “but I just had to share with you what your son just said to me”.
Thoughts of all the skeletons in the family closet running amuck and making a mass escape flooded my mind.
“Oh,” I replied, with great dread, “what did Ben say?”
“Well,” Michelle continued happily “I was taking him to the bathroom to go pee and he pointed to his little wee wee and asked me if I knew what that was? Before I could think of an appropriate answer he informed me rather proudly
““This is my penis! Do you like it?” “
I told him it was very nice and he replied
““Yep! And one day it’s going to be big, like my daddy’s!””
The only justice in this world I have found is that your children will one day have children of their own. Then they can experience all the joy, mixed with embarrassment, that our children gave to us.
Benjamin is our first offspring to procreate. His son’s name is Hayden. Ben related an experience that he had in the shower with his son at the age of two. Ben said that Hayden had a plastic cup that he was playing with and Ben noticed that he would fill it up and giggle madly as he poured it out all over anything he could find. At first he didn’t pay any attention to him until he starting thinking
“How is he filling his cup up so fast?”
When he stopped to really observe his son he found that Hayden was using the nearest outcropping on his father’s body that happened to be conveniently eye level with him and was filling his cup from the water running off of it. Needless to say he quickly put an end to the “fill the cup from daddy’s downspout game”. God is good, yes he is very, very good.
To this day, Hayden is still voicing his observations. Recently he was in the bedroom with his grandma when she was changing her clothes. She didn’t think he was at an age to notice anything until she was stripped down and he looked at her and said
“Eewww Yuck!”
Grandma now does her clothes changing privately, thank you.