Your Mommy doesn't have a WHAT?????

My eldest son learned to talk at a very early age. He was using complete, grammatically correct sentences before he was 18 months old, which, I must admit, was pretty funny when watching the reactions he would get from strangers. His vocabulary was enormous and his pronunciation was impeccable. He did, however, have days when his tremendous fluent abilities would cause me all sorts of undue embarrassment, totally unbeknown to him.

For example, he would have, what my WonderHubby and I would refer to as "The Letter of the Day" days. Now, these were days when he would select a given letter and every single word he said would begin with that letter. He started this somewhere around 15 months or so. A psychologist friend of mine was astounded that he had the ability to do this, as this required quite advanced thinking and skill, things not generally found in someone quite so young. In general, The Letter of the Day days were pretty interesting to observe, and rather amusing at the creative words he would come up with. There were, however......exceptions. These would be letters like B, or God forbid, F.

In the middle of the grocery store he announced at the top of his lungs just how ITCHY he was, which, of course, came out as BITCHY. The little white haired ladies and the other young mothers would look at me in disgust that this sweet child would be uttering such a repulsive word. But, F....F was absolutely worse. You simply cannot imagine how many TRUCKS and DUCKS we would find on F-day. "Mommy, Mommy, look at the f***!!!", he would YELL excitedly. We would find them in stores, in parks, always in public places where every adult present would look at me in abject horror to hear the f-bomb being dropped by a toddler. After a while, I merely became immune to the looks.

We were never parents to lie to our son about the names of his body parts. His penis was his penis. Not a willy, not a pee-pee, not a jigger, a penis. He would bathe with my husband sometimes, but, at this point, we already knew that this child was a little too smart for his own good, so he didn't bathe with me anymore. So, he knew that Daddy had a penis too, like him, and one day he asked if I had one too, and I told him no. He didn't ask any other questions so we left it at that. Never tell a child more information than they ask for. Topic closed...or so I thought.

One day we went to the grocery store and we're in the check out line, I'm filling out my check, he's flirting with the check out lady and all of a sudden he blurts out in that loud baby voice of his "Mommy has NO penis!" You could have heard a pin drop in the entire store. The check out lady looked at me horrified, I turned about 15 shades of purple, my son started singing "Mommy has NO penis!" over and over like a new song. I gathered up my groceries as quickly as I could and RAN out of the store.

From then on, my son used that expression as a sort of "Greeting" whenever we went anywhere. He told everyone. Bank tellers, gas station attendants, convenience store clerks, strangers who just happened to stop to talk to him, EVERYONE. The conversations would go something like this:

"My, aren't you a hansome little guy!"
"Mommy has NO penis"
Person looking to me in shock, and quick end to conversation with me purple and running out of wherever I was.

Finally, I just more or less, gave up. I realized he was going to do this to me forever and I might as well just accept it.

One day, I think went to get a slice of pizza for lunch. I ordered the pizza, the girl told him how handsome he was, and out came the the proverbial, "Mommy has NO penis!" The girl looked at me with that same look I'd seen a hundred times or so by now, and I just looked back at her and shrugged and said back to her, "Well, I don't!" This, for some reason, embarrassed HER and she quickly turned around to find something else to do. Like find our pizza.

Out of the mouths of babes.