...And Keep Your Hands To Yourself

I’m just going to come right out and say it.

What is up with little boys and their winkies? 

No.  Seriously.  My son’s obsession with boogies and picking his nose has waned and his new obsession has proven infinitely more entertaining to him and, though I didn’t think it was possible, even more embarrassing to me.  A couple of weeks ago while I was on the phone with my sister I heard him say, “Oh, it fits!”  That’s never a good thing to hear when your back is turned, as moms know all too well that “it” could be a number of things fitting into a number of orifices: bean in the nose, pencil in the ear, or anything from the floor in the mouth.  I looked over from where I stood in the kitchen. (Why do these things always happen when I’m on the phone?)  My son had pulled down his underwear and his pull-up and all I could see was his naked lower half.  He stood with his butt cheeks clenched as he pushed out his pelvis, all the while trying to slide a small play-dough tube over his, well, you know.  “No don’t put that on your winky!” I screamed in a panic.  My mind flashed forward to trying to explain this to an ER doctor:  “I’m sorry but we need one who specializes in winky tube removals.”  I said to my sister, “I gotta go,” to which she replied over her uproarious laughter, “Yeah, they never grow out of that by the way.”

I can’t help but think that this is all my fault.  Up until we started potty training he hadn’t paid much attention to the thing.  We’d strip him down before a bath and let him run around naked, thinking it was a healthy expression of his natural state of being. In fact, it took him a while to actually run naked.  For the longest time he walked bow legged throughout the house, knowing something was down there but not fully understanding the what or the why of it.  That was a hilarious, innocent time in his and my life.  But as we all know, a boy can’t stay in diapers forever and it was unavoidably time to go tinkle in the big boy potty.  It seemed like all it took was for the underwear to come off and a downward glance and poof, the world made sense.  When he was in diapers he only reached down to touch it occasionally as we changed or bathed him.  He had no idea what it was actually capable of doing.  Then all of a sudden he was being told to pay attention to it, nay, to focus intently on it and, oh boy, point it at something.  It was like he discovered a new playground at the end of our street.  Now the boy is constantly touching it, pulling it, opening his shorts to look at it, even bragging about it, “Look at my big winky mama!”  (He doesn’t suffer from any confidence issues, to be sure.)  I’d like to share in his enthusiasm over his newfound thingy, but because I don’t have one myself, I really don’t see what all the fuss is about.  I pretty much feel about those things the way I do about the telephone poles in my backyard; I understand their purpose and I would like for them to work properly, but I don’t want to stand around and look at them all day. “Yes, baby, you tinkle out of there,” is all I can say in response to him, and then offer a distraction, “Look!  A bird!”  

Please God, let’s go back to the nose picking phase.  I’ll take big boogies over this any day. 

Are all boys like this?  (Yes.)

Downtown at the City Garden as I was changing my son out of his swim shorts into some dry pants in front of God and the AT&T building, he looked down and said in a loud voice, “Hey, where’s my winky?”  I said, “Shhh!” which we all know works great when I’m trying to get him to be quiet.  He said it louder and with more punctuation.  “WHERE’S.  MY.  WINKY.  MAMA?”  I tried to explain to him quietly that it was just cold but he wasn’t buying it.  “But it’s hot mama.”  I couldn’t disagree.  Come on guys.  I didn’t sign up for this.  I’d like to have a “pass” option and field all of these types of questions to my husband.  Although, I wonder how mature that conversation would be since the man tells my son to “shake the dew off the lily” after each tinkle.  When the hubby is not around it’s totally up to me to explain these manly things.  Grasping at straws, since “it’s cold” wasn’t an acceptable answer, I followed up with, “It’s like a turtle.  It will come out again when it feels safe.”  Thank God that he quickly forgot about that analogy because I don’t want him calling the thing a turtle.  Winky is bad enough.  Turtle will for sure get him beat up in high school.

You guys, I have never in my life talked about winkies this much.  I'm going a little nuts.  (Pardon the expression.)  I’m so sick of them.  I wish I could go back in time and tell the misogynist Sigmund Freud that, uh, yeah right.  There are people who suffer from “you know what” envy and guess what?  Those people ain’t women. 

Or as Elaine from Seinfeld put it, "I don't know how you guys walk around with those things."

This may seem like inappropriate talk or taboo subject matter to you but it’s my life.  God help me if I have more boys.  Please don’t stop reading my blog.  I promise to not write about winkies ever again.  I don’t mean to offend your delicate boundaries or your moral sensibilities, I just need to talk to someone about this.  We never, ever, talked about our private parts growing up.  Remember, my mother’s disapproval of all anatomically correct language forced me to come up with substitutes like “cookie” and “winky” in the first place.  The woman called everything, front and back, a “bottom.”  I never understood what, or where, she was talking about.  This is why she nearly had a heart attack when we were at an all-you-can-eat-pizza buffet and I gave my son a small ice cream cone for dessert and he said, “Grandma, my winky looks like an ice cream cone!”  Heck, she’d have a heart attack if she read this.

I don’t want to shut down my son because I’m overly sensitive about stuff down there, but how do I get him to stop already?  Once again I’m forced to walk a fine line of discipline.  Encourage a healthy appreciation for Mr. Johnson but not a clingy, stalker like obsession with it.  Make sure he knows that it’s okay to talk about it but let’s be careful to pick our time and place.  (Like, a blog that all of your friends from church can read, perhaps?)  I think I’ll have to be as delicate as I can with this one.  No overreacting but no giggling either, which will be and has been difficult for me.  Every time I tell him to “keep your hands to yourself” I cringe…and then smile.  And I have a sneaky suspicion that while you might not admit it, you've probably done the same thing. 

'Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy

I’ve spent every day for three years now with my son.  I don’t care who you are, if your child is your pride and joy and your only reason for living in this world, or if you’re one of those mothers who can’t stand the sight of her own children, that is a heck of a long time to be around someone.  But I love him so much that it makes the whole joined-at-the-hip thing pretty tolerable.  In fact, his little idiosyncrasies have grown on me.  Most of my complaints, if I would call them ‘complaints’, are the usual mommy grumbles: He won’t eat his vegetables, he doesn’t listen to me all of the time, he throws fits when he doesn’t get his way.  You know, the normal day to day stuff of raising any preschooler.  He provides me with more entertainment than annoyances, usually.  I don’t mind that he wants to put the Barney DVD on repeat and watch the thing half a dozen times.  And sure, he loves to listen to the same song in the car five times in a row.   He sings one song so much that I’ve woken up from a deep sleep singing it.  He even knows what number the song is on the CD player, “Play number 8 mama.”  I admit, there are times that I do get a little sick of the song but all in all, I appreciate his consistency.  The kid knows what he likes. 

My son, as you probably know by now, is a bit more precocious than the average boy.  He sings.  He dances.  He brings his own microphone to our church worship service.  He loves to bang out rhythms on coffee cans, buckets, the backs of chairs; anything that could be a make-shift drum.  Needless to say he loves music and probably has more rhythm than most other white toddlers that I know.  The next Justin Bieber?  Maybe.  He knows more song lyrics than my husband does, but that’s not saying much.  My husband unintentionally figured out one of my biggest pet peeves a long time ago and since then, anytime we are in the car it seems like he goes out of his way to do the third worst thing a person can do to irritate the heck out of me.  Honestly, I don’t know if he can help it, because he has a pretty terrible memory for someone who designs databases for a living.  My rule is, and always has been, this: if I don’t know the correct song lyrics, I won’t sing along.  Sometimes I think my husband goes out of his way to sing incorrect lyrics and in doing so, inflicts a torture on my ears similar to that of listening to Christina Aguilera sing the National Anthem.  Because he doesn’t just sing the wrong lyrics, no, he sings them at the top of his lungs.  He sings over what I’m singing which are usually the correct lyrics.  He won’t stop until I call him out on it, which I do every time this happens and believe me, it’s quite often.  “It’s not ‘Above the fruit and grain.’  It’s ‘Above the fruited plain.’”  I mean, come on, “America the Beautiful.”  Even the dumbest American knows that one.  At least sing "Something something plain," if you don't know it.  "Something," to me, is a more respectable alternative because it at least indicates a playful self awareness.

Don’t judge me.  We all have our limits.  I can’t tell you how much this thing bothers me.  I’m weird like that.  Curse at me.  Call me ugly.  Give me dirty looks.  I can handle it.  But whatever you do, don’t sing the wrong lyrics.

My son has picked up this terrible habit.  Like I said, I can stand a lot of his little quirks but this, I just don’t know.  His childish vocabulary and a lingering mush mouth make for some interesting song lyric interpretations.  I try my best to get his attention and gently correct his mistakes, but it’s just more fun for him to mess up the lyrics, just like his dada.  For instance, a song that we sing at church that goes, “For the King has carried the cross, He is risen from the grave,” sounds like “For the key was carried to gob, he is ridden from the gay.”  Yeah, it’s all kinds of wrong.

For being as uptight as I clearly am on this subject, I'm not fundamentally opposed to the hilarious misheard song lyric every now and then.  A woman I used to work with swore that the lyrics to “How Will I Know” by Whitney Houston were “I’m asking you cause you know about feet stink.”  She’s the same person I got into a week long argument over whether Wham’s “Careless Whisper” was “Guilty feet have got no rhythm” or “These two feet have got no rhythm.”  I won, by the way, because the lyrics are totally “Guilty feet have got no rhythm.”  I take song lyrics seriously, which is why I posted large signs all over her desk that said “GUILTY FEET.”  She was still finding them a month later.  I’m also not above mishearing certain lyrics myself.  I’ve had my own slip ups but I’m pretty resourceful when it comes to finding out the actual words to any given song.  And once again I have to apologize, because all of my song references are, of course, from my favorite decade.  My top misheard lyrics include the Petshop Boys, “In a Western Town with denim walls, the Eastern boys and Western girls,” and Paul Young’s, “Every Time you go away…you take a piece of meat with you,” and mine and everyone else’s favorite Manfred Mann tune, “Wrapped up like a douche another rumor in the night.”  These are funny misheard song lyrics that I will only sing out loud to be ironic.  Only for a short time did I believe these to be the actual words to the songs.  For about a second, I thought that the opening line to Billy Ocean’s “Caribbean Queen” went, “She Dutched by me and blamed it on James,” (Actual lyrics: “She touched by me in painted on jeans.”) or that the chorus to Toto’s “Africa” went, “I Dutched the rains down in Africa.”  (Heck, I don’t even know what the actual lyrics are to “Africa” and I’m pretty sure nobody else does either.) Was it possible that sometime in my youth I thought that the Netherlands had invaded 80’s Pop?  How did I make an entire race of people a verb?  Trust me, once the 90's came around and I explored the World Wide Web, I found the correct lyrics to each one of those songs so that I and those I cared about would no longer make those embarrassing mistakes.

(I invite you now to take a few minutes to look up those two songs on YouTube.  Listen.  It really does sound like "Dutched." Go ahead.  I'll wait.)

Ask my husband, I’m a bit OCD when it comes to lyrics.  That, thank the Lord, might be the only thing I’m obsessive compulsive about.  It’s because I believe that the writers of these songs took great pains to write them.  I would hate for someone to call my website “Confessions of a Staid Gnome Mom.”  Call me crazy for respecting the original intent of the written and sung word.  I know not all song lyrics are poetry and more often than not, the actual song lyrics don’t make much more sense than the made up ones.  Surely Jimi Hendrix did not mean to infer that he dabbled in the love that dare not speak its name when he penned one of his most famous songs.  Thousands of people all over the world have gotten it wrong for decades now because they didn’t have mothers who were obsessive about correct song lyrics.  But my son will be different, my son will know.  Someday I’ll explain everything to him.  I’ll teach him the things that really matter in life.  And hopefully he will go on to tell others, or at least his someday-wife, “No honey, it’s ‘Excuse me while I kiss the sky.’” 

Then my work will not have been in vain.