Penithes and 'Gina

Parenting blogs bring back tons of memories. I love the ones who are absolutely positive their parenting methods are the only ways that work.

I’m not sure I have a parenting method. It’s trial and error, tailor-made to each kid. It’s not the most effective method, either, or I’m sure I’d go shopping with little robots, tallest to shortest, in a nice duckling row. For my leash diatribe, see here.

Tonight’s advice I saw was, “Teach your kids the proper names of their private parts.” I took this advice to heart once. In nursing school, one of my instructors made a lot of sense. If the kid has his own pet name for his privates, who’s going to know if it hurts?

My eldest was two. Hello. Two-year-olds point. If they’re not old enough to point, then they’re not old enough to talk either, but I thought being an instructor made you closer to God or something, so I instructed Tiger’s Eye on the “correct” terminology for his parts, and the corresponding girl parts, because, of course, I had KitKat by then and he’d already noticed the difference.

Wait...funny break...Tiger’s Eye discovered himself and did his first somersault in the same minute. It cracks me up to this day. What’s this? Roll down the hallway.

He had it down. “Penithes and ‘gina.” He understood. We’re good, right?

Next day, we had dinner at my parents’ house. My grandmother and Pop were there. Somewhere during the roast beef being served, Tiger’s Eye announced that:

“Boys have penithes and girls have ‘gina.”

Pop’s deaf, or darn near. I dodged the bullet there. My grandmother, however, came and left the world with every single faculty God gave her. Engrossed in conversation and maintaining the proper food passing pattern, however, she missed him.

“Josh boy. Josh have penith. Mom girl. Mom has ‘gina. Dad boy. Dad has penith.”

He was going around the table! And pointing!

“Grandmom?” He paused.

He spoke her name. Of course she heard him. My sisters had already noticed his designation of us all, and I could barely breathe. My grandmother, a great benefactress, stalwart Christian, and very nice individual, was about to be told she had...

“Do you have ‘gina?” Tiger’s Eye asked.

“Yes, dear, I have china.” She looked quite puzzled. “I keep it in the china cabinet.”

She hadn’t heard the rest! Tiger’s Eye, confounded, looked down, trying to figure out how the heck she kept her vagina in a cabinet, but it shut him up and for that I will be eternally grateful.

Lessons learned:
*When a parent puts emphasis on something, the kid knows it’s important and remember. This is good. You can talk and think they don’t hear, but they do.
*If a kid can speak, he/she can also point, and a proper label is unnecessary when an index finger will do nicely, thank you very much.
*Moms can hold their breaths for an eternity. The same goes for bladders, but that’s not in the context of the story.
*Little blond two-year-olds are parrots and sponges. Never, ever forget this. Another rule that goes hand in hand with this would be, “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.”

So, progressive parents, do what you want. If he’d remembered the cabinet quandary, it would have been very, very fun explaining to him how to get that up in a cabinet and keep it there. I think I would have used a denture analogy. Hey, he was two. I had the girls believing they weren’t going to grow much more and they weren’t human, they were elves. They had the ears for it.