Reading: Stuart Little, which Daniel and I began today.

Grateful for: The spectacular beauty of today's dramatic sky: a crazy quilt of dark grey clouds lined with bands of gold and punctuated by ragged patches of cerulean blue.

Link of the Day: Perforated Lines. Nancy has a nimble mind and a lively, engaging style. I like her use of photographs and the way in which she can synthesize observations, memories, and ideas into a unified whole. I thought this entry about her mother's birthday was remarkable, both for what it said and for what it left unsaid.

Facts of Life

When the twins and I got back from the grocery store around lunchtime yesterday, I found a message on the answering machine from the director of Daniel's school. I called her back and learned that Daniel had a slightly elevated temperature of 100.4 (F). I wasn't really surprised. He'd had a cough this weekend, and that morning he was lethargic in the way that sick children can be. He had even fallen asleep in the car on the way to school. So I picked him up around 1 o'clock and brought him home, where he rested for awhile in his room and later on the couch, too weary even to pick fights with his brothers.

Exhibiting the astonishing resilience of the young, he is fine today, as energetic as ever with neither fever nor cough. Unfortunately, the policy at his school is that if a child goes home with a fever he is not allowed back to school for at least 24 hours. I'm sure it is a good rule, in general, but I wish there were some flexibility for these borderline cases. With the amount we pay for tuition, I hate for him to miss even a single day needlessly.

While he was home today, Daniel suddenly asked me, "If you and Daddy wanted to have another baby, how would you?"

"Well, for one thing, we aren't planning to have any more babies," I hedged.

"Yeah, but if you were," he pressed.

Daniel first asked me about the facts of life around ten or eleven months ago when the pre-K teacher at his school announced her pregnancy. He had already known that babies grew in their mothers' tummies, but suddenly he wanted to know how a baby got in there to begin with. To my utter surprise, I found myself embarrassed to answer that question when he asked last winter. I'm still not sure why I had trouble with it then. I had always intended to impart such information with forthright honesty. Instead, I gave him a vague answer about eggs and seeds, which confused him so much that he dropped the question, until now.

This time, however, I was prepared. After my abysmal failure the first time he asked, I hied myself to the bookstore and found an age-appropriate explanatory book, which I held in abeyance. So when he asked, I explained conception to him in simple terms, and then brought out the book.

"See, Dans, I have a book for you that explains the process. Do you want me to read it to you?"

"No, I'd rather read Stuart Little," he answered.

previous       index       e-mail me       next