New Year. New Parenting Tale. What Do you Know About China?

I celebrated my 7th year blog anniversary this week. When I first started this blog in January 2011,  I wrote an online parenting column for the News and Observer. As a result, I wrote a lot about life as a parent and the challenges (good and bad) that I faced being an older mom with two small children. I have some of those stories archived in my parenting tab for my writing portfolio.

However, when both of my children entered elementary school, I no longer wrote about the kids as much here. There were many reasons I did that with one of them being the fact that they were old enough to find and read my blog.

Yesterday, I went through some of my old content and realized that a lot of these stories are priceless to me as a Mom and my collection makes me remember all the times that busy parents sometimes forget when children age. Liza just turned 8 and Jack turned 12 last week. Some stories need remembering. This morning, I thought of a tale I wanted to preserve and so this story begins.


When my children were little, I decided to be very scientific when referring to body parts. I grew up thinking my vagina was called "pooh-pooh"  As stupid as it sounds, it was a fact.  It was just a different time back then. No one said the words vagina or penis. It was not proper to even talk like that. That was private part talk and just something frowned upon.

But when I realized my children became the age where I needed to speak about body parts to them, I intentionally set the stage where my children were not going to call their private parts a wee-wee, ding-dong, pee-pee or pooh-pooh. They were going to call their private parts by their real names.

As a result, the words vagina and penis were about as common as the words TV and remote control in my household. They were not considered taboo and only did my son want to abuse the word penis. He, like many of his peers of the same sex, find the word funny.  I use the present tense here because I'm not totally convinced my son's grown out of it yet.

My daughter, on the other hand, did not abuse the use of the word and was quite proud of herself for being so knowledgeable.

When she was about three or perhaps four, we were at an annual family gathering out of town. Liza and another young cousin were sitting in the lap of a family-in-law member.  They were carrying on conversation and Liza was telling him lots. No one could really hear, but all the sudden the family member asked Liza,

"China. What do you know about China?'

Liza looked at him strangely and said matter of factly, "No, not China. I said I have a vagina!" 

Let's just say the cousin ended that conversation quite quickly.

But, the vagina talk doesn't end there.

Every summer we go to Asheville, North Carolina. It's a long drive from Raleigh. Will and I do not like to stop often. Jack was already at camp so on this car ride, it was just my daughter and us.  We were making some decent time and had arrived right outside of Asheville.

All the sudden, Liza spoke from the backseat and said seriously.

"You better stop soon because this vagina is about to blow."

Needless to say, we stopped as soon as we could.

I have more stories about Asheville which I'll share later this year.
Til next time....I'm off for a cup of tea.