The Warrior and the Egg

Welp, as luck would have it, my sons were home alone with me when I received my “monthly bill”.  Normally, everything goes unnoticed by the boys, mainly because Ryan is able to distract them for a few hours.  But, on this particular day, I had an unfortunate amount of pain and still had to be able to function.  In the past, if they had noticed anything at all, I could get by with “my stomach hurts”. Then, as they got older, that would progress to “well, why don’t you just do like you tell us and just go poop?”  Eventually I had to tell them “my lady parts hurt” because they were starting to get the impression that Mom apparently has to crap all the time.  Not true.  So, I bit the bullet the other day, after frantically searching for my Extra Strength Midol, and attempted to explain why Mommy’s lady parts hurt.  I have to say, my boys are extremely smart and catch on very quickly.  It doesn’t take much effort on my part but I still try to play it down a little and take the Andy Griffith approach; that is, turning it into an action packed story with a clear plot that would entertain any young boy.  I’m a visual learner myself so, that’s usually the route I’ll take, along with my goofy story telling.  It works though.  After the school lesson was done, I realized that my sons must think that Mom’s uterus apparently looks like a sock puppet with antlers.  Oh well.

My sons learn best if I turn a life lesson into a mission/journey.  So, in this particular scenario, there is band of warriors (sperm) on a quest to find the sacred treasure (egg).  Many will start out but only one will succeed and the warrior must be very special in order to take the treasure.  Of course, our story HAS to be different because I had to explain why, in our case, we ended up with two valiant warriors.  I just said “something magical happened and you cloned yourselves”.  Totally pulled that one out of my ass. They did get a real kick out of realizing that only the strongest and fastest survive on the journey.  Everything was going good and I was really proud of all of us for staying mature.  We had a little hiccup when I told them that my ovaries were essentially the same as their testicles; that’s where all of our little mini me’s stay.  Apparently Nathan had a “EUREKA” moment because he said “Oh, that’s why ours are so wrinkly!”  After I was able to get my laughter back under control, we went over what the womb was for, what it does throughout the month and what happens if the warrior never finds the egg.  I got a few wide-eyed looks and some questions like “Are you ok?” and “do you have to use Band-Aids?” but we got through it.  At the end, I felt confident that we had gone over everything and I started to get up and put my diagram away and then…

Jake: “Oh, hey wait Mom…how do the warriors get in there?”

Mom: “That’s Part II and we’ll go over that when you’re 13!”