The Birds and the Bees

I've been suffering from horrible pregnancy insomnia. I'm up all night and exhausted all day. Sounds like I should have a spotless house and a blog filled with daily, perhaps even thrice daily posts. But, as anyone who's suffered insomnia can tell you, I'm awake all night, but hardly able to move from exhaustion. Same thing goes for the daytime, except I must move to care for the beasts. I even tried drinking a half a glass of red wine the other day to get sleep. Nada. Of course, I don't know what I thought I would accomplish with half a damn glass.

Anyway, that's what's been going on this week. That and Reilly Kate started her first week of her second year of 4 year old preschool. The poor kid. I feel so bad for her about this Kindergarten shit. But she's okay with it since she feels like she's getting the best of both worlds: homeschool Kindergarten in the morning, and preschool at the Mustard Seed in the afternoon. The first day her teacher dragged me aside to tell me that "she is very, very smart." Mmmm hmmm, was all I could muster. "She's very advanced for this class." At which point I wanted to drag her happy fucking ass from the preschool over to the dumbshit administrator at the elementary school who assured me that based solely on her birth date she was NOT ready to start Kindergarten.

I have to wonder, though, if it was Reilly Kate's sex education of her fellow classmates that got the her teacher's attention. You see, a few weeks back we were at home watching Animal Planet (a constant in our home) and there was a segment on about fish reproduction. Harmless, thinks I. Fish certainly don't hump. Besides, I am no prude. My kids can watch anything that depicts sex and reproduction in a natural, God glorifying manner. So there we sat, Reilly Kate, Roman, and I watching fish reproduce.

"Once the female has finished laying her eggs, the male moves in to release his sperm directly onto her eggs," explained the narrarator.

"Mama, what's sperm?"

Ah, and so it began. THE talk. The big one. The one all parents dread. Actually, I have always answered all of her questions openly and honestly. I never give her more than she asked for. So she doesn't fully understand the whole mechanics of human reproduction, but she gets the gist. Sperm meets egg creates baby. She did once ask me more than I really wanted to get into, but diverted herself away before I could answer.

"Mama, ummmm... I was thinking... Daddy's sperm is in his sac and his sperm met your egg. So did his sac go in your yoni (vagina)?"

I took a deep, long, cleansing breath while I tried to gather, sort, and order my thoughts all while navigating Seoul traffic in my way-too-big-for-urban-Asia American minivan.

"Hey, mom? Where's the bladder again?"

Filled with joy and elation at having avoided THAT discussion, I proceeded to delve into the finer points of the human bladder with all the enthusiasm of a horny cheerleader at a basketball game.

"Our bladders are located low in our bellies. The bladder holds our urine. Urine is the waste products filtered from our blood by our kidneys..."

So I shouldn't have been surprised when dropping Reilly Kate off for her first day at preschool, she ran up to a little girl and exclaimed, "Chelsea! Guess what! One of my dad's sperms came out of his sac and went up my mom's yoni to meet her egg and now she has a baby in her belly!"

Immediately I clamped my hand over her mouth. "We don't talk about that here. It's a private matter." Admittedly, I overreacted and I felt bad about that. I hurt her feelings. I rained on her parade. She was just excited to tell the other kids that we were going to have another baby in the house. I tried to back track a bit.

"I mean, some people just don't want to talk about that kind of thing, Reilly Kate. That's all."

"But mo-o-om," she whined, "Chelsea does. Don't you Chelsea?"

"Uh, huh." I looked over at Chelsea who sat with a half grin plastered on her face, eyes wide open and ears perked for all the juicy details she knew Reilly Kate would be divulging.

And so it is that my daughter is the sex expert of her preschool class. Have I mentioned that this is a Christian preschool? Yeah. I'm waiting for the phone calls. Christians, afterall, are notoriously prudish about reproduction, human or otherwise. I'm fairly convinced that the reason my fellow Catholics have such large families is because most don't really even know where it is that babies come from. It's probably a good thing we're homeschooling. If we sent her to Catholic school, as was our plan, we'd wind up excommunicated.

Then we'd really be fucked.