Having Another Kind of Talk With Your Kids

Nothing can describe what I feel when I consider some of the unthinkable things that happen to children these days. And nothing could prepare me for what I had to do today - try to explain these things to my son.

He loves our digital cameras. Lately it's become a mildly frustrating but humorous occurrence to find a new "viral" picture or two on our Cybershot or Flip every time we fire it up.

Until today when I turned on the camera to find a close up of his younger sister mooning the camera (she's been doing the "look at my butt cheek" thing a lot lately). Given the way people are today, my wife and I could imagine what would happen if a well-intentioned but unknowing person found the camera and saw the pic. So we decided to have a talk with him.

He knows where babies come from. But trying to relate:

a. the idea of how visual stimuli make grown ups want to have sex
b. some grown ups do bad things to children and would get the same stimuli from pictures like the ones he took, and
c. someone else who saw them might think that mumma and daddy are like that and our family would be in a lot of trouble

...was a real challenge, but he got it in the end. It was good to see his innocence coming through, and the trouble he had grasping the concept. It felt bad to give him these pieces of information that, once he really processes them, will take away another piece of that.

We could have just hidden the cameras from him but we want to continue to encourage his creativity, and taking that avenue from him would not be helpful. We have imposed rules for asking to use the camera though.

The last thought to hit me was how glad I am that it was a digital camera, and not a wet-film camera. We may have never known what hit us. I wondered for a second if we were being too paranoid and cautious, but I don't think so. The last thing I need, on the extreme end of any improbability, is to have my family put through the ringer over two kids clowning around.

Pre-Op Blathering...Finding A Way.

Okay, some may consider this TMI, and others may read on. Whichever you are, I do not care.

Nine years and ten months ago, I had just returned from a deployment to the Arabian Gulf, and my wife S and I had determined that after 18 months of marriage it was time to start having children. We now have four beautiful children, two of each. When we started we actually thought about having two more, but four will keep us busy and poor enough for a while. So we are done procreating.

Tomorrow at 1030 am, nearly nine years to the day after S gave birth to our first child, I will head to the urologists' office to make it officially impossible...or as close to impossible as possible.

I remember lying in bed one evening when we had decided to start trying, and thinking about what it meant. Not about being a father or anything like that; I don't think the reality of that really hit me until the first time I told L to do something and he yelled "No!" back at me. I think it was more about "taking my place" in the evolutionary history of the species, if that doesn't sound too hokey. In the billions of years since life first showed up on the planet, it has had but one purpose - to make more life. Life has adapted to its environment, it has transformed and even actively shaped its environment, for the purpose of being able to make more life. As much as I thought I had achieved by then, or would go on to achieve, here I was simply taking my place among the billions of other organisms of my species that were working to ensure its continuation.

One might think I found this depressing. It was just the opposite. I was overcome by a sense of wonder, like I was a cosmologist catching a glimpse down the road to a unifying theory of physics. It was more of a religious experience to me than most anything I'd experienced after. I was "doing my part".

I think of Jurassic Park by the late Michael Crichton. One of the many excellent morals of the story is that "Life finds a way". Whether on a molecular level (remember amphibian gene splicing allowing female dinosaurs to change sex to male) or on a group/societal level (remember the dinosaurs (velociraptors?) watching the tankers come in and leave) life finds a way to move forward. We have children because we want someone to carry our legacy on, to carry on our name, to make us happy, because our religion tells us to - all reasons "designed" to benefit us as organisms or our community. In reality, these machinations are simply "life finding a way". Our evolved brains and ability to reason expresses the primal drive to "find a way" in a way that better suits our more rational construct of the universe. At least in the developed world. In the developing world, "life finds a way" in part because larger families can experience greater economic benefit. Simplified, I know, but this is a philosophical rambling and not a research paper.

So anyway, for whatever reason, life has found a way in a very minute sense (exactly 4 ways in 6.2 billion) through me, and tomorrow we're making sure it doesn't find any more ways, so we can focus on making the ways we've found the best ways they can be.

Which means I'll be sitting around a lot. Which means I'll be on the computer a lot. Which means that the the first (and ONLY!) Cthulhu's Family Restaurant "Ow-My-Balls-A-Thon" starts tomorrow afternoon. From when I get home and settled in, I will either post or produce some modification to the format of Cthulhu's Family Restaurant every 1-2 hours (hey this isn't going to be an exact thing!) until I go to bed between 11 pm and midnight. I hope to finally get some changes made and things added I wanted to do, and pad my monthly NaBloPoMo stats as well.

As I ponder tomorrow and the experience, I'm reminded of a conversation I had with my 10th grade health teacher regarding human reproduction.

Young Stickthulhu: Mr. Health Teacher, I'm confused...what's the difference between a testicle and a seminal vesicle?

Mr. Health Teacher: Well, Stick - there's a VAS DEFERENS!

Ummm...not for long. TMI!!! TMI!!!

Sleep, those litte slices of death...

Actually, I don't share views with Edgar Allen Poe on this one. I don't mind staying up, but I do love my sleep. That's why being able to "sleep in" until 0645 this morning was such a treat!

For the past ten days or so, three of my four minions have been battling a nasty sinus infection, and they're only just now getting over it. Minion #2's eardrum actually perforated, so it looks like she's in for her second set of grommets. Minion #3 was a little more fortunate. A week of crankiness and she's over it.

Minion #4 (I'll call him "Chub-Niggurath" ... the only one I've figured out yet) gave us the toughest time. He had a pretty nasty cough most of the time, during which he cut a tooth and his molars started acting up. So the nights were pretty rough. Don't think Mrs. Stickthulhu got more than 4 hours a night, in 45min - 1 hr chunks. He was always wide awake by 0500, so I took up the slack by getting up with him and getting everything set up for Minion #'s 1 and 2's school while he rode shotgun in the baby backpack.

Uuugh, what a week that made out to be. Worse for Mrs. Stick than me, who actually started coming down with her own sickness on Thursday.

Which is why, when Chubsie ended up sleeping for six hours straight last night, the atmosphere upon waking was more like a carnival than an execution.

So it's off to make a pancake breakfast for the kids and then jet down to Fall River for a few hours this afternoon. The Minions have had the great fortune (unlike me) to really know their great grandfather, and we try to keep the contact as frequent as possible, while we have him.