Boys and Their Toys

After six solid years of girliness reigning supreme as Chez Alexander, having a boy is quite the shock. Everything he does is so boyish. And none of it makes any sense to me.

For example, if he wants to get from point A to point B and there is an enormous pile of laundry/a beanbag chair/another child in the way, instead of going around he just crawls right over whatever is blocking his goal. I kid you not. Many is the time I have had to de-tach him from Charlotte as he attempted to use his raptor-like nails to scale her.

He also regularly shoves his mouth so full of food that he literally can’t close it, let alone chew and swallow. After a few seconds of befuddled attempts to mash his jaws down he spits everything back out on his high-chair tray, then picks the half-chewed food up in smaller increments and jams them back into his mouth, one right after the other, not taking the time to chew and swallow, until his mouth is exactly as full as it was before. This process repeats itself until the now-unrecognizable food in question is softened and partially digested enough for him to swallow in one huge gulp.

All these things I can handle, really. It’s kind of fun to see how very different my male child is from my female children. I enjoy the realization that many a trait the Ogre has which makes me want to smack my head against the wall (really, how many times to you have to come back from the store with fat-free half-and-half before you learn to read the label?) are things that I can see shades of in our son.

And yet.

And yet.

Nothing but nothing, I tell you, has prepared me for the way this child feels about his penis.

I always thought that male penis-talk was some sort of bravado, a show, some sort of ridiculously over-played and over-exaggerated “men’s club” thing. And I’m sure that much of it is.

But having a son has made me realize just how much the penis is an integral part of this kid’s identity.

Liam’s favorite time of day is diaper-changing time. It’s all I can do to keep his hands off himself until he’s cleaned up enough, and then he immediately reaches down, grabs his penis, and then lets out this triumphant, primal holler.

I guess I don’t help matters by cracking up, but it is seriously the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. He would lay on his back all day on his changing table and just grab his penis if I let him. His howls of indignation when I put a diaper back on are only soothed by food or a battery-less Wii remote.

It’s not just Liam, either. Watching my two little nephews is like being given a glimpse of an entirely new world. A whole new way of being, of existence. The way of the man-child.

Peeing, for example. It’s a pretty mundane task, right? You feel like you have to pee, so you pee. End of story, yeah?

Not so for a four-year-old boy. Peeing is like this great triumph. This kid whips out his penis like it’s a sword. So much so that I very quickly learned to keep bathroom time separate with the two oldest, cause Sienna kept lamenting the fact that she couldn’t stand up to pee.

I vividly remember last Christmas, when my oldest nephew, three at the time, had apparently just learned the word “penis”. He raced around the house shouting, “I have a penis! I have a penis!” and no one could stop him. His cries were quickly picked up and echoed by all of the older children, and very soon we were surrounded by one boy and three girls all shouting “I have a penis!” at the top of their lungs.

Luckily a quick explanation about anatomy staved off any gender-confusion in the girl children (I hope), but nothing could dampen the little boy’s pride in himself.

I’m trying to focus on the now, though, on the childhood of these boys, and not let my mind wander toward the future.

Cause it’s all fun and games till they hit puberty. Shudder.