so beginneth the chronicle of the spring

[flea]

I'm a bit late this year, but it's hard to know when to call "spring" when it's 70 degrees on January 1st and February 1st, although there are weeks of frost sandwiched between. Current status of the garden is: daffoldils are between 4 and 6 inches high. I have a couple of tulip noses peeking out if you look under the leaf mulch. I have trimmed the brush along the driveway and trimmed some of the bushes (butterfly) that needed to be trimmed. The camellias remain but I really need a ladder, which I do not possess.

I planted peas - snow and shell - yesterday and Casper helped. I was swoonful with love at her bringing me the bags of seed peas and saying "open," carrying the trowel, picking up the peas from the furrow and attempting to eat them. It was a glorious sunny day, though not very warm (maybe 55) and I got a sunburn on my neck. I put in pea brush. I have saved the biggest branches to try to build a makeshift trellis for the pole beans. I am almost done with the leaf pile of doom, which dates back to last summer and which I ahve been decanting into the yard waste bin one week at a time. This is separate from the compost pile proper, but has,d ue to the slowness, become a de facto compost pile, so I was scraping up big clumps of mud filled with fat juicy worms and depositing them on the bigger garden bed. I showed Casper a worm. She said "worm."

She also farted last night and turned to look at me and said "butt." So we begin. What did you call genitalia and backside when you were a child, or, if you have children, what have you taught your children to say? We usually say "bottom" generally for the zone covered by a diaper ("sit down on your bottom", "let me wipe your bottom"), and "butt" for the butt, and have occasionally said "vagina" but haven't had much cause to name the genitalia yet (she hasn't asked). As the daughter of a medical student and a nursing student, I was taught penis and vagina, which led to the classic experience suffered by my mother, in the grocery store, when a one-year-old me shouted "look, chicken vaginas!" by the poultry case.

Comments

[cindywrites.livejournal.com]

Yeah, see, in theory, I agree with the "Teach the proper names," school of thought. In practice, that can lead to chicken vagina moments. When they were of the blurt stage, I would use the word "privates" hoping it would also manage to get across that (it's so scary to be a parent) nobody had a right to their genitalia, in case they encountered predators.

I taught Julia the word vagina probably when she was about three, but she generally still uses privates. The boys were taught the word penis at some point, mostly to counteract someone calling it a "pee pee" or something. Being boys, they love the word penis (and, of course, the entity penis).

We tend to use bum as the term for their hindquarters, although they've since picked up the word butt, I try to discourage it.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

I learned "bottom" or "privates" as casual referents for the general area, but I also learned the specific terms "vagina" and "clitoris." I hardly think that it's common for parents to teach little girls where their clitoris is (although they didn't say what it was for), but I was sure grateful not to have to hunt for it many years later when I did develop an interest in what it was for.

[forodwaith.livejournal.com]

daffodils are between 4 and 6 inches high

Waaah. We had 3 cm of snow yesterday (not unusual by any means).

"Penis" and "bum" here. I hadn't given any thought to the female terms yet, then just last night the Blue-Eyed Boy - he was having a bath with Nora - made a remark about her penis. Out of sheer reflex I said that girls didn't have penises, they have vaginas. ::shrug:: I guess we'll deal with chicken vaginas when they happen.

[cindywrites.livejournal.com]

Hee. I think that's probably when I taught my daughter the word vagina--when one of her brothers yelled, "Where's JULIA'S PENIS????????????" as if we'd taken it from her.

[dxmachina.livejournal.com]

Sigh. Already with the garden taunting.

I have daffodils and tulips and crocuses. They just haven't woken up yet, which is just as well because there's eight inches of snow on top of the bulb patch.