In expressing how much my eight-year-old daughter loves my
twelve-year-old son, she wants to know why they can’t marry. “I’m working right
now, can it wait?” I ask, hoping either she will forget or some ingenious idea will
strike that sounds like I know everything. It can’t wait, apparently, because
she rephrases it several different ways, trying to break the barrier. What can
I say? She’s tenacious. At least she isn't trying to marry a loser, right?
I feel it’s important to express in terminology she can
relate to, being a kid and all, yet not making me appear as a clumsy oaf. As a
former dancer, you may think I’m so familiar with the subject I can
recite it in reverse. The truth is I can if it’s in four-letter words, but this
is my daughter. So I figured if I expressed The Speech in relation to video
games, she will more than likely get it.
“Okay,” I say, “You know how much you like the game Happy Chef?” Her head nods emphatically,
so I follow up with, “That’s me! I’m Happy
Chef. And I have two little games of my own that are both Happy Chef games, even though some of
the programming is a tiny bit different because you’re a girl and he’s a boy,
but you still have the Happy Chef
genes.” Hooray, her anxious will to understand is forming.
The gene pool is where all the programming comes from when a
baby is made, and the programmer says, “I want the mouth of this game and the
eyes of that game to create a new game,” controlling it. I follow up with, “The
gene pool thinks it’s getting two different games to mess around with to create
its new game, right? But when the programmer says to use Happy Chef eyes, it scrolls down to find the Happy Chefs eyes to find green and
blue. Because it can’t tell which ones to use, it may create blue eyes like
yours, or green like your brothers. But what if it is so confused it gives the
baby one eye of each color or maybe even three eyes because both colors are Happy Chef eyes?” My daughter watches,
deep in thought, brain in high gear.
“But if the programmer says ‘Oh I can either use Happy Chef eyes or Bejeweled eyes,’ because that’s what your husband has, it isn’t
confused. The same goes for whether the new baby game will be dark colored, smart,
funny, tall, etc. Then it creates a whole new game from Happy Chef and Bejeweled.
Maybe it’s called Happy Jeweled. Does
that make sense?” Satisfied because either she got it, or she was so baffled
she quit, I was just content with her not asking the gender of the Happy Jeweled baby.
Perhaps someone needs to come up with a computer generated Birds and Bees lesson to explain this concept in a fun way to kids. But parents would rather have their kids find out from their friends, with intentions of doing it themselves. Even when parents find the time, often they are lost in
rationalizing, or perhaps have no clue themselves. But there’s gotta be a fun
way for kids to get the facts before they discover the four-letter terminology
from their friends at school. In case you were unaware, the stork story is
grounded.
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