Copasetic Flow

Let me preface this by saying I’m in no way an expert on anything medical.  So, if you came here for anything actually related to the virus, now would be the time to move on. Instead, I’ll be talking about talking to kids.  I’m not a trained expert there either, but—as a dad—I do it a lot with the 9, 7, and 5 year-old kids here: Daize, Towser, and Tawnse respectively, (all aliases). Why do I bring the virus up at all?  Shit happens.  We went to an author’s talk a few days ago where the first question an audience member brought up was the virus.  Yesterday, Daize and I walked into one grocery store in the midst of a run and rode by another grocery with cars lined up down the block waiting in line to park.  (Thank you so much SFMTA driver who opened your doors and let us hop back out of that area!  Public transit rocks!)  The gang and I talk about things as they come up, so guess what?  With all the local happenings we’ve talked about C...

Until just recently, we’ve always referred to genitalia as ‘junk’ when talking with the kids.  it’s not that we don’t think you should talk about genitalia, in fact, through no design of our own, it’s quite the opposite at our house, conversations about junk come up fairly frequently.  It’s just the word junk had a better ring to it.  We’ve also committed the other sex-ed sin of calling vaginas ‘innies’, and penises ‘outies’.  While I’ve heard this can be an issue, for us at any rate, it wasn’t. When you live with three kids in a variety of 1200, (on average), square foot houses, everyone sees everyone else naked, a lot.  Between grad school, and then moving to San Francisco, our real estate budget has never really allowed for the privacy that might come from spreading out through several rooms, (or sweet merciful heaven), more than one bathroom. But, even the singular bathroom has been a blessing.  Each kid as soon as they’ve been able to walk has...