Fun With Play-Dough

My Husband and six-year-old daughter Isabella are out running errands, and I call the cell to make sure he doesn’t forget to pick up certain things.

“What did she want?” Isa asks, and he tells her I need some stuff from the store.

She asks: “Like what?” and she has that tone; the one that says: don’t lie to me. I smell something mysterious.

“It’s a very long story,” he tells her.

“I have time. Tell me.”

“Maxi Pads,” he replies without thinking things through.

“What are Maxi Pads?” Oh, crap.

So he gives her some vague story about how it’s not really blood; it’s actually baby food, and if you don’t have a baby, it comes out, and so on and so forth. Baby food, huh, so that’s what that is. Glad we got that out of the way.  Next, she’ll be asking why I don’t bottle it up and donate it to the food bank. “I didn’t want her to be freaked out,” he says. Of course, I have no right to be critical of him, he was in a pinch, and you have to say something. It’s not as if my explanation about “really big band-aids” was all that satisfying.

In spite of my husbands stellar explanation, she doesn’t drop it; this is much too interesting a topic. Like a terrier she hangs on, and continues to ask questions when she gets home: “Is it like those white thingies with the little strings that I like to pull apart?” she asks. “That’s right,” my husband says, and disappears into his office to buy time.

Why is it that children always ask these types of questions before we’ve had time to come up with a satisfying answer? I suddenly have a lot of sympathy for those parents that invented the stork and the cabbage patch; I’m even considering using those myself. That way, if she spreads any stories around at school, I don’t have to worry they think we’re traumatizing her by disclosing too much too early. They’ll just think we’re too old fashioned; I think I can live with that.