From: Maia Cheli-Colando <maia>
Date: Sun, 18 Feb 2007 11:18:49 -0800

A little story about scrotums...

When I was five months pregnant with my firstborn, we had an ultrasound. She immediately, obligingly, let us know which gender she was. :)

My second born was not so accommodating. At the first ultrasound, our baby showed everything but that. This permitted my husband and daughter to conclude that the baby was a girl, while I continued in thinking the babe was a boy. (I had guessed at my daughter's ultrasound that the next one would be a boy. Intuition is sometimes right.) At our second-born's second ultrasound, the first words the tech said about our baby were "There's a large scrotum there!" A what? I had never heard the word in any sort of conversation. It took me a moment to realize what she meant.

Three years later, my son "discovered" himself. And everybody else too
-- he spent time sorting out who had what. He'd go through the list of who had penises and who had vaginas, and who couldn't push a baby out
(boys) because (among other reasons) they wouldn't fit! But he was puzzled by the extra thing, not a penis and not a vagina, that he and daddy and other boys had. So we gave him the anatomically correct word, scrotum. And he was content. (Relatively speaking; I think he was not entirely pleased that he and daddy couldn't grow babies.)

I'm pretty sure that neither my four year old son nor my eight year old daughter would find a dog's scrotum anything to fret over.

What, after all, is more relevant to a child than their own body and their own family, and how it all got that way?

Maia

Olgy Gary wrote:
> In and of itself I don't see a problem with the word scrotum myself. I think
> it boils down to when and where do parents choose to teach kids these
> things. And whether they want to be upstaged by words like scrotum being in
> what otherwise they would never think of pre-reading before buying it for
> their children, i.e., a Newbery award winner.
>
Received on Sun 18 Feb 2007 01:18:49 PM CST