Why is that? Is it because I went to a catholic school or something? I didn’t think that I had too many hang ups but I must admit that for some reason I feel a bit nervous about this. Now that the natural moment for gender revelation has passed (after our first shower) I can’t help feeling a little weird about premeditating this particular anatomy lesson. I never really intended to leave the gender explanations this long but after listening to you all I decided that I really needed to get my undies off in the shower and do it soon in the name of body image and most importantly, preventative behaviour. UPDATE: I’ve taken all your comments on board. “That’s not daddy’s pee pee” she says, “That’s a corker!” She looks at me, looks at my undies and back up at me with a grin. “That’s daddy’s pee pee” I say, recovering slightly. OMG! I freeze for a second, coming to terms with what has just happened. She looks directly at my crotch and before I can react she points her finger and jabs it into the slight protrusion in my wet undies a few times and says “What’s that thing Daddy? She is two years old and three feet tall and I’m 42 and almost six foot. We have even managed to wash her hair which is a small miracle in itself.Īs I stand up to turn of the water and grab her towel she turns around to face me. So anyway, here we are in the shower and I am sitting down in my undies and she is standing up and everything is going fine. We then learned about the opposite sex through everyone else except our parents. We had both seen our same gender parent naked though. I can’t remember ever seeing my mum naked and my wife doesn’t remember ever seeing her dad naked either. You can’t pull down your pants and say “Well this is a man’s penis and blah, blah…” so immediately you must say “No, you can’t look at my penis” and then make up something unconvincing about the why and begin to create a taboo around genitalia.
When and how do you explain physical gender differences to kids? If I try to explain the whole boy and girl anatomy thing to her at this age she is bound to demand a full inspection and what do you do then? So I have to manouvere myself to block her view while I attempt to abort the mission. Well if you have ever tried to stop a pee you will know that it can be quite a difficult thing to do, especially under pressure.
I can see her little brain ticking over going ” Wow how can he do that standing up?” and she creeps closer to try and get a better look at this amazing technique. I have recently been caught on a couple of occasions trying to sneak a quick stand up pee when her curious little head would peep around the corner saying ” What are you doing daddy?” So far that has enabled us to avoid any explanations as to what’s between my legs and why it is different to her and mum’s. If I leave my underpants on in the shower and sit down while she stands up I can probably get away with it without any awkward questions.Īs we are toilet training and thus have an open door policy in the bathroom, I usually sit down to pee so as to show her what to do. She does not know about what dad has and we haven’t had to explain it yet. We call it her “corker” which is a direct translation from a European language for the female anatomy.
She has seen mum naked and knows that she has the same bits. She has seen me in the shower at times but I usually leave my undies on when she is around and while she knows boys and girls, she has never seen a penis as far as I know. I mean, I can’t really say, “Sorry honey you can’t have a shower because of daddy’s penis” can I? Luckily Mum has been around to do the showering but lately we have had to change plans. She now loves the shower so much that she refuses to have a bath. Our two year old daughter has always had baths and lately she wants to have showers, which stands to reason because that is what we all have around here. Today, he writes about something altogether different…. He followed it up with this post and gave everyone whiplash. You may remember James as the stay-at-home dad who wrote this hugely controversial post for Mamamia that sent many readers ballistic.