The Middle Child

So since I wrote about my oldest, I feel obligated to write about all my kids and so I turn to my middle child. Oh my! Where do I begin? First of all, she is 6 and has the husky low voice of a life long cigar smoking granny. On top of that, the girl is an absolute goofball and has no filters on the things that come out of her mouth. She is the fun one and yet very sensitive. She makes me laugh harder than any millionaire comic out there. She is also the reason we don't go to public pools and locker rooms anymore.

I used to take the girls for swim lessons at the local Y. Since I am a fairly modest person, the girls are not used to seeing naked people walking around letting it all hang out. This was also the time that my middle child had gotten confused about what a 'tushie' was and had taken to calling the female frontal nether region as the 'tushie.' So here we are at the Y, I'm changing the girls out of their wet swimsuits and trying to safeguard my oldest girls privacy because she refused to change naked in the woman's locker room and I couldn't fit all 3 into the little changing room. So I'm manuevering her underneath a large towel while trying to keep an eye on the youngest who has decided to take everything out of my purse and dump it on the floor. Meanwhile my middle child is staring wide-eyed at something when all of a sudden she announces in a loud (I mean piercing!) hoarse voice "Mommy! that old lady has hair all over her tushie!" I was so startled, I dropped the towel causing my eldest child to shriek and I swivelled around to see my (at that time 5 year old) pointing at this poor woman who had just walked out of the shower. OK my first reaction is, "why don't you actually use the towel that you are draping so casually over your arm?" and then I grabbed her pointing arm and turned her away, chastising her for embarassing the poor woman. Fortunately, I don't think the woman understood any English and I was able to hustle the girls out before another unfortunate faux pas would be released.

Unfortunately this is not the last of her interesting faux pas. Recently, I took the girls to our local swimming pool since they had a week off from camp and I had finished teaching summer session. At the pool, there was a man who had sort of shaggy hair and a little bit of a paunchy belly. But he was unmistakably a man. Perhaps the confusion was that he was wearing a speedo which my girls have never seen on a man. American men don't tend to wear speedos and I think the last time I saw one was when I was in Miami.

So my middle child announces in her loud husky carrying voice, "Look! that woman forgot to wear her bathing suit top and is naked!" Her voice rose at the end so that 'naked' comes out in a near shout. I shushed her and whispered "No, he's a man." To which she replied, not in a whisper, "That can't be a man, she's got bigger boobies than you do Mommy!" I don't know who was more insulted me or the guy with the man boobies. I can't even begin to tell you how my humiliation was completed when I told her not to use that term and tried to explain to her that they were not the same as women's breasts when she nodded her head sagely and said "Oh, I get it! Those boobies have no milk in them!"