Bare. Naked.

Of my two children, it is fair to say that Daniel is the more compliant one.  He follows rules.  He says "please" and "thank you", and he doesn't interrupt.  He does his school work and eats his vegetables.  I also note that the prospect of me taking blood pressure medication was quite a bit more remote before his sister came along.

I once got a call from Daniel's kindergarten teacher who reported that she had been forced to separate Daniel from his best friend because they kept talking while in class.   "Oh yes, I understand," I replied, trying hard to sound concerned while masking the thrill I felt at the prospect of Daniel acting like a typical five-year-old boy.  

Fast forward to 2009.  Daniel is about to turn nine.  He probably watches a bit too much YouTube in an unsupervised setting, and there was, of course, the Superbad Incident. ("Mom", Janet said as she bounded into my bedroom early one Saturday morning.  "Daniel and I accidentally watched Superbad.  What's a condom?").  Still, with Daniel I've never really been concerned.  He seems to have good judgment and most people would never suspect that he watches anything other than science documentaries on PBS.

Imagine, then, my surprise at being informed by Daniel himself (voluntarily) that the After-School Program teacher (who is about 15 and still adds an inflection to the end of every sentence) had discovered that he and three other red-blooded nine-year-old boys were drawing "dirty" pictures.  He was dead serious as he "confessed" the details to his father and I.  I tried hard look concerned and caring, and to keep the corners of my mouth from turning upwards as he described the hermaphroditic masterpieces that he and his associates had created with mere pencil crayons.  Apparently, all was well and no one suspected a thing until one of girls noticed a folded up piece of paper that had written on it, of all things, "No girls allowed to look at this".

Go figure.

It went downhill from there, apparently.  There were girls screaming and boys yelling.  Papers were torn and some were, quite possibly, eaten in a valiant attempt to hide evidence.  The teenage girls running the After School Program finally managed to regain control and everyone was ushered outside to expend what little creative energies they might have left that day. 

The next day when I picked up Daniel, the After School teacher took me aside.  She told me about the drawings and showed me letters of apology that the boys had, on their own accord, written to the now-traumatized girls.  I told her what Daniel had said to me, and I listened politely as she went on to tell me how she had sought some advice from those wiser than she and, apparently, me, his mother, about this kind of thing.  She was able to assure me that this was completely normal for nine-year-old boys.  I asked her if she had seen Superbad and she started to laugh.  We've left it at that.

Ahh.  There is still hope that Daniel will one day run with scissors.