Mating Season

I debated on whether or not to share this, because, by sharing, you would obviously see what a mess I am making of this parenting gig, and how my children are going to turn out to be, well, strange. I don't think other parents have to have these kinds of conversations, and if they do, then we need to get together and compare notes.

I don't even know where to begin, except to say that Older Girl has become obsessed with animals of late. It started at the end of the last school year, when every book she checked out of the library was about endangered species, and she would fall asleep on a pile of her Ranger Rick magazines every night.

To get even more specific, she is obsessed with horses. I think everyone, at some point in time, has known a girl who was horse crazy. They drew horses, and read about horses, and knew how many hands high an American Saddlebred was, and took riding lessons, and so on. Well, that is my Older Girl. She doesn't walk anywhere, she gallops on her noble steed. All of her books for her school reading list have a common theme: Misty of Chincoteague, Black Beauty, My Friend Flicka. She whinnies.

Since she is a voracious reader, Older Girl has read a few factual books about horses, in addition to all of her horse novels. And that has lead to talk of mating and breeding. She doesn't exactly know what mating entails, and I'm not about to get all explanatory on her if she doesn't specifically ask me. However, lack of knowledge never stopped her from expounding on any subject. She told her brother that several of her larger toy horses had mated and that's how she got so many breeds of small toy horses. Naturally. I've also seen her walking through the hallway with a stuffed horse clenched between her knees. When asked about it, she explained that she was about to foal. Of course.

But tonight, I had to draw the line. We were shedding our coats after coming home from children's choir, and I noticed a bulge in the waistband of her pants. When I asked about it, she lifted her shirt and showed me the head of a tiny stuffed horse that was sticking out of her pants. She had tucked it in her pants for choir, because, as The Boy would say, she was a "fregnant horse." That's when I had to firmly tell her that, under no circumstances, was she allowed to tuck any more animals into her pants before church. (File that under: Things I Never Thought I Would Say.)

Please tell me she is not the only one to do this kind of weird stuff.