Mommy monsters and other conversational oddities

So kiddo wakes up one morning and immediately -- before he can possibly get dressed, even -- starts to tell me about the big boat. "And it crashed into an iceberg, and it broke in half, and all the pieces fell into the ocean, and all the people got dead."

"Um. Do you mean the Titanic?"

"Yeah, the Titantic. And the driver -- "

"No, the person who drives the ship is called the captain -- "

"Yeah, and the captain got dead too."

My son, James Cameron.

I couldn't figure out where he'd learned about the Titanic, since it seemed not precisely age-appropriate to his class, and I don't think he's scored a Netflix account recently. My friend M., whose daughter is in his class, reported to me later that she'd stopped by the classroom for something and had noticed kiddo building a large boat out of Legos. She complimented him on it, and then he told her about the Titantic, and the iceberg, and how all the people got dead. M., slightly flabbergasted, asked the teacher if that was really the sort of thing the kids should be learning right now.

We figured out that another kid in their class had brought in a book about the Titanic, and that had been kiddo's source material. So ... good memory skills, sweetie!

I suppose it's not any worse than his explanation for why you have to look both ways before crossing the street: "If you don't, a car will run over you and you'll turn into a skeleton. Then you have to eat another little boy to turn back into a boy."

I swear we have not shown him one zombie movie.

It got even weirder a few days ago. He was throwing his usual "I don't WANT to go potty and you can't make me" fit, refusing to go upstairs, refusing to pull his pants down, and finally I snapped and really yelled at him. Because the word "saint" is nowhere in my name. And frankly, if you're going to pick something to throw a power-play tantrum over, why would you pick bathroom breaks? Is needing new pants and underwear really worth your moral high ground?

The next morning he told me all about the mommy monster. She came out of her cave and went into his classroom and came after him, and tried to drag him away, and then he kicked her in the face and tied her hands and she got dead.

"Uh huh," I said, wondering, should I take this personally?

He went on to explain that I am not the mommy monster, that the mommy monster is in fact a monster. I told him it still isn't nice to kick people in the face.



And then later that day, we were sprawled across the couch together when he looked down and suddenly said, "Mommy, is that your penis?"

Uh .... what?

I had to explain to him that women don't have penises. He didn't make the connection between women and Mommies, and asked again. I said that boys had penises but that girls did not. "But what do you have?" he persisted, and I somehow managed to avoid answering the question. Because really, I didn't think we were going to be tackling that until, oh, grade school? How about college? College okay on that one?

DH, by the way, found the whole exchange five kinds of hilarious, which means that 11 years from now when kiddette gets her first period, I will be making him explain the whole thing to her. Ha!