Deep Thoughts

     

     I absolutely love to be the proverbial fly on the wall when my twins are trying to have deep, meaningful conversations with each other. Their explanations of some of life’s more perplexing concepts positively crack me up.  I can just tell that their little minds are working over-time, even when they think I’m not listening.  You may call it eavesdropping, but I call it free entertainment. 

     Several weeks ago, for no particular reason whatsoever, my kids busted out into a song they’d made up about Hanukkah.  We are not Jewish, and it was eighty degrees here in the Midwest, so it was most certainly nowhere near time to light the Menorah.  No clue why, but they went into multiple renditions of their little made-up song off and on throughout the entire day.  By the end of the day, I was even singing the freaking song in my own head!  I kept wondering what on earth triggered their brains to become fixated on this Jewish holiday in the middle of the summer.  Later that evening I was upstairs putting away laundry when I heard my son ask my daughter what it meant to be Jewish.  My ears immediately perked up because religion is a department in which our household is somewhat lacking.  It’s one of those areas about which I feel guilty for not incorporating more into our lives, so I just knew that her answer would most certainly be all kinds of jacked up.  She told him that Jewish people believe something different than we do — interesting answer, since I’m not sure if she even knows what she believes.  My son then asked what Jewish people believed, and my daughter told him that they don’t believe in Jesus, and that they think God died from a heart attack or something. I could tell he was deep in thought, but her explanation seemed to satisfy him.  They moved onto another topic, as I quietly apologized to God for not being a better teacher to my seemingly confused children.

     Another topic of interest lately has been how they were “cooked up in my tummy.”  I am not really prepared to have the old birds and the bees talk yet, so I’ve tried to keep any discussions to a bare-bones minimum.  They know that they grew in my belly for almost nine months and that I had to push them out of me.  Lately, though, they have been very curious about how two of them formed inside of me instead of just one.  I very vaguely explained that there were two eggs that started out in there that later turned into babies.  (I didn’t even get into the whole sperm thing with them yet.  I can’t imagine what my son would do with that information as fixated as he is on his “peeper” all the time.)  A few days later when I was on the phone with my mom, I heard them start talking about the whole twin thing again. My daughter was explaining to my son that there were two gigantic eggs inside Mommy’s tummy that cracked open.  She said they popped out of the eggs and then Mommy had to push out the babies and the egg shells in the hospital.  Dear God, what was I teaching my kids?!

     I am a firm believer in letting my kids think for themselves and explore their ideas.  I think it’s so important for them to see the world with their own eyes.  However, I clearly need to make a mental note to have some serious discussions about religion and <cringing at the thought> S-E-X in the near distant future.  Otherwise, they’re gonna continue to think their Jewish friends believe that God needed to work out more and that twins are related to chickens.