As every day passes it is becoming more and more obvious that I am completely unprepared for the teenage trials and tribulations that lay before us.

My son recently sprouted two hollow legs, hoovering food and anything else not nailed down and all of his pants are starting to look like capris with inches of ankle bone showing. He sprang up over night. I am dreading the day I wake up to find all my hand lotion missing and a bunch of dirty socks stuffed under his bed.

My daughter has become obsessed with growing breasts, wearing makeup and styling her hair. She spends hours staring into the mirror trying to visualize what she will look like as a grown up and pondering her future as a famous singer/world class surgeon/supermodel all at once.

I’m still stuck in the lego and Barbie stage; offering them juice boxes and asking them if they want chicken fingers or mac n’ cheese for supper.

They are growing up faster than I am maturing as a parent and it’s starting to scare the hell out of me.

It doesn’t help they attend a school where grades five through 12 freely roam the halls. The almost adult kids try to avoid the wee ones like my Fric and Frac but inevitably, due to lack of square footage, their paths collide.

Fric and Frac learn all sorts of interesting life lessons while on the playgrounds of public school. And they are more than eager to share those lessons with their totally hip, rad wrinkled, worried mother.

Any day my pubic hair are going to start turning gray, people.

The other day Fric and Frac came home talking about boners and stiffies and they wanted to know what ‘wanking off’ meant. They haven’t really figured out what masturbation means and I’d like to keep it that way for a while.

Just to keep my sanity for a few more days.

But they persisted and kept gnawing at my ankles like rabid little rats and wanted to know why some of the boys on the bus were telling a kid to buy a melon, microwave it for a few seconds to warm up the middle and then cut a hole in it.

Was it some fancy new type of dessert? Have we been eating melon the wrong way for all of these years? Were they missing out on some magic formula to magically morph them into one of the cool kids?

And by the way, Mom, why does everyone keep teasing the boys about warm apple pie? What’s the joke?

I had several choices at this moment as I stopped, picked up my jaw and pushed my exploded eyeballs back into my head while inwardly cursing the fact that we live out in the sticks and my children are forced to ride the little yellow bus with a bunch of sex starved adolescent boys.

(Shit like this never happened when I lived in the city and had to walk to school. No sirree. It was all fairy princesses and sparkle dust. Heh.)

I could sit down and calmly and rationally explain the jokes and have an age appropriate conversation about sex or I could bury my head in the sand and let Satan’s spawn on the school bus corrupt my beautiful innocent children forever.

Hell no. If any one gets to corrupt my children it’s gonna be me. I didn’t spend eight hours in hard labour trying to push their fat heads out of my itty bitty pink parts just to allow someone else have all the fun. I’ve earned the right to be able to twist their little minds every darn time I had to wipe their poopy bums or kiss their booboos.

Still, this wasn’t a conversation to enter in to lightly so I did what any quick thinking momma would do. I told them to do their home work and we would talk about this after supper.

I needed time to collect my thoughts and figure out how not to scar myself for years to come to delicately word our conversation.

That and I wanted to call Boo. See if he had time to deal with it. Maybe we could conference call it, and he could do all the heavy lifting. (I’m thoughtful like that.) But Boo was actually working so I would have to face the firing squad alone without any back up.

I felt like an old gun slinger heading out to main street at the stroke of noon, aware that if I wasn’t the fastest draw I’d end up with a bullet in the head.

After supper my delightfully excited demon spawn sat down with me and we talked. About everything. Kinda. I still edited as much as I could. Had to save some of the good stuff for their dad. Heh. But in the end, Frac ran screeching from the room with his ears bleeding and my daughter just sat on the couch with a stunned look on her face, wishing she had never asked.

Mission accomplished.

Heh.

Later that night, Boo phoned and asked how our day went. When I told him his children wanted to know why boys spunk into fruit I heard the phone clatter to the floor and my husband having a small heart attack on the other end. When he sufficiently recovered he asked how I handled the situation.

“Why? Don’t you trust me? You think I will warp them don’t you?” I asked on the defensive.

“No, no, nothing like that,” he rushed to reassure me. “I know you would do the best you could. It’s just sometimes your best is a little, um, frank. Plus, this kinda came at me out of the blue,” he hurriedly added so I wouldn’t rip off his head, shit down his throat and then stuff his skull down the gaping wound that was once his neck.

“Came at YOU out of the blue???” I huffed. “Try being the one to explain what wanking off or tugging the one-eyed snake meant!”

“Well, how did you do it?” I could tell my beloved was wrestling simultaneously with fear and curiosity. While he dreaded my answer he needed to know. Kinda like rubber necking at an accident site. You just can’t stop yourself.

“I explained the whole self-gratification thing in a non-specific manner but I felt it was more important to focus on teen age sex. Especially since they are obviously hearing about it every day. I don’t want them to think it is cool or an activity to engage in lightly.” I took a deep breath before continuing.

“Because if I have grandbabies before I turn forty I’m ripping off your nuts and barbequing them. It will be all your fault for leaving me alone with these kids during their crucial development stage.”

“Fair enough,” Boo said. “So what did you say?”

“Well, not much to be honest. I sat them down and made them watch a music video and then explained the lyrics. That pretty much did all the work for me. I think we may be raising a future nun and a forty year old virgin. I’m okay with that,” I laughed.

“Cool,” Boo laughed. “But what video did you make them watch?”

“Oh, just an old Meatloaf video. What’s better than a little rock and roll to go with a sex talk?,” I giggled as I remembered my children’s horror filled faces as I explained to them the realities of teen age sex courtesy of 70′s rock.

What better than a video that explains the difference between boys and girls and sex and the harsh realities of what happens when you have sex when you aren’t ready.

Plus, I may have had a little fun rocking out to the video and remembering my own steamy teenage nights parked in a vehicle in the middle of no where.

Heh.

Ya. I so rock this parenting gig.