Part 1
Boys and Boogers
When I was four-years-old one of my best friends was a boy named Jerry whose family lived in the same apartment building as mine. Our families moved away from each other when we were five and he and his family came to visit us in our new home some time shortly after. They stayed overnight and Jerry slept in our room with my sister and me. I don’t remember him having a cold or allergies, but for some reason I swear he picked his nose and wiped it on our wall until he decided to go to sleep. In grade school I had two other unforgettable incidents with boys and their boogers. There was who Dustin blew his nose and, apparently amazed by what came out, just had to show it to me. To this day that booger has the dubious honor of having been the biggest and roundest I have ever seen. Then there was Eddie who simply picked his nose, showed it to me, popped it in his mouth and carried on with his work. I was shocked, disgusted and amazed all wrapped up in one little girl-who-would-never package.
A few days ago I found myself saying to one of my three-year-old twin boys “honey, if you have a booger please give it to mama instead of putting it on the wall”. Asking my son to give me his booger tops a list of similarly odd comments such as: “let’s take the grass, sand and worms back outside where they came from”, and my personal favorite, “guys, it’s dangerous to run up and down the stairs with bags on your heads”.
Part 2
The Boy Train
Life with three sons, ages 5, 3 and 3, is an adventure full of surprises for a girl like me. I grew up with one sister. Her first two of three girls were born before my first son, and I became quite close with them. When I found out I was pregnant with our first child it never crossed my mind that it could be a boy. It’s not that I preferred a girl over a boy, or that I even consciously thought about life with one gender over the other. Simply put, I was surrounded by girl energy; I’m a girl, my sister is a girl, my nieces are girls, so of course I would have a girl. Imagine my surprise when we found out we were having a boy! I stared in wonder (often and for long periods of time) at the sonogram picture that showed his boy parts. Curious and excited, I started connecting with his boy energy long before he was born.
Shortly after our firstborn’s first birthday I discovered I was pregnant again, this time with twins. Certainly the odds were that at least one of them would be a girl. Honestly, I really wasn’t sure how I felt about that prospect. Some sort of uber-practicality came over me and I decided, rightly or wrongly, that life with three children separated by a mere two years would be easier if they were all the same gender. We didn’t have any girl clothes or toys, and had already started raising one boy. We were on the Boy Train headed to Boy Town. It just seemed easier somehow to avoid adding another train, with another destination and a completely different set of tracks.
Part 3
Two More Boys, a Booger Wall and the Smell of Dirty Socks
The day we found out we were having two more boys my perinatologist (and mother of three grown boys) smiled knowingly and said “in ten years your house will smell like dirty socks”. My mom (who didn’t raise any boys herself, but was raised with three brothers and no sisters) said “oh, Shannon, you’re going to have a Booger Wall”. Her reference to the now infamous booger habits of my childhood friend was a loving quip-turned-eerily-accurate-prediction. Neither my perinatologist nor my mom intended for me to take what they said at face value. Their comments intended to convey the truly different experience on which I was about to embark. The smell of dirty socks and Booger Walls were symbolic windows into the world I was entering as a woman raising not one, not two, but a handful of boys.
Part 4
What I Know About Boys (So Far)
Coming Soon…
