Muffins, front bums and fine China

Having sons, I was fully aware that - at some point in the distant future - there would come a time when my boys would be predominantly preoccupied with vaginas, and their teenage heads would contain nothing but food and furry triangles (if they were so inclined, of course).

But that was all in the back my mind, a far flung matter in my child-rearing schedule. I figured that I had a good twelve or thirteen years of V-free parental concerns.

Beau only gave me three.

It all began rather innocently, with Beau understanding the fundamental differences between boys and girls. Namely: penises and vaginas, amongst other far less intriguing and less humorous things.

Jas and I didn't clutter or colour the facts with willies and ginnies, as many other parents do. Why provide cute nicknames to avoid the precise terminology? And with so many cutsie labels for their noodle, wang-wang, peenie, pecker, donger or doodle, which one would you use?

To our boys, everything downstairs was either a vagina, a penis or a scrotum; they would learn all of the nicknames in the playground classroom.

Now the problem was, once Beau understood these differences, he was keen to share them with the WHOLE WORLD.

Beau created some consternation on the topic with his female playmates at day care. When the little girls were having a quiet pee, Beau took it upon himself to educate them on their anatomical make-up: "Do you know, you are a GIRL and you have a VAGINA?"

There was instant conflict: the girls argued that they did not have a vagina as they had a ginny, a foo-foo, a twinkle, a bajingo, a front bum or whatever their parents told them to call their hoo-hoos. And Beau - being Beau – was fully armed with the facts and would not surrender to emotional pleas to the contrary.

So washroom war broke out and the teachers were parachuted in to bring peace to the Battle of the Sex Bits. They had to resolve the matter of terminology by explaining to the little upset lasses that they did, in fact, possess a vagina.

That wasn’t all. Shortly after the toilet skirmish, there was an occasion - again at day care - I truly wish I was a fly on the wall.

Now Beau was often one of the last children to be picked up each evening. The social creature that he is, Beau has a little chat to parents as they collect their offspring and he has come to know all of the parents. By child. By name. And by the car they drove.

On the oh-to-be-a-fly-on-the-wall-day Beau greeted one of the mothers as they came to pick up their child.

"Hi Michelle! "

"Hi Beau! How are you?" Everyone knows Beau.

Beau then cut to the chase and rendered Michelle speechless: "Michelle, do you know that you are a GIRL and you have a VAGINA?"

The teachers in earshot struggled to keep a straight face.

I wonder if Michelle now avoids Beau.

On a shopping trip some time later, Jas pre-occupied Beau with some colouring-in. A shop provided some pencils with paper containing images of people. Beau began colouring in with earnest as Jas went about her business.

On reviewing Beau's work she found he had only coloured in the female images on the paper; not only that, he had only coloured in one specific part of them….all with a brown pencil.

Beau had spent all of his time creating anatomically correct maps of Tasmania.