Floppin' About

The biggest debate raging in Casa Verde at the moment is all about DH's penis.

I'll allow you to digest that sentence for a moment.



Yeah, okay, so DH and I are debating his penis. Namely, that he totally doesn't mind wandering around the house all stark nekkid in front of the kids. Now before you go thinking he is a pervert, let me give you the background story.

In DH's family, they're pretty open about these things. They have no issue with privacy, wandering around naked, and in general being pretty 'free' when it comes to bodies and bodily functions. Fer cripes's sake, these people have bathrooms with louvered doors. So you can HEAR and SMELL and almost, kinda, if you look at it from the correct angle, SEE what is happening in there. These bathroom doors totally drive me insane, and yet they see nothing wrong with it. Okay, fine, be that way. Me? I'm picking the toilet as far away from other humans as I can, and then I am doing my Kegel exercises mid-flow to make sure my pee is not too loud. But that's just me.

My family, on the other hand, is totally NOT open about anything like that. Okay, we make more than our fair share of fart and poop jokes, but we certainly don't wander around naked, we don't talk about sex, and our bathroom doors were manufactured by the same people who make the doors for bank vaults. My sex talk consisted of "Ask your sister!" and my sister's sex talk was "Whatever you don't know, ask your friends." What we do, we do behind steel-reinforced closed doors, and for heaven's sake we don't then discuss it!

Then the kids came along, and DH was all for a free, hang-it-all-out household. I resisted this for a long time, until it became easier to just let them come into the bathroom and ask me the i-will-die-now-if-you-don't-answer-me-Mummy question than it was to listen to the progressively louder screaming and crying and pounding on the door. Ours, too, became a liberal free love hippy household. In truth, I don't really like it that way but I've been too lazy and too tired to bother with bringing back some decorum. Also, I don't really have a great REASON for bringing back decorum, since now my kids have seen it all anyway.

However. They are now 7, and hurling head first into pre-teen-dome, and I think it's time that DH (and I) covered up a bit. So last weekend when he went to turn on the TV for them, while he was in the complete nuddy nuddy nude...I said, "You know, maybe it's time you put on some unides if you're going to do that." He gave me a wide-eyed look and said, "Good God Woman! WHY?" (Okay, okay, he just said, "Why?" The rest added for creative licence purposes.)

I could think of no better answer than to say, "Well, you know...there comes a certain time in one's life when your Dad's penis becomes, you know, embarrassing....and I think you should put it away before the girls have to muster up the courage to tell me to tell you that your penis flapping about is kinda embarrassing."

DH is aghast at this, and thinks I'm completey crazy. He sees nothing wrong with the whole thing, and to be fair, other than ungodly hour TV duty, he mostly keeps it covered. Still, I just think it's kinda...well...yucky.

So, dear readers (now that I have some! Whee!) tell me. Penis in or penis out?