New edition: The good stuff

Recently I've been feeling that Edith is growing up so fast and is such an interesting person right now, I'm sorry I don't get more time with her. In March she and Tom enjoyed a special daddy-daughter spring break week in Salt Lake City, leading a service trip for families from our church to a depot run by the United Methodist Committee on Relief, where they take in, check, prep, package, and ship all the supplies people donate for national and international disaster relief. Edith and a five-year-old boy from our church together packed some 1,200 tubes of new toothpaste into disaster relief kits. She also served food at a soup kitchen, ate at a pay-what-you-will restaurant designed to offer low-income people the dignity of a restaurant meal, saw buffalo, and added two more states to her count:

FYI: I made the map with this map generator, which is one of the only ones I've found that lets you color code. I originally had been looking for color coding to distinguish on an international map between countries I've actually visited and countries where I have passed through the airport. But with four colors available I got more nuanced here: Green for places Edith has lived, blue for places she has spent plenty of time on multiple visits, orange for places she's visited 1-4 times, and red for states she has traveled through but not otherwise visited...although we did spend one night in a DFW airport hotel.

For my part, I snagged a couple of hours with Edith during her school's delayed opening last week. I took her to get a haircut, and for the first time in her life, shortening her hair made her look older and more sophisticated rather than younger. Then I took my sophisticated daughter for tea in downtown Manitou, where she wanted to play chess with me at the coffee shop before walking to school.

But for me, the best moments of all are not the ones when we're doing something special but when we're talking, often on a perfectly ordinary day, and a great conversation blossoms out of nowhere.

We had one of those the other night at bedtime. I was tucking her in, when she asked, "How do two mommies have a baby?"

I told her it was a great question and then pausing, asked if she knew how a man and a woman usually have a baby. We'd never discussed the whole thing, and I wasn't sure what she knew. The advice these days on talking with kids about big things like where babies come from, or why America is at war, is to give kids only as much information as they ask for at any one time and not more, lest you overwhelm them with concepts they haven't imagined and aren't ready for.

Edith knew that sperm from a man [somehow] gets inside a woman's womb, and [somehow] a baby grows. But that's all she had down, and apparently it was all she needed for the last four years or so.

This evening, however, her mind was suddenly on overdrive. As she said, "Sorry to keep you here so long, but my brain is really buzzing."

So with me continuing to give only as much information as she asked for, step by step, our bedtime conversation covered:

• standard sexual intercourse and the conception, growth, and birth of babies
• sperm donation and in vitro fertilization
• adoption
• birth control, including several common methods (this stemming from, "Mommy, if people like to do that thing [sex] even when they don't want to have a baby, is there a way to do it and not have a baby?")
• abortion ("But what if the sperm and the egg already started growing and the people don't want a baby--is there a way to stop it from growing and being born then?")
• the ethics of abortion, on which Edith was hammering out her position based on my answers to questions about the state of the pregnancy at the point when one might have an abortion. Her primary concern was that there might be children born into the world who are not wanted, and so with me only answering her questions and keeping silent about the range of heated opinions on this issue, she turned out to be pro-choice--at least for now.
• adoption screening procedures (Still thinking about how to assure all kids have loving parents who want them, she asked, "What if people want to adopt a baby who are not good people?" and then, "What if they figure out that the people who want to adopt a baby are good people, but they have some bad relatives who might come to the house now and then? Do the parents still get to adopt the baby?")
• ultrasound technology and the pros and cons of in utero sex determination
• whether she would want to know the sex of her baby before birth
• whether she likes technological innovation and technologically enhanced lifestyles (Short answer: No.)

I came downstairs stunned but beaming to have been there for such a moment of asking, thinking, and learning. I haven't seen anything in a college classroom come close yet.