Body Parts

The other morning my grandson mooned me on Skype. 

It was Pooh, so I can't say it was entirely unexpected.  The boy has always known how to capitalize on the element of surprise that results when he chooses to unveil certain of his body parts.

Mind you, this is the child whose self-created superhero persona is "Naked Man."  You will be relieved to know that, at his mama's insistence, his original image has been modified to include underwear.  (This turns out to be a blessing in disguise, as it gives Naked Man a place to stash his sword.)

An aside: No pic with this blog for fear of being arrested by the kiddie porn police.  But I have to admit that a picture of Naked Man in all his glory is my current choice showcasing Pooh in the "googery," or gallery of grandkid photos hanging on the wall in the kids' room here at Googie's.

Anyway, the word "bottom" was one of the originals in Pooh's vocabulary, and he understood what it referred to long before he ever said it.  This brings to mind a favorite story from the vast annals of "Pooh Lore" we have been collecting for the past four and a half years:

Once, when he was only eighteen or twenty months old, he was sitting on his mama's lap brushing his teeth before bedtime.  "Brush your top teeth," Cookie coached, and he did.  "Now brush your bottom teeth," she said-- whereupon he stopped abruptly, and you could see the wheels turning in that little head.

Immediately, he turned the toothbrush upside down to brush the seat portion of his fuzzy, footed jammies.  I happened to capture the whole incident in a digital camera video, which should make good blackmail material when he is a teenager.

Now that Pooh's repertoire includes other words for "bottom," he continues to interchange them, sometimes with amusing results.  Last time he was here, he asked me to retrieve a toy that had sunk to the floor of the swimming pool. 

"Where's your water gun?" I asked.

"It's down on the pool's butt."

"You mean bottom?"

"Yes," he said, unaware of any semantic problem whatsoever.  "Can you get it for me?"

Although Pooh seems to be the one most preoccupied with body parts, his sisters will occasionally throw in their two cents' worth.  Sooby, our own little artist in residence,  recently produced a pen and ink version of an anatomically correct horse family, which I was most happy to have shared with me as a text message but which again, for obvious purposes, I hesitate to share here.

And even little Bootsie has coined a term for a woman's upper undergarment with her recent reference to her mama's "booby lids."  (Well, it kind of makes sense if you think about it.)

With two other baby grandsons only beginning to talk and another expected in November, I would imagine we are hearing only the beginning of the tome of "body parts" stories we will end up with.

But considering the recent Skype experience, I am thinking Pooh is the one we will have to watch the closest.  Unless, of course, we really don't mind being caught as the bottom of one of his jokes.