"The Talk"

I wasn't planning on it happening this way, but today was the day I wound up giving Horse "The Talk." You know the one where you tell your child there is no way you will single-handedly finance their college tuition? Yeah, it's not that one. It's the "tab A goes into slot B and you're far too young to think about tab A going into slot B" talk.

The poor kidlet is never going to look at assemble-it-yourself furniture the same way again.

Anyway, it just happened that as I was driving her home from a doctor's appointment this morning, she asked a question pertaining to the AIDS knowledge she just recently obtained in health class. Her siblings were both off at school, and I figured that was as good a time as any to not only reassure her that she cannot catch AIDS as easily as she seems to think she can, at least not at this stage in her life, but also to give her the basic working knowledge of the likeliest manner in which she could potentially contract it during her lifetime. (What? A little healthy paranoia is a good thing for my kidlet's future sex life, as far as I'm concerned!)

In hindsight, having that conversation in the car was probably a wise decision. I could not look directly at her, nor she at me. That fact alone made it a lot easier. She asked a minimal number of questions, and I answered with as few details as possible. Her take on the whole thing was, "That's disgusting!" I neither affirmed nor denied her observation, although I was secretly relieved.

I told her that there were other details she would need to know as she grew older, but those could wait. I mentioned that anytime she has questions on the subject, I would hope she would come to me to ask them, rather than asking her friends who might not have the correct answers themselves. She informed me it would be a rather long time before she ever wanted to learn more about such a thing.

I'm absolutely fine with that.