Circa October, 2013

“I got a call from the school today,” announced my bride.

“What now?”

“Your youngest apparently told a girl in his class that he’d once had a tick on his testicle.”

I pondered this information. Unlike many things that our youngest has proclaimed (though ownership always seems to fall to me when he’s in trouble), this one was actually factual.

“Dare I ask — what was the segue?”

“Apparently they were talking about ticks in class, and he decided to share this additional information.”

“Is he in trouble?”

“Not really. He just got a talk about what is and is not appropriate for discussion at school.”

“Ah.”

Testicles have long been a source of fascination for the boys. Once, during a perilous series of questions about where babies come from, we revealed that boys gave girls one of their cells. These cells were stored in what was commonly the boys commonly referred to as “their balls.”

Upon receiving this information our oldest, who was clothing challenged for reasons unknown at that moment, looked down at his genitalia and, grabbing a handful, asked, “You mean I’ve got people in here?”

The conversations regarding the nether region are not always centered around the people-storage or ticks. The majority of the time it’s come up it’s because I’d taken yet another blow to the crotch. The boys are fascinated by how debilitating this is to me, while it has no impact on them — yet.

When the girl across the street was about nine she taught both of our boys the sinister technique of approaching an adult man in a nonchalant fashion and, without warning, directing a fist to the groin. She’d dropped her father to the ground with this technique on a number of occasions, and the boys reveled in repeating this outcome with me.

I recall laying in the street on one occasion, with tears in my eyes, having just received a unexpected shot to the ‘nards from our eldest. When he saw the severity of my reaction he leaned down with concern and asked, “Did I hurt your people?”

Still in the fog of pain that defied explanation, I replied, “Don’t worry. I don’t want any more people.”