This morning over their shredded wheat (without milk) the twinkies asked how they “got in your belly when we were babies.” Their Sunday school teacher is pregnant, so they’ve had a lot of questions lately about babies.

Two weeks ago Reese spent almost an entire Sunday afternoon with a balloon under his shirt. He was pregnant too. Excellent.

Since I am a pretty awesome mom my standard answer to this kind of question is “Daddy put you there.” I know this does not clarify anything for them, but at least it gets me off the hook.

Today Jackson had another idea. He told me a story about going into the forest and getting egg which was then put in my belly.  (Reese wanted to know if I ate them. I assured him that I did not) Not terribly far from the truth. He also asked when the egg “cracked.” I told him that it was not that kind of egg.

He looked at me like I had a chicken on my forehead.

Then he told me that the egg did crack. Reese cracked first and then he cracked, four weeks later.

I told him it was only half an hour later.

He looked at me like I was speaking in clucks.

So there it is. No stork, no daddy, no hospital. Just me in a forest planting eggs in my belly and then cracking out twin boys. Four weeks apart.

The next time some stranger asks me about fertility treatments I am telling them that story.

Yeah, I know that is a pretty bad title, don’t worry there is a story behind it.

One of the things that kind of stinks about the Army is sometimes soldiers go out on training exercises (or real missions) where they have little to no communication with the outside world. Until about a week ago my husband was in Ranger school. We only communicated by letters and he got almost no news. That means he did not really know about the uprising in Egypt or Libya or the shooting in Tucson. It is hard to explain the trauma of those kinds of events after the fact.

He was also in training during Hurricane Katrina. He missed all of those news clips of the people suffering and the complaints about how our government handled it. He did not get to see Kanye West say “George Bush does not care about black people.” It was impossible to describe what that televised moment was like. Honestly, I don’t even remember if I told him.

Anyway, a while back when W. was doing his book tour some news program revisited that moment and Dallas saw it. Needless to say, he was surprised that someone actually said that on live TV.

We talked about it while we were giving the twinkies a bath. I repeated the phrase Kanye West said only to have our little parrot, Reese, repeat it.

Of course, he did not repeat the entire phrase. He just said “black people, black people, black people, black people” in a little sing-song voice. (It’s catchy, I know you’ll be singing it all day long.)

So, that’s not the best song for him to have learned. Clearly, it could be taken the wrong way, but what do you do? Tell him to stop? Change the subject? Attempt to explain to a 4-year-old race relations is 2011 in America? I chose to do none of the above and just ignore it until he stopped. Top quality parenting on my part. I do hope that someday if he repeats the song in public I am not physically close to him.

I need to be at least be far enough away so that I can look around and wonder who that kid belongs to.