At 3:30, as the school bus stops with a “sssss”, Ashley with her blond locks runs off the bus with a shriek. “Jonah licked me!”

Yesterday, we heard that Jonah kissed her. Today, he licked her. What’s going on? Well, my 5-1/2 year old boy has a crush on a brash blond in hot pink and animal prints. Loni Anderson with a thing for Carebears.

First day at SUNY-Binghamton in Freshman Lit, a boy in the next chair turns to me and asks with a grin, “Did you ever see frogs explode in a microwave?” Horrified, I turned away without saying a word. Later, I sat with my new dorm friends in the dining hall and told them about the strange boy’s remark. One guy, Chris, who ended up as a good friend throughout college, roared with laughter. “He LIKED you.”

Why? Why would my kid lick and disgust this girl? Why would the college boy disgust me with his frog-brain-splat story? What the hell is wrong with men?

As a mother with two boys, I’m often asked “are you going to try for the girl.” Sometimes they add a “poor thing,” I think because people generally assume that boys are harder than girls and that the boys will leave me high and dry once they ship off for college.

Actually, I’m quite happy to have boys. Please excuse the generalizations, but I think boys are easier and more suited to my personality. They are simpler. They don’t play mind games with me and rarely cry. They’re always up for trips to the mall and the city. Once they grow out of the wiggly stage, they follow me around like little puppies.

They might not be so devoted to me later in life, but they also won’t call with a rant about how I’ve destroyed their lives and hang up in tears.

So, I’ve been quite content with my two XYs, until I got that little jolt of reality today. I’m going to have to do a lot of reprogramming to get these little savages fit for the world of women.

I just went digging around the attic for Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions, but to no avail. We still haven’t properly unpacked the library. Anne has a funny passage about how unsettling it was to learn that she was pregnant with a boy. Something about having an alien penis in her uterus freaked her out. Anyhow, I can’t quote it right now because the books have been turned into dusty mountains for an electric train which snakes around them.