When I was growing up, we used to wait with bated breath for the Sunday paper and the part we called the “Funnies”, aka the comic strips. I haven’t seen a printed paper in so long, I have no idea if they still include those or not. Do they even still print and distribute papers? I assume so, since I still see paper stands around town. Anyway, I loved the Funnies and have recently read in an article that comic books are now called “Graphic Novels”. They are publishing textbooks in this format, even, for kids who aren’t strong readers but who enjoy comic books (mostly boys, I would think).
I don’t know how any of this relates to my topic, except that these days, we don’t need comic books to make us laugh – we live on a proverbial funny farm. And yes, I am aware that a funny farm is a colloquial term for an insane asylum. Most of the time, I feel like that’s exactly what I’m running here. But then there are times when the inmates (aka, “the children”) are also just plain funny. Here’s one example.
Peter gets out of school roughly half an hour after the other two, so I will often pick him up alone, after I drop the other two off at home. I have found this to be one of my favorite times of the day, since it’s practically the only time my almost 13-year-old talks to me about school stuff. And generally, we start off with me asking “How was school today?”. He typically answers “Good” then launches into whatever he wants to talk about – a class or a friend or homework. Today, when I asked my question, he answered “Weird”. So I started probing further, until he finally admitted that they are studying the endocrine system in Science. I started laughing and his face started to redden. I asked if they learned anything about girls and how hormones affect them. I thought for sure he was going to tell me something that embarrassed him greatly – which was, of course, why I was asking in the first place. Instead he said “Let’s just say there was a lot of ‘Huh??? What’s that???’ followed by Ms. Miller (a first year teacher who was just married over Spring Break) saying ‘Ask your parents when you get home’.”
