Why I Love Mornings

I was driving Jack and Jill to school this morning and, as usual, we were singing along to Radio Disney. We had taken a different route to school than normal because I realized once we were on the road that my tire was almost flat and I needed to get some air - STAT!

An aside: When I stopped at the gas station to get air, some jackass had parked his car right in front of the air thingy and I had to wait nearly ten minutes for him to get his sorry ass back to his car so I could get some air. This made my kids late to school. It also would have made me late for work, but Jack made sure that I was even later because he had forgotten to get a permission slip signed for a school-wide field trip. In the end, I was 45 minutes late to work. No one even noticed. Man, I love my job.

So, we're at a light that we're not normally at bopping along to some Hannah Montana song ... I hear Jill talking, but I'm not really paying attention to what she's saying. (Dude. Hannah Montana was on!) I hear her say something about drugs and my ears perk up. Not at the thought of drugs, but because my eight-year-old daughter is talking about drugs.

Then she says, "Mommy, what is prostitution?"

If I'd had anything in my mouth I would have spat the contents at my window.

Instead, I said, "What? What did you say?"

"What is prostitution? It's on that sign over there."

I look over to where she's pointing and see this house surrounded by signs and I find the offending sign.



"Oh, um ... It's when someone sells their body for money."

"They sell their body?! Like their arm?"

"Well, not exactly. It means that someone has sex with someone for money."

At this point I realize that I was just disqualified from winning the mother of the year award. What the hell was I thinking when I said that prostitution is when someone sells their body for money and that meant that they have sex with them? Did my brain malfunction for a minute there? Couldn't I have come up with something, anything other than it having to do with sex? Did I really want to have the sex talk over a 30 second time span and then send them off to school with all sorts of crazy visuals running through their head?

"I know that we haven't talked about what sex is yet, but we need to talk about it soon anyway. In the meantime, just know that prostitution is illegal and that's why the people in the house put up the sign."

"Okay," said Jill.

And she let the subject drop. Thank freaking goodness. Of course, she probably told everybody in her class about prostitution and I'll be fielding phone calls soon. But whatever. I didn't have to have the sex talk on the way to school.

The homeowner had an opinion or a warning about a lot of things. This one was my personal favorite:



You know, 'cause sometimes you just have to be reminded.

Edited to add: At home, I can actually see the pictures, but I can't see them at work. The first one says, "No Prostitution, No Drugs, No Crime" and the second one says, "Don't defecate in the shrubs"