My wife and I home-school our four children.  It has, over the past two years, become a wonderful experiment in learning and family cohesion.  The children have bloomed academically, and even as we find bumps in the road, it always seems to get a little bit better.

However, now and then you get a real eye-opener.  Like today, when my daughter exhibited that her vocabulary far out-strips the average seven-year-old.  She was talking about her imaginary friends, the ones that make appearances every six months or so.  Their names are ‘Bloody and Daisy.’  She can’t describe them; that would put a hex on the wonder; it would put into concrete something so wonderfully ethereal and full of possibilities.  I understand.  She’ll describe Daisy’s dress as a lovely green affair, that flows when Daisy flies, but she won’t describe Daisy.

However, she did describe Bloody today.  Bloody has short, brown/black hair and is…I pause to take a breath…’a hermaphrodite, Papa.  Sometimes Bloody is a boy, and sometimes Bloody is a girl.’

A hermaphrodite?  As Scooby Doo would say, ‘ruh roh.’  Maybe her older brothers have been more of an influence than I realized.  They teach her all kinds of things, from history to science, personal combat to family stories, but this was a unique one.  A hermaphrodite?  Dear, dear Elysabeth.  I’m glad we’re homeschooling you.  That one would have raised some eyebrows at the Christian school, now wouldn’t it?

An education and a vocabulary are powerful.  They allow my eight-year-old boy to say he finds something ‘irksome.’  They teach my oldest boy, at 13, to connect the occipital lobe with vision, because oculus means eye in Latin.  They keep my 11-year-old male progeny looking for a way to marry magnets and perpetual motion.  But hermaphrodites?

What can I say.  She is God’s child.  He clearly has a plan for her that involves a sharp mind.  And after all, God certainly loves hermaphrodites, too.

But couldn’t Bloody have just been an anthropologist or cellist?

Have a fun day,

Edwin

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