From Working Mom to WORKING Mom!

So, I am minding my own business trying to be the best mom I can be to my boys. The other night, after they went to bed I began downloading pictures from my camera onto the computer. As the pictures are downloading I see that there are some wayward, random pictures taken and figure Noah must have found the camera and decided to try his hand at yet another artful collage of pictures. I see pictures of the ceiling fan, Blue's Clues on TV, the window, the coffee table, and then OMG!!....NO IT IS NOT!!!  I anxiously wait for all the pictures load but DREAD what I am about to see.

As I look though the photos it appears that my sweet little five year-old son as done some exploratory investigation of his own body. Yep, right there in plain sight and I am staring at my son's private parts on my computer!!! Not one photo but more like five or six....from different angles. I felt as though I had been hit by a Mack truck. That is the LAST thing I expected to see when viewing his latest photography collage. Now what?!

He is FIVE years-old, I am not ready for this!! Now I know this is just innocent curiosity and it is very age appropriate for this age. But my first instinct was to SCREAM at the top of my lungs for him to get out of bed and explain this to me! I also would like to reach into the computer and pull out any and all photos. If these pictures got into the wrong hands, it could be really bad. I waited for my husband to come downstairs and I tried to tell myself to calm down, this is not as bad as it looks. After a few minutes I returned to my senses and realized that it is normal for a kid to be curious.....MY kid just happened to document his curiosity with a camera!!!

Did I mention the kid is five years-old and WE ARE NOT READY FOR THIS?! Really I know it isn't that big of a deal but IT IS!!! This just snuck up on us. Here I am minding my own business, being a mom and then BAM!! It snuck up on me like a lion pouncing on a poor unsuspecting mouse! It was not on my radar for being a possibility in the near future. I guess I just chose not to think about it and thought it wouldn't happen.....EVER.

Once my husband saw it, we sat dumbfounded in front of the computer...feeling numb....likely thinking, what do we do now??

So now what.....sleep....that is what I need, I just need to sleep on it. I will be more rational in the morning. And I was.  Instead of yelling and screaming at him for being naturally curious about is body, I would talk to him, calmly.  The next day, after finding many things I HAD to do like, washing clothes, cleaning the kitchen, washing the floor, with a tooth-brush...twice, I sat him down.  I told him that I was looking pictures on the camera and saw that he took some of his body parts. The poor kid looked terrified. I told him it was okay to be curious about his body and that if he has any questions he could always ask Mommy or Daddy. I also told him that his private parts are private and not meant for others to see including taking pictures of them. I told him that if he wanted to look, it needed to be done privately in his own room but to leave the camera out of it and to remember that he could come to me or Dad anytime he had questions. He said okay and I could see the worry melt away from his face.

So that is how I handled it. Hopefully it was okay. What would you do? Anything different?

So I decided to embark on our the next home improvement project. The playroom makeover gave me the urge to add more color to our house. My 2 year-old son's room has been severely neglected and has never been really decorated.  Before he was born, I just decided to re-use the set that I used for his older brother when he was a baby (minus the paint). So his room looked pretty bare bones especially since we took the crib down (he was caught almost climbing out of it when he was 16 months) and got rid of his changing table because he was always climbing on that too. We decided one broken collar-bone from falling off of it was enough, so we sold it.

Anyway, back to the project. Here is the before picture of what it looked like: