Booby

A whole year has gone by without me posting on my blog ....what can I say.... sheer laziness!

The world is in the midst of a quarantine, thanks to the scary coronovavirus! How’s the confinement going for you all? It’s not very different for me as I don’t go to work. But since many others aren’t going to work either I feel little less guilty about being the lazy ass that I am. To occupy a few minutes of your day, let me share something that transpired a couple of weeks back.


After finishing the chores for the evening for the day, I went and sat next to my eight-year-old son who was playing on the bed and saying something repeatedly sounding really cute. I decided to pay little more attention to what he was saying. I froze!! In his ‘cute’ high-pitched voice, he was saying “boobies!” …..”boobies!”…….”boobies!”

The horror!! A hundred things racing through my mind simultaneously, how does he know the word? Where did he learn it from? Who does he hang out with? Does he already know what it means? What if he says it in public? What if he says it in school? The principal was sure to call me (again), what if they think I taught him?…..  world’s worst mother!!!


I took a deep breath and asked him, “Beta, what are you saying?” and he repeated (in that cute high-pitched voice) “Boobies!”. I asked him what it was?

He then went on to tell me about a video he saw titled, ‘Kids say the darndest things’, in which a little girl is continually asking for “boobies” from her mother until the mother realises that the girl is asking for ‘BLUBERRIES’! 


I heaved a huge sigh of relief and did a little jig in my head “My son is still innocent!”


He went back to playing with his toy and also repeating “boobies”. I sought my phone and secretly recorded his voice and sent it to my husband and my sister. I aired my concerns to them about what people would think if he did this in public someday! My son wouldn’t exactly be asked to explain how he learnt that word. They would judge the parents. My sister, a birding enthusiast came to the rescue and said I could defend it by saying that he was actually talking about the birds! Yes!!..there is a species of tropical seabirds called ‘Booby’ found in the Galapagos Islands. 


I was going to delete the voice recording and then decided against it. I was going to save it along with the other video and audio recordings stashed under the label, ‘for the purpose of embarrassing your kid in the future’.


I rubbed my hands in glee, anticipating the day when I could share this with him and watch him cringe in embarrassment! Yup.. world’s worst mother!





P.S. I read the Wikipedia article on the birds and was not entirely flattered by the reason it got its name.

P.S. There’s a lot of information on the internet about how the female breasts came to be called ‘Boobs’... go ahead, some more trivia to occupy yourself with! 



 Stay safe! Stay healthy!