Coco… rico?

(please click on the picture to see it bigger)

NB: En francais allez voir au clair de la lune

The miracle of life, and of course what happens prior to it, represents one of the most disturbing and thorny subjects of discussion between parents and children. The majority of parents could never escape from that fearful philosophical question:

“Daddy! Mummy!, how are babies made? “

A lot of images are welcome to make the subject more poetic. My mother wove a creative patchwork, connecting all the innocent legends she learned in her childhood : Daddy puts into the ground the pink or blue seed which is inside his willy, Mummy waters it with love, after nine months, a baby is born, a girl in a rose, a boy in a brussel sprout. I recognize in this last distinction my mother’s little jibe of feminism and a large part of her national pride. (She is Belgian!)

This patently unrealistic description of life’s mystery convinced Coco, for a short while, but had unexpected consequences too: haunted by the loss of his so precious seed, he didn’t want to go to the little boy’s room for an entire day. With the aim of testing the truthfulness of my mother’s explanation in an interested way, he kept blue and pink sugared almonds in a box, expecting for some kind of delicious multiplication.

But seeing that nothing happened, he finally decided to test another explanation he saw on television.In this experiment, over a few days, Coco remained seated on his bed, in an apparently deep meditative posture. As I have mentioned previously, any silence from Coco announces a problem, and this time was no exception. But the object of the catastrophic events was not so obvious: at least, Coco thinking in his room is not alarming in itself, maybe a new philosopher was being born.After all, these meditations would have impressed Buddha himself, Coco, maybe having reached nirvana, decided to return to his typical boisterous life.

Finally, one week later, my mother found the real story. As she was cleaning the bedroom, she was assailed by a very strong and horrible odour. After a meticulous inspection of the bedroom, she unfortunately understood that this son will be neither a great philosopher, nor an anthropologist: inside a little bag hanging from the sunny window, coiled up inside some welcoming cotton wool, two eggs were waiting…Coco confessed in a perfectly reasonable voice that he wanted to have chicks. He first kept the eggs stolen from the fridge under the eiderdown which he was sitting on in order to heat them. But in the TV programme he saw, it was made clear that it must be for such a long time! So, logically, he wrapped the eggs up in cotton wool and left them by the sunny bedroom window.

Logical!

The only problem was that he chose hard-boiled eggs…