by Sophie Cooke

Created on: February 27, 2009

When I was 8 that was my job. I'm being serious!

I haven't talked about this for years, but the subject was here. You see, a little boy my mother looked after had just discovered his penis, and she was determined to stop him playing with it.

"Stop it!" hadn't done the job. Nor had explanations about it not being very nice (the playing, not the penis!). So, in desperation, she had said to me "Soph, make sure he doesn't play with his you-know-what".

An 8 year old girl knows what a "you-know-what" is ("but why didn't you call it a nozzle like we do at school?"), but not how to stop a boy from touching it!

So she (me) tries explaining to a 4 year old boy that it's only there to help him pee and is not to be touched or it might fall off and he'd be left in her position of being able to sit down to 'go'. No luck.

So she tries asking him why he feels such a frequent need to re-arrange it.

"It feels good".

"Well it feels good to eat ice-cream, but we only do it once a week!".

No luck.

So she bribes him. Yes, an 8 year old trying to bribe a 4 year old.

You may wonder why I was so concerned. Well, I think because I had been allocated a 'job' which I had to prove myself with.

I couldn't bribe him with money so I tried offering him sweets. (I don't remember where I found them.) I do remember that he decided each sweet only respresented a certain amount of time, so every so often I had to give him another one or he'd touch 'it' again. So, hardly any luck.

By this time, I'd learnt (from my schoolmates) that little boys regularly 'played with their nozzles'. (It was a few years before I learnt that bigger boys did too!) My best mate suggested we - well I better not tell you what her first suggestion was - but her 2nd was that we handcuff him, but I was sure that would only persuade him to use double the effort on making the penis excite him.

I know I seem to be making fun of a serious subject, but I suppose that to an 8 year old, the 'job' was more an amusing challenge than a deadly serious task. I should add that I had strict instructions not to touch 'it' myself, just in case you thought I was turning into a female paedophile!

But help came from an unexpected quarter: an older girl at school. She was telling her mates how she had looked after her brother, including during the 'yucky" moments when he'd insisted on playing with himself. So she'd found all sorts of other things for him to play with instead.

When I got home I found balls and bells and rubber ducks and toy boats and goodness knows what else to for him to play with. And they kept him busy. The only trouble was that I had to check from time to time that he didn't become bored with his new possessions.

But he then didn't have time to play with his nozzle. And when he played with his balls (I mean the coloured hand-held ones l'd given him), bells, and ducks, people were more likely to pay attention to him and not give him time to think about his penis.

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