the rules of abstinence.

i love having heart to heart conversations with my kids. while i don't really like the whole "i have to talk to them about sex, relationships, etc" thing... i still do it.

i'm a big advocate of telling teenagers to use condoms. for most people, that sounds obvious, but it seems that many christians preach one message and one message only and that's abstinence. i've read that the percentage of teen pregnancies amongst christians (and also abortion out of fear of telling their parents who are so anti-pre-marital-sex they would probably die if they found out their kid had sex) is actually quite high.

so we have the "don't be so fooled into thinking you will be able to always maintain abstinence" kind of talks at my house.

this makes arjun EXTREMELY uncomfortable. okay, rightfully so. he's a 15 year old nepali boy who's had one kiss in his entire life and here he is listening to this white lady preach about condoms. it's enough to make any boy squirm.

"didi, you always think negatively! i am not going to do this!"

"i'm not thinking 'negatively', i'm thinking realistically. and i don't mean today or even tomorrow. i mean in five years when you are twenty and some really hot girl comes up to you and wants to. then what are you going to do?"

"you know didi, in that situation, when I want to, but I don't REALLY want to (i.e. the conflict of the conscience and desire), what I am going to do is just try to run away from that girl, then go and smoke a lot of ganja and then I will most likely forget that I ever wanted to do that thing with that girl."

Hmm... this sounds like a Colorado sponsored abstinence plan!!! :)