The Secret Life of Birds

Around once every two weeks or so I get a call from Jacob and Hannah's school around lunch or mid-afternoon. When I was still teaching, the call was usually for supply work; however, I haven't been in the classroom since early October so those calls have all but disappeared. Now when the phone rings, and I see the school's number on display, I know that someone is sick, hurt or a cause of some concern. Truthfully, every time I see the school number I feel a little dismayed at what news is about to be delivered. The phone calls asking me to fetch a sick child, more times than not, come when a younger sibling is asleep, I am still in my pajamas or there are muffins in the oven. The rest of the time the phone calls tend to come just as I have hit the doze stage of an afternoon nap. (I keep the phone next to me so that I can check if it is indeed the school phoning and, therefore, I need to answer.) Well, last week at exactly 2:21pm just as I had started to drift into a catatonic state, I was jolted from my Lazy Boy by a call from the twins' teacher. Bless her soul, the first thing she said was, "Don't worry, no one's hurt." I am truly thankful for such an opening line because when the phone rings in concert with the wail of ambulance sirens on the main road, I do feel a little nervous.
She then went on, "I'm calling about Jacob's Home Journal."
The Home Journal is a source of much frustration in our house. It is due every Monday and the twins are required to write about their weekend, events in their lives and so on. I suppose it is a practice in writing freely so as to gain comfort with the written word. They are also permitted to include procedural writing which has led to such enlightening entries by Jacob such as "How to pack a backpack":
1. You get your backpack
2. You put your lunch in
3. You zip your backpack.
You get the picture.
Anyway, Mrs. B said, "At first I was going to let this go but..."
"Yes." Feelings of impending doom.
"Jacob has been quite clearly copying from texts and using them as his entries."
Secretly feeling that the news is not that bad, "Oh, we'll talk to him."
"As I was saying, I was going to let this go but when he decided to give me a full sex education course in the reproductive life of birds, I decided I had to phone you."
I have to tell you that the teacher was definitely laughing at this point. "He used quite the words and I really didn't know that birds did that sort of thing."
My mind, at this point, began searching through its archives trying to figure out from which text this information came. As I rifled through my mental rolodex I stopped at a thin text given to Jacob in February called "So Many Ways to Reproduce." Ah, yes that must be the one. Why had I let him have this? Why hadn't I vetted it properly? I got off the phone and found the text in a jumble of books and skimmed its contents looking for ducks. And then I found it. And I began to laugh and tears began to stream down my face as I read what Jacob had so carefully copied into his Home Journal and innocently passed into his teacher. I called my parents to read them the offending lines but I could hardly speak for laughter. The most I will tell you is that the entry was titled: "These One Have Intimate Encounters".
Enough said.
As Mrs. B said, "Let's get back to gr. one entries." And, as Dave said in reference to our province's premier who recently introduced a since nixed sex-ed program whose intent was the sexualization of our young children, "Dalton McGuinty's got nothing on you, Elena."