Young Love: Our Saga Begins

I feel fortunate that my boys, so far, have very open, chatty personalities. They haven't yet demonstrated the need for privacy, or hiding things, or telling me to mind my own business. That is, until the other night around dinner time when Derek sidled up to me and whispered, "I have a secret, Mommy." Of course I asked what it was. He looked mildly exasperated and said, "I can't tell you!" I could almost hear the implied "Duh!" However, my son has proven many times over that he is incapable of bottling anything up for any length of time, so I just smiled in what I hoped was a gentle, understanding, motherly kind of way, and let it pass. The very next morning, in a transparent attempt to be sneaky and mysterious, he began another conversation, detailing which girls in his class "liked" which boys, and who had a "boyfriend/girlfriend". Nonchalantly, I asked if he had a girlfriend. "Yes, I like Nancy," he replied soberly, "and Kara is supposed to tell her for me in math class today." I bit back my first comment, which was "you're in 3rd grade, can't you wait until at least middle school for this nonsense?" Instead I took a moment to be grateful that he feels comfortable talking to me...and I can only hope that all his future secrets are this easy to extract!