How's It Hanging?

"Slightly disfigured, but thanks for asking", would be our 3 month old's response, if he could talk. And yes, the "IT" in question would be the "IT" that is the subject of the question "How's it hanging", though I can't imagine the origins of that question. I mean, isn't it kind of personal, and who really cares?

But I digress and feel the need to share with my fellow bloggers the woes of my youngest son's genitalia. Won't he love this particular post when he comes across it in 15 or 20 years as he is reading the "Da Da's Blog Scrapbook" that Mrs. Pheasantly Fascinating has asked that we keep for both boys?

Both our boys are circumcised. It was a decision that we sort of made on auto-pilot. We talked about it but there was no great debate and it seemed like the obvious choice to have it done.

When we had it done in the hospital for the littlest, everything was fine. We put the gooey gauze on it for the next week or so as instructed. The reddening went away and everything was looking copacetic except for one thing: the skin of the head was adhering to the shaft and wouldn't pull away.

We told the pediatrician who said it was no big deal. She prescribed us a steroid cream (okay, I don't like the sound of that) and told us to apply it daily and to work at the skin manually to try and unstick it.

As success has been non-existent, Mrs. Pheasantly Fascinating started driving down the Information Super Highway in search for, well, information.

OH MY GAWD....what a scary place the world of circumcisions gone wrong can be!!!

She read medical accounts of little ones whose little ones are less than what they should be. There was a photo she described to me as the child having just the skin showing. The actual penis had retracted and was now entirely inside the little guy.

Okay, so maybe a little stuck skin isn't a big problem. But aesthetically it makes it look funny. It looks neither circumcised nor uncircumcised. If the cream doesn't end up working we are going to ask the pediatrician if there are other options, including minor corrective surgery. Some of you might think that is a bit drastic if there is noting medically wrong. But, right or wrong, the normalcy of appearance of said body part is pretty significant in a young man's psyche. I might get backlash for having just said that, but my guess is that it won't becoming from the parents of boys.

Well, that's pretty much all I have for now on the subject, unless it was a bad idea to share this with the blogging community, at which point, I won't.