The Pen15 Club

Remember that club? C'mon, you were in middle school and a friend (or enemy or frenemy) said, "Wanna be in the pen 15 club?" You thought "weird, but whatever" and then they took permanent marker and wrote pen15 on your hand but it looked much more like the word penis than pen15. I feel like I have not escaped the pen15 club, and while I enjoy it most of the time, I am tired of penis being a topic of conversation.

We debated and debated whether or not we should get Monkey boy circumcised. We knew that, basically, it's a cosmetic thing and while we did not fall for scare tactics of several sites (check out circumcision.org), we did know that there were reasons we did not want it. Ultimately, we decided to go ahead with it and noticed from the beginning that Monkey seemed to have a lot of extra skin and rarely did we see the head of his penis. We brought it up but several pediatricians said once his fat pad went down, so would the skin. Not so, now we are in a situation where, coming up on his 2nd birthday, we are going to have to have surgery to get it fixed because it will look somewhere in between circ'd and not circ'd. Great. We wanted to do Monkey's before he's in underwear. A diaper just seems so much more comfortable in this situation...

On to Bubsy. When he was born the dr's thought he had hypospadias. Basically this means his hole is not at the end of his penis but someplace else. It also means he has a partial natural circ. which is where he did not develop a full foreskin. Really, more penis issues? So, at the time of birth we opted not to circ because the foreskin he did have would need to be used to readjust the hole. We went to a surgeon's consult and found out if he did have hypospadias; it was very mild but would not need surgery. The surgeon thinks that the dr. assumed it was hypospadias because of the partial natural circ. which indicative of it. Anyway, in a few weeks Bubs will be going to surgery to have his circ. at 4 months of age and if anything does need to be repaired it will be. We decided this needed to be done because what foreskin is there does not retract and, therefore, we cannot keep it as clean as possible. It is only covering one edge of his penis and is not
 a normal foreskin by any means.

While we were going to just leave Monkey boys, now that his brother will be full circ'd, we wanted to make sure they looked the same. I know that's sounds like a dumb reason at first but really, if you are a boy and had brothers, did you not take baths together, play "swords" (my husband told me all about it, men...you are caught!), and see each other's penis? I just don't want either one to have a complex.

So, over the next month or so, life will be marked by surgeries and taking care of sore peepees. Who would have thought that at age 27, I was still a member of the Pen15 Club, even if it's not scrawled across my hand in black permanent marker.

Cheers to the Pen15 club!