Nature vs. Nurture

EDITOR'S NOTE: THIS POST BORDERS ON THE INAPPROPRIATE. BUT WE THINK IT IS CRAZY FUNNY, AND WE HOPE YOU ARE NOT OFFENDED :)

When I was in college, we called it the sleep button.

It was that magical place, just below the belt line, somewhere between your belly button and your nether regions. You'd slouch on the couch to watch David Letterman, slide your hand just under your belt - and fall asleep. Instantly.

Sometimes the sleep button was so effective that you'd be asleep before Letterman got to the Top 10 list.

And on any given night, you were likely to find one of the three young men who shared our apartment snoring on the couch with his hand on the sleep button.

This phenomenon is but one of the many mysteries of men that have sparked the classic Nature vs. Nurture argument at my house. It goes something like this:

"Look what you've taught your son to do," my wife might say. "He's sleeping with his hand in the front of his pants!"

So I did look, and Jack was indeed asleep in his swing, in front of the TV, with his hand in his pants. It was like a preview of his college apartment 20 years from now.

"I didn't teach him that," I'd say defensively, secretly wishing I could have taught him that. "It must be natural."

He fell asleep in front of the TV. With his hand on the sleep button. Manly. Perfect.

But it gets better, and more primal.

We learned the hard way that changing boys' diapers is operationally different than changing girls' diapers in at least one important way. With our girls, we just took the diaper off, performed the open-air clean up, and put on the new diaper.

Those of you with boys are already smirking. You know that when we used this approach with our boys, they peed on us, on their changing table, and often, on their own faces.

There was another peculiarity we discovered during the diaper changing, though. Luke just can't take his hand off of it. He grabs it, he pulls it. In some ways, he really is not very nice to it. And he giggles the whole time. He loves it.

Same thing during bath time. He sits up in the sink with his hand under the water, and he just laughs and laughs. We have to physically remove his hand from it in order to get him dressed.

I'm a baseball fanantic, so I'm open to the possiblity that some of this, ahem, adjusting could be learned. But not by an 8-month-old baby. It has to be natural.

Triplets are a great opportunity for biological and sociological experiments. They are all growing up together, in the same environment and with the same influences. So we should be able to draw certain inferences from their behavior.

As a 36-year-old man, here are some of the inferences I've drawn from my boys:

We didn't 'learn' to fall asleep in front of the TV. We didn't 'learn' to put our hands in places they ought not be, at least in polite company. It's nature, not nurture.

My boys taught me that. Thank you so much boys.