Robyn and Lauren are obsessed with a CD set of children's animal songs we currently have in the car. It's a triple-pack, and each has her favourite disk ("Orange! I want orange! Pink's been on for years!") and her favourite tracks on each, known by number ("Number nine! Nine! Please can we have number nine! And then eight, 11 and three!"). Daniel only wants to hear Big Bad Wolf (track 1, pink disk, trust me).

Anyway, what disturbs me is that after I drop the girls at school (to the sound of the animals going in two by two, for instance) and go on to work, it's usually only after two or three kms of road have gone by that I realise the CD is still on, the current track has finished and I'm humming the introductory bars of the next one.

Shudder.

Speaking of the Big Bad Wolf song, did you know that the first little pig was very gay, and he built his house of hay?

Which led to Robyn asking me what gay meant, naturally as we were climbing out of the car at the doctor's parking lot at 3.50 in the afternoon, late for Lauren and Daniel's appointments (bulk medical appointments are very convenient).

So of course I told her there were two meanings; happy, merry, carefree, yadda, yadda, alternatively more usual and modern meaning, yadda, yadda, men who choose men rather than women to spend their life with, or vice versa, yadda, yadda. So far, so good. Easy really, as she's very comfortable with the concept (thanks gay friends), just hadn't attached the label 'gay' to it.

THEN she asked whether that made God cross.

Because So-and-so's mother says it makes God cross (So-and-so being Robyn's best friend).

Sigh. It's so much harder explaining prejudices to children than facts.

I hope for So-and-so's sake she doesn't grow up to be gay. Imagine having to deal with that reaction from your mother.