Girls in Their Underwear Taking Over the World

My 6-year-old has a bit of a fixation with girls' underwear. Is this a normal phase? (It's not one they put in the parenting books!)

This afternoon we played with our Cars movie cars, and one of the characters was at first capturing everyone else, and then suddenly he began to put purple girls' underwear on all his prisoners (this part is all imaginary, mind you -- the prison was made from Magnetix), and then it became an underwear store for the rest of the cars, with the prisoners now being models for all the different styles. One car ordered underwear with decals of underwear on it! Yikes.

That was probably my fault. I know he thinks underwear is funny, so yesterday I pointed out a drawing in a book we were reading, a little girl holding her dress up above her waist so you can see her panties.

Did I think that out first? Uh, no. Another brilliant parenting moment by moi.

"Why is she doing that?" DB asked after he stopped laughing. Well, the drawing shows break time at preschool, and the 2 kids to one side of this character have obviously just used the bathroom (one is getting his overalls snapped and a second is drying her hands on a towel). So I think that girl is next in the bathroom and she's getting ready.

And, preschoolers do that -- they don't know not to yet; in fact we had 2 of them in the front row of the winter concert hike their skirts -- so I think the artist was just being realistic. It's subtle, she's in the back of the picture (the main focus is on the 8 or so characters in the foreground having their snack).

But he really liked it ... to the point where tonight at bedtime he asked me, "Can you show me the picture of the girl in her underwear again?"

We looked at it again, and then he asked me, "Mommy, can you give me something to think about so I don't think about girls in their underwear, taking over the world? Because when I'm bored I think about that."

I made a suggestion based on the scenes we watched tonight from the Cars movie. But what on earth am I supposed to do with that knowledge about what's going on inside my son's head???

I did reassure him that girls and boys go back and forth liking and not liking each other and also noted that I didn't expect him to be thinking about that type of thing until oh, 7th or 8th grade.