Where I Explain the Birds & Bees & Dinosaurs & Monkeys

Lauren loves babies. Loves them. They're on her mind all the time. It's only natural then that I've spent quite a lot of time answering baby related questions. She knows, for example, that babies grow in a woman's uterus for nine months, then make their grand entrance into the world through the vagina. No big deal, we've never been shy about genitals around here.

It's kind of always bothered me, though, that she never thought to ask how the baby gets into the uterus to begin with. I mean, I know she's only six, but I do really want her to be a critical thinker, to have some degree of intellectual curiosity. Finally, it happened.

After you get married, how do you get the baby?

You mean, how do you start one growing?

Yes.

Well, first of all, lots of people do get married, but that's not a requirement. To start the baby growing-- are you ready for this-- a boy has to kind of poke his penis into the girl's vagina.

I stuck out a finger on one hand and pressed it against the fist I made with my other hand. Visual aids, people. I was bringing it.

Baby grows in the uterus. Nine months later, voila! Baby comes sliding right out of the vagina.

She thought about it for a minute. Then looked back and forth between me and MB.

Did Daddy put his penis in your vagina?

Yep.

She found this hilarious. I can't really blame her. The whole arrangement is absurd. And then she wanted a juice box.

Later she caught me off guard with follow up questions like:

How long do you have to keep the penis there? Mere seconds.

Does it tickle? Not exactly.

Here was the tricky one:

How do you get the grown-ups?

It took some mega probing to figure out what she really wanted to know. Turns out, she was basically asking the chicken and the egg question. If it takes two grown ups to make a baby, but you need a baby before you can have a grown up, how do you get any grown ups to make a baby? Impressive, right? My explanation was less so.

I asked her if she had heard of Darwin, which she hadn't, and things went straight down hill from there. Later that night she explained to MB how dinosaurs turned into frogs and frogs turned into monkeys and monkeys turned into people. Which I don't believe is 100% accurate. But that will have to do until she can find a responsible adult who can explain things properly.