Hey Kids, Let’s Talk About How Babies Are Made

While gathered around the dining room table, munching on some braaied goodies on Sunday afternoon, Seth suddenly drops a bomb shell.  As you do.  It went something like this…

“Girls, this afternoon, after we’re finished eating, we’re going to have a chat about how babies are made.”

Uh…  Say what now?

I mean, Seth and I’d spoken about it before.  But only in the sense that we casually mentioned the fact that being six and seven, they should know about this already.  And from us and not their ill informed school friends – but that was about it.  We certainly didn’t decide to do it that afternoon.

But there it was.  Hanging in the air.  I could almost see the words in a big speech bubble on the top of his head.

I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced this with kids, but if you mention that in a little while you’re going to do something, you might as well just commit to the fact that you’re actually going to do it right that second.  Not in the future as you had originally planned.  So instead of waiting until we were finished eating, we had the conversation while eating our Sunday lunch.  Not exactly how I’d envisioned it, but these parenting milestones hardly ever go the way I picture them, so it’s par for the course.

So, in an effort to keep it light and see what they know, I asked if they knew how babies got into the tummies of Moms.  Riya shouted out, “GOD PUTS THEM THERE WHEN YOU GET MARRIED!”.  Which is partially true and what we’d been telling them up until this pivotal point.

We followed up with, “But do you know how God gets them in there?”

No one knew.  And actually no one even seemed to care.

I’m paraphrasing somewhat, even though this happened yesterday, my memory is not what it used to be, anyway…  Seth persisted with “So, when a girl finds a boy that they love, they get married.  After they get married they have a baby.  How this happens is that the man puts his ***** into the woman’s ******.  Then inside the ***** is a seed and it goes into the Mommy’s tummy where there is an egg.  They join together and with God’s help, it turns into a baby.”

(We use the real words with our kids, but seeing as this is a parenting blog I don’t want any sicko’s with weird search terms to land up here so you can just insert the appropriate words in the gaps.  If you don’t know what those words are then, um…  You’re welcome to come chat to me about how it all works.)

We didn’t elaborate too much because we just wanted to cover the fundamentals.  I actually didn’t even want to have this conversation until they asked or showed some interest.  Keeping them children for as long as possible is important to me.  I really don’t want them to lose their innocence just yet.  But thanks to the World and what other kids are exposed to now, we didn’t want to wait.  Just in case.

Anyway, at this point I expected an onslaught of awkward questions.  Maybe some exclamations of “EEEWWW GROSS!” or blushing, silly giggles…  you know, something!

But guys, there was nothing!  Nothing.

Even when they asked their one and only question of the whole ordeal, “So did you do that?” and we answered that we had, there was no reaction.

They just accepted it and moved on with their lives.

I suspect that they’re still processing the information and that we’ll have many more conversations about this in the future.  But it was still so bizarre that a topic that we’d sort of avoided for a while was actually so easy to talk about.

Have you chatted to your kids about this?  How did it go?