My kid knows how babies are born now. Crap.
Thankfully, she doesn’t yet know how babies are MADE. Because she didn’t ask about that. And I’m all for being honest with her and answering all her questions, but I’m not going to answer questions she hasn’t asked yet.
My standard answer of how she “got borned” was no longer satisfying her. She knew she had been inside me but yesterday she was adamant about knowing how exactly she got out.
Thankfully I had anticipated this conversation happening before too long and bought a book that we could read together. In case you are wondering, it’s called It’s NOT the Stork! and it’s especially for kids her age, and I think it’s perfect for this. It’s written in exactly the tone you’d want it to be in, and all the images are drawn, not photos, and it’s not graphic at all. It even touches on IUI and IVF as means of getting pregnant. And it includes a good section on “okay touches and not okay touches” which I appreciated. We had talked about this before and I certainly don’t want to beat her over the head with that message, but in this context it seemed to fit well.
I had read through the book when it arrived so when we were looking through it last night I was able to skip over the parts about sex, erections, and eggs and sperm meeting. We went straight from what her girl parts ALL are, inside and out, to how the baby looks inside, that the baby is not actually in the mommy’s stomach, and then on to birth.
It wasn’t so bad. But then again, it wasn’t the whole thing. I have no doubt that it won’t be very long before the little wheels start turning and she wants to know how the baby gets in there. But as of last night, she wasn’t worried about that. So I’ll cross that next bridge when I come to it.
My biggest fear now is that she’ll go telling everyone at school what she knows. I told her not to do that, explaining that it’s her friends’ parents’ job to talk about this with their kids, not hers, and told her if she wants to talk about it more or ask any questions to come to me, or her dad or her step-mom.
Her main takeaways? Vaginas are cool and belly buttons are funny. She’s right on both counts.
