Where Babies Come From: The Official Version

Sometime last week I was driving Luke and Max to tae kwon do. Luke asked Max, "If you're so smart, answer this. When you're a kid, where is your baby? Is it inside you somewhere, or do you just don't have one?"

I was still trying to figure out what this meant, when Max answered, "You just don't have one." Luke of course queried further about how you get your baby when you're grown up, then. Max told him, in perfect science geek style, "You have to mate." He followed this up with a scarily accurate description of reproduction that went something like this: "Females have eggs and males have sperm, and when you mate the sperm all race to the egg and the one that gets there first fertilizes the egg and grows into a baby."

No mention of how sperm is delivered to egg or where the mysterious egg is. Does Max know? I'm pretty sure he does, although later that day, after tae kwon do when I had taken them to the local diner for ice cream, Luke told me "Max and I have bums, and you and Mama have 'ginas." "We have bums, too!" I protested. "They're what we sit on!" Max felt it necessary to add that they're also where feces comes from (his word, not mine).

I didn't butt in during their conversation because they weren't talking to me. Yesterday, however, while we were cleaning up after making cupcakes, Luke asked me again where your baby is when you're a kid. It's very interesting to me how he's phrasing this. I know it's not very different from "Where do babies come from," but it feels more personal, like he's wondering where HIS baby is. This makes me happy and gives me a glimmer of hope that perhaps he's already beginning to plan my grandchildren.

So I stopped washing the dishes and sat down with him at the table. I started by asking him if what he wanted to know was where babies come from. He nodded. So then I told him that there were lots of different ways to GET a baby, but only one way to MAKE a baby. I told him that he did not have a baby inside of him, but that he had something called sperm that could help make a baby. I told him that girls have little eggs inside them that are like seeds and that those also make babies. He said, "I didn't know babies came from seeds," which I know may be making the more literal-minded of you wince, but I was just going for the gist of it here. Mainly I wanted to communicate that this was all fine to talk about and kind of fun (still thinking of those grandchildren, I guess). So I told him his sperm were like little "squigglies" and I illustrated with squiggling fingers and I said that when a man and a woman decide to have a baby, the man puts his squigglies inside the woman and they all race to find the egg, because the first one who gets there joins with the egg and becomes a baby.

He thought about this for about a second and then said "I just have one question," in a voice that he uses when he's kind of nervous. "How come there's no boys in this family?" I asked him if he was wondering where we got the squigglies that helped to make him, and he said yes. I told him that some people, when they grow up, fall in love with and want to marry a boy, and some people fall in love with and want to marry a girl. I told him that mama and I fell in love with each other and wanted to marry each other. Then we really wanted to make him, I told him, but we had a problem: mama and I both had eggs, and we didn't have any squigglies! I told him that we sent away to a place called a sperm bank where some men gave their squigglies away to people who needed them to make a baby. Then we put the squigglies inside of mommy and one of them met with my egg and became him! I told him THAT was when he was inside of me, but that he hadn't been in me since I was a little girl. So there was a man, I told him, who helped mommy and mama have you by giving us his squigglies.

Then we talked a little bit about people who adopt babies, like C and N, and Luke said "Because they couldn't take care of them, so they gave them to B and J to take care of them," and I confirmed that this was true. He said, "I know. I talked to mama about it." Then I told him that he can always ask me about anything, that this is okay to talk about, and that I'll always tell him the truth."

So this morning Luke was in my bed when he woke up, and we started talking. He told me, "I have a question about the squigglies. What about twins?" I was pretty surprised. I'd even mentioned to Teen, when I relayed our conversation to her last night, that I hadn't gone into the fertilization of twins or anything. But here he was asking. So I said, pretty gamely, if I do say so myself, "Well, there are two ways twins are made..." and then explained identical versus fraternal. At the end of this, I told him that mommy and mama had some papers that told a lot about the man that gave us the squigglies for him, and that if he ever wanted me to I would show them to him. He nodded, but didn't seem interested in this now. He had already moved on to something else. "Can we make some monster spray?" He's been dreaming about "skeletons, goblins and ghosts." He loves spooky, scary stuff so much, but sometimes I think he overreaches. I told him, "Maybe we should tone down the spookiness of your pirate party," and he nodded and tucked his head into my chest.

Then he told me he felt sick, and I felt his head and sure enough he has a fever. A couple of minutes later, Teo told me "I don't feel good." It seems amazing that this could be the first time in almost three years of having two children that they both came down with something simultaneously, but it is. So I have them both tucked into my bed and they're watching "Scooby-Doo Meets Batman" and drinking POG (Passion-Orange-Guava juice). I'm praying that this is just a high-fever-for-twenty-four-hours-or-so virus and not a throwing-up-and-diarrhea type virus.