Sex Ed Gets Visual

Arabella, now 6 years old, tends to catch on to things late, but once she gets the idea she is all over it. With interest.

Last week we were headed to the babysitters house to drop off her sister when A asked where babies come from. We've already discussed this before, but I just briefly reviewed:

The egg and the sperm meet in the mommy's uterus and a baby grows.

Yeah yeah, she remembered all that. What she wanted to know was how they get there.

Um... Well, the egg is already there, inside the mommy's body, and the sperm comes from the daddy...

Yeah? How does it get in there then?

... Well, the daddy puts his penis inside the mommy's vagina, and that gets the sperm to the uterus to meet up with the egg (whew)

There was silence for a moment, then A asked "how does the penis get inside there?"

It just does. that's what it's there for, it's a sperm delivery system.

I could tell she was still working on that one, but I wasn't going to go into more detail unless she asked. We got about another block before she expressed her dissatisfaction and asked "can kids watch?"

Um, no. That's private. And for adults. (Why the hell isn't there a Dr. Seuss book for dealing with this stuff?)

Like I said, once she gets an idea she's all over it.

*ps. The book "Amazing You: Getting Smart About Your Private Parts," by Gail Saltz, is an excellent book about body parts and babies that leaves out the sex parts of procreation. It's good for preschoolers, but obviously my soon to be first grader has outgrown it.