As a mother...

We all curl our toes when we think about the "sex" talk. We paint these pictures in our minds of how we'll stutter and avoid it until the last possible chance and then hopefully just pass the whole thing off to the "sex ed" teacher in sixth grade. Okay, not all of us. I'm the lone ranger who flew by the seat of my pants and just knew that if I answered every question that came to me completely giving no more and no less than they asked, it would all go off famously... and... so far, it's going great. When Eden was four I got pregnant with Nick and she wanted to know how a baby got in there. I got the cutest little book that was called "How Babies are Made" and read it to her several times. It was so cute, completely avoiding sex, just showed a cartoon picture of sperm and egg saying they join together in a mothers womb and then they grow into a baby. She was fascinated with sperm and eggs, thinking it was amazing that it took a piece of a mom and a dad and they joined together to make a new person. It was all she wanted to know. A couple of days ago we were packing up her room for the move and she said. "Mom, how old are boys and girls when they get their sperms and eggs?" I had to have the question repeated because I had been very engrossed in whether to keep all 487 stuffed animals or just 162 of them. Once I hit the reset button I was fine though.
"Oh, you were born with eggs, all of the eggs you'll ever have are already inside you... but that's a good question about sperm, I guess I forgot. I'll check that out. Why?"
"Oh, I just wondered if that's why Abby and Ethan can't take a bath together."
When something has been germinating in a completely innocent mind, it can be very hard to grasp where it's going.
"Hm, what do you mean Eden? I'm not quite getting it."
"Oh, well Kait and Nick still take a bath together sometimes but Abby and Ethan don't so I thought maybe if they were in the bath, the sperm could swim over to Abby and she could get pregnant."
This was very enlightening and I was very glad that I had pursued this conversation.
I smiled and said "No, you have to have actual sex to get pregnant, you can't get sperm out of the water."
She nodded and said "ooooohhhh."
I wondered if the next question would come. We've come that close before and she'd never pursued it.
After a minute it came "so what exactly is sex?"
I said "the penis goes inside the vagina and releases the sperm, and if the girl is ovulating, the sperm fertilizes the egg and a girl gets pregnant. So you see, it's not easy to get pregnant, you have to have sex, and that's why God made it that way. Sometimes, if people have sex with someone who they aren't married to, they can get pregnant and have no daddy for their baby. God's plan for a family is that every child gets to have both a mommy and a daddy, and it's beautiful. So, you should only ever have sex with one person, like me."
She nodded very seriously and said "Daddy."
I decided to go ahead and explain when a girl could get pregnant since it was hand in hand with the rest and was after all, the original question. "And, a girl cannot get pregnant until she has a period."
"What's a period?"
"It's what I have each month when I bleed. It's an egg that wasn't fertilized by a sperm. Every month a woman ovulates which means she produces an egg and if a sperm doesn't fertilize it during ovulation, she has a period about two weeks later. A period starts when you're 12 or 13."
She sat quietly thinking about everything I said and said "okay, I get it."
No embarrassment, no blushing. Nothing. It was strictly a scientific question for her. I decided that it was nice that she asked me before all of the boy crazy stuff started. It seems to be so much easier to just add a little piece of information to the stack as she asks. Hopefully it will all end well. We'll see. I really should have read a book or something. Too late to second guess now! LOL! Btw, to my mommy friends, I did also tell her that it's not appropriate for kids to talk about, and each parent tells their own children about how babies are made in their own way.