Friday, September 29, 2006

The Birds and the Bees

You know, I thought I'd have more time for this discussion to come up, but nope. The Beebs was a lot more interested than I thought she'd be in the book, A Child is Born, that I had out to peruse. I should have known that my daughter would have automatically inherited my curiosity. As soon as she saw it in the pile of books, she picked it up and started flipping through it.

In the middle of a gaming session.

My friend K noticed and pointed it out, just in case I wanted to monitor her reactions to the final few pages. The photographs are real, brilliant and show everything you'd ever want to know about what happens during development and birth. So there Caitlin was, poring over images of women giving birth, with assorted infants crowning, head out, body out. It led for a very interesting conversation for the past hour.

Amazingly enough I got to skip over how the sperm got to the egg, but I did explain that the sperm comes from the man, the egg from the woman, and they get together to form the baby. Talking about zygotes and blastulas is a little beyond her at the moment. The pictures of the initial stages of development are awesome though, and helped to explain how we don't look like anything remotely human at all until much later. Generally around 8 weeks is when the fetus starts looking human. From her great age of 5 years old, Caitlin was fascinated. We even talked a little about artificial insemination.

She did get a little upset when I mentioned cesarean sections, worrying about the blood and how it would hurt. I gently let her know that the doctors take care of it (me) and give you drugs so you don't feel a thing. I told her all about daddy, Aunt J and Grammy all being right there waiting for her to be born. She's now very excited about getting to see her future sibling's ultra-sound and listen to the heart beat, when the time comes (No, nothing to see here. Move along.). I'm so glad that she's excited, I can't hardly explain it.

What can I tell you? She's a helluva girl.

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