Monday, March 31, 2008

There's a BABY in Mommy's tummy!!!

So proclaims Jonathan, frequently and with great astonishment. He is fascinated by this fact, and frequently asks questions about the baby. He wants to know what her name is (we don't know the gender yet, but Jonathan is quite sure that she is a girl) and how big she is, and when she will come out. I got a few magazines with in utero pictures for him and he spends a surprising amount of time looking at them. Today he was looking at a photo of a woman in labor (pushing) and wanted to know why she was so sad. I told him that she wasn't sad, she was just working really hard to push her baby out. Of course then he wanted to know how the baby would come out. Sometimes I've worried about those kind of questions - they so often come out of nowhere - and wondered if I'd be able to answer them well. But I was really happy with the conversation today. It was good, and age-appropriate, and semi-clinical without being embarrassing. Jonathan was satisfied and I feel like we've started the first step down the road of good communication on an often tricky subject.

2 comments:

Cowen Family said...

Emily, I know you guys are all readers--pick up the book Hello Baby by Lizzy Rockwell. My friend/chiro's wife suggested it and Matthew is not really into it, in fact I think he could really care less about it, but it is a great book for little ones with lots of questions. Let me know what you think! It even follows up after the baby and talks about Mommy nursing the baby--I appreciated that too!

ruth said...

I wasn't too embarrassed about talking about how the babies come OUT. It was when they started asking how they got IN there that I turned red. Of course, I told them that God made the baby grow in there. Then when an unwed teen got pregnant, they wanted to know how you could keep God from making a baby grow in you. Oy vey.