Our nighttime ritual at the Chism house is that I get the boys ready for bed and then hand off to Brent so that he can read and pray with them. We used to take turns doing the reading and praying part but I had a tendency to fall asleep before the boys and crash for a few hours which meant that the night was a bust for getting chores and things done. So, Brent has taken over reading duties but he has been out of town recently so I have gotten this pleasure. Last night I was laying with the boys and we had just finished reading books and saying prayers but I was not quite ready to leave them so I hung around for a few minutes.
Somehow Will got on the subject of babies and where they came from. I got in a bit of a panic and thought that my idea of hanging around was no longer a great one! But, I decided that someone gets the heavy questions and I might just want to be the one to get them. Brent's parenting philosophy is a little less delicate than mine which is great in some instances but maybe not for the Birds and Bees conversation with a 7 and 4 year-old:) So, Will proceeds to explain to Sam that when people die they go to Heaven for 40 days until a mommy and daddy decide they want a baby and then at that time they go to be in the mommy's belly. (I think Will's school is putting WAY too much emphasis on recycling these days!) Anyway, when the baby is to be born the doctor gets the baby out of the mommy's tummy and cuts the thing that connects to the peenie. (Obviously Will knows something about the chord but we haven't really explained it well enough. All he has seen in his two baby brothers is that they come home with injured belly buttons and peenies. So, I think he believes the chord runs from the belly to the peenie and it clearly damages both ends.) He then explained that the doctor uses some sort of glue to fix it all.
Voila! That is how you get a baby! At least that is how my 7 year-old saw it yesterday and now my 7 year-old and 4 year-old both see it that way today:) And honestly, I just didn't have it in me to correct any of the story. Brent asked me why I didn't tell Will about Heaven and the whole non reincarnation thing. Well he obviously knows about Heaven and if I at that point, alone without a safety net, tried to say no to reincarnation, I know that I would have gotten the question of where babies really do come from. I mean I have answered that question already by saying that God gives mommies and daddies babies. I thought that was a good answer. Clearly I didn't figure that my son would see God as the master recycler and just send one, a used one, down from Heaven! So, I decided that for that moment in time, I was going to have to let this one slide. We'll let Daddy handle this one when he gets home, delicately or not so delicately, it lets me off the hook;)
