If you've been dreading the moment when your little one asks "Where do babies come from?", then How Are Babies Made? could be an ideal starting point.
Conception
Nothing too graphic (this isn’t a sex education text), just basic facts. The woman has tiny eggs inside her body, and the man has sperm. To start the baby, the egg and the sperm have to join together inside the part of a woman’s body called the womb. Depending on the type of sperm, the baby will be either a boy or a girl.
At first the baby is very tiny and you can’t tell just by looking at a woman if she is pregnant. But her body is changing on the inside, getting ready to take care of the baby for 9 months. She might feel tired, or possibly sick, and because she will be sharing everything she eats and drinks with the baby, it’s a good idea to eat lots of healthy food. Once the baby gets a bit bigger, a tube connecting the baby to the mother grows, which allows the mother to share the food and drink. Two illustrations show what the baby looks like at six and eight weeks, slowly getting more recognizable as a real little person.
Baby’s Getting Big
The baby starts to show as a bump in the mother’s tummy after about four months. Most of the time it is asleep, but when it is awake it moves around. It can also hiccup and suck its thumb. As it grows the baby is protected by the liquid inside the womb, a bit like carrying a goldfish inside a plastic bag; if you accidentally bump into the bag, the fish is still safe. By six months the mother can feel the baby move inside her, wriggling about or rolling over.
Gradually the baby’s senses start to work. It can hear sounds like the mother’s heart beating.. The baby can also see light and colours coming in through the mother’s skin, like the light of the sun. By seven months the lungs are developing so the baby can breathe outside of the mother. By nine months the baby is taking up a lot of room inside the mother, and she feels very full and a bit uncomfortable. Imagine carrying a bag of groceries around all the time and not being able to put it down!
The Baby Is Ready
The mother’s body tells her it’s time for the baby to be born. The womb starts to squeeze, pushing the baby out through the opening between the mother’s legs. When the baby finally comes out things are very new and different. The first thing the baby has to do is breathe on its own, so it has a great big cry to fill up its lungs with air. For the first few weeks the baby doesn’t really do much aside from eat and sleep, and wriggle its body around as it gets used to its new world.
With useful lift-the-flap pictures and a child-friendly text, How Are Babies Made? (Usborne Publishing Ltd, 1997, ISBN 0 7460 2502 5) is a handy little reference book to explain the basic facts of life.
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