BQ 87454 Where do babies come from?

[Shrinky Dink]

So, I'm curious where everyone first thought babies came from.

The stork seemed ridiculous to me because I had seen pregnant women before. Because I knew that babies grew in a woman's tummy, I figured that babies were like food and were conceived via french kissing. I thought, when you got married, your parents would tell you the special way to french kiss so the boy's spit would basically go down to a special 9 month tummy and the baby would grow in there. Since I knew about babies in the tummy and thought of them kind of like food, I figured they also came out the way food came out, the poop hole.

I'm not sure exactly when I was told about genitalia and sex (I was 9 at the oldest), but I probably held the food theory until then.

[Cognoscente]

Wow, 9 seems old. But now that I think about it, I was probably 7 or 8 at the youngest. Weird.

[bobtheenchantedone]

My parents checked out a book from the library when I was at least 5. I might have been six or seven. From that book we learned that "making love" made babies, and that making love was a naked parent activity (including drawings of a naked man and woman holding hands). It was trying to be all facts-of-life-y. Like, let's be honest and open about body parts and sex and stuff.

Despite that book being pretty upfront about a lot of things (sperm meets egg etc.) I still didn't really understand the PIV aspect of sex for another few years.

[Portia]

I wanted to be an OB-GYN so I had a medically accurate, and completely terrifying, view of human reproduction before the age of 6, with adult-oriented books and videos.

[Whistler]

I think I knew about "sperm" and "egg", but it was all very abstract to me until the sex education video we watched at school in 6th grade.

[NerdGirl]

I knew fairly early on, but with a lot of weird misconceptions about the actual logistics, including the idea that you didn't actually know if there might be a baby inside you, so you wore maxi pads so that the baby wouldn't fall in the toilet when you peed.

[Violet]

I think my favorite misconception I had was that men had cycles like women and they had to line up for an egg to be fertilized (it didn't help that all six children in my family were born at two times of the year).