A Guide For Explaining To Your Kid Where Babies Come From

[CHILD’S NAME], come sit down. You’re old enough now that I wanted to talk to you about… where babies come from. A year ago you asked me, and I skirted around a real answer because frankly, I didn’t know. And I still don’t know! When I was your age they told us a bird came around every so often dropping babies from the sky and everyone unanimously agreed that was a fine thing for birds to do. No one questioned it! But you are five years old now. In many western cultures you would’ve been sent into the wild with a box of matches and a Billy Joel greatest hits CD months ago. In my eyes, you’re a man, and you deserve a man’s explanation.

[CHILD’S NAME]- in life, a woman and man will at some point find each other. Sometimes through a mutual friend, sometimes through an app on that machine you use for Angry Birds, sometimes through a dark room where the woman and man have been drinking “dizzy juice.” That’s right, the same dizzy juice mommy drinks during Scandal. Somewhere down the line, the woman and man decide to have fun with each other for anywhere between 3 to 3.1 minutes, and a week later the man gets a text suggesting that he might turn into a daddy soon. He searches frantically for the perfect response to convey his shock and speechlessness, and settles on the Macaulay-Culkin-Home-Alone-face emoji.

Now I wanna be completely honest with you [CHILD’S NAME], because here is where my understanding of the reproductive process comes to a screeching halt. At this point, I guess the woman swallows a balloon, and the gases from her stomach slowly inflate the balloon over the course of 9 months? Somewhere down the line she goes to a D-O- C-T-O-R, and says “Doc, you gotta help me, I messed up real bad, I swallowed a balloon.” Now, a bad doctor might give her the side-eye her and tell her she’s far too young to be playing with balloons in the first place. But sometimes, a doctor that’s not-so-judgmental will tell her that she can get into contact with a specialist… a specialist that can pop the balloon for her. At this point the guy might start to push for the balloon pop procedure: “My parents will kill me if they find out I helped you swallow a balloon! I’m not mature enough to handle a balloon. What if it floats away?” At this point the girl is completely within reason to slap the man. They wouldn’t even be in this mess if he’d hadn’t lied about wearing a jacket to the party supply store.

The woman now has a difficult decision to make. See, people all around the country are fighting over whether or not she should be allowed to pop the balloon! Dudes are making hastily-written signs and standing menacingly outside of Balloon-Coming-Soon clinics, threatening to KILL HER if she pops the balloon! “Maybe I can try and give the balloon to a nice gay couple,” she thinks. But they’ll be damned if they let gay people take care of a balloon! The doctor offers another alternative- he’s gonna hook her up with a magician that specializes in turning balloons into babies! It’s his only trick, but he’s pretty good at it. So the magician shuffles his deck of cards and asks her to pick a card, and she happens to pick the one with the baby on it. So he shuffles the deck again and he reaches into her vagina and pulls out the very baby she had on the card! Sometimes the idiot magician shows off and pulls 2, 3, hell, once the magician even pulled out EIGHT babies! Anyone with half a brain knows he’s cheating at this point, because there’s only 4 babies in a single deck, but the trick is so fascinating that you don’t even care. Plus they let you keep the babies!

In our case, your mother and I told the magician we would name the baby [CHILD’S NAME] and now here you are! Our lovely little [CHILD’S HAIR COLOR]-haired, [CHILD’S EYE COLOR]-eyed balloon [CHILD’S NAME]. Now go upstairs play with your Legos, ya little [PLAYFUL, POTENTIALLY-RACIST NICKNAME]. And put on some headphones. I’m gonna try to get another balloon in your mother.