newborn baby--"about as big as your Molly Lou
doll"--the position of the baby--"all folded up like a little
Jack-in-the-box." Most conscientiously you leave an impression of the
naturalness of the birth process. Not for worlds would you create any
feeling of distress or anxiety. Neither do you, as the mother, seek to
appropriate all the laurels. The children do not owe you love and
obedience because of "what you went through for them," and "that is the
reason I love you so" leaves father a bit out in the cold. No, birth
should not be presented as a sacrifice or an ordeal, but as a
fulfillment, a joyous fulfillment which mother and father together
share.

The two remaining foundation squares, fertilization and mating, take
more courage to answer. They strike so closely into the heart of
existing relationships. You are fearful, too, that the knowledge will be
misused, that it will lead to sex play and experimentation. You don't
know how to phrase the answer anyway. There are some things you just
can't put into words!

Let's see if one can't, and much more simply than you imagine. Your
Philip, or Philippa, who has just learned that babies grow in their
mothers, says: "I wonder what makes the babies start. How do they get in
their mothers in the first place?"

"Babies are not babies from the very start," you answer. "They have to
grow before they are born just as you grow now after you are born. Each
baby starts at first from the union of two tiny particles of living
matter called cells. One cell is in the father, one is in the mother.
These two particles must come together and unite away up in the mother
where the baby is to grow. When they do, then the baby begins to take
form."

Now for the next step, mating. No, it's not so difficult at all if you
have not neglected to build up a foundation for it as you went along.
For an understanding of the act of mating, the children must first be
familiar with the differences in body structure--that boys have an outer
organ, and the girls have a long, slender inner passage. Knowledge of
the first they acquired in the come-and-go of daily home association; of
the second, when they learned how a baby was born. In a discussion of
mating, it takes usually just the merest reference to these structural
differences for children to see immediately the mechanics of mating.
"Yes, these two parts fit closely together so that the father cells
(sperm cells) are able to pass over to the mot