Notes from the Farm: The Birds and the Bees

We are running late for one of the only commitments our homeschool, work-from-home family has these days, and my daughter pukes.

My husband decides to stay home with her, so my son, Asher, and I head out the door. Asher is already a talker, but put him in a car and he goes into overdrive, asking every philosophical, theological, or mechanical question he can think of.

Today his chosen topic is about our chickens. He adores our chickens and wants to know everything about them. We've recently discovered that one is a rooster, which made Asher very excited because he wants baby chicks. He knows a rooster has *something* to do with that, but he doesn't know what. We've been dancing around this topic for a few weeks now.

So today he says, "Mom, how does the rooster get a baby chick in the egg?"

I'm not gonna lie. My initial thought was "Not today, Satan. I am not talking to my son about chicken sex today."

But the avoid-the-chicken-sex tactics weren't working. I told him that chickens mate, and he was all, "what is mating?" and then I said something about how the rooster puts his seed in the chicken (*shudders*) kind of like plants have seeds. He is now understandably even more confused. The questions keep coming.

So finally I said it. I told Asher that roosters have sex with female chickens, although I didn't tell him the explicit details because I actually don't understand the details of chicken sex. And I'm not going to google it.

And now he has an incredibly vague notion of what sex is, and clearly I need to read up on some things before I try to explain human sex to him. Because, unfortunately, that's coming.

Have you had “the talk” yet? How did you decide when to bring up the birds — er, chickens — and the bees?