We get questions!

[rivka]

Alex, apropos of absolutely nothing, on the way to school: What happens to the rest of the sperm?
Me: ...
Me: ...Oh, you mean after one joins with the egg to start growing a baby? The rest of them just kind of die and come out of the mom's body. They're so super tiny that you couldn't see them, though.
Alex: Can you smell them?
Me: No. (Semen has a smell, but not sperm. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.)
Alex: Maybe, when a baby boy is nursing, the mom gives him the leftover sperm.
Me: No. The mom's body doesn't have any sperm to pass on.
Alex: What about when the baby was just born?
Me: Not even then. Even by the time the baby just starts to grow inside the mom, the leftover sperm is already gone.

She went on to ask a lot of very detailed questions about what sperm look like. And whether the first people were born from sperm and an egg. Not to mention monkeys. Where did this all come from?

Comments

[naomikritzer]

Clearly, you need a copy of A Child Is Born, if you don't already have one. Molly was totally riveted by this book for a while, from the photographs of the itty bitty swimmers to the slow development from zygote to embryo to fetus, to the birth pictures.

[ailbhe]

It all sounds like excellent logic to me! One day, Alex will know everything.

[anthologie.livejournal.com]

"Where Did I Come From?" is also a great book.

[puzzlement.livejournal.com]

I don't know that I ever asked as such, but I remember having a vague feeling that each sperm was fundamentally half a baby, and thus having trouble with the idea that each ejaculation 'wastes' millions of them, especially when the situation with ova is so different. (It helped I think to understand what a truly immense number of cells we all have. Although knowing that makes ova seem odd.)

So I guess had this been young me asking these questions, it would have come from a sense that this was all a very odd way to go about making babies and trying to figure out what I'd missed.

[huladavid.livejournal.com]

"Where did this all come from?"

I blame the monkeys, but then I blame them for evolution.

[huladavid.livejournal.com]

Unrelated to anything -well, maybe to the matter of questions- I heard about a couple of science podcasts that Alex might be interested in. First is Princess Scientisk (http://princess-scientist.com/) and the other is...completely gone from my mind. It's about dinosaurs and done by a six year old boy and his father.

I'll work on finding the info for the second one.

[huladavid.livejournal.com]

Found the other site: Aaron's World (the blog is at http://aaronstotle.blogspot.com/ & you can link to episodes from there). It's also on iTunes. I want to point out that there are only 3 episodes.