When Sarah and I first met, I made a point of introducing her to my sons right away. To her, that signified a certain amount of “seriousness” in my intentions, but the truth is, I didn’t find it that big a deal. I was trying to have some fun and get laid, like, on the daily, and didn’t want to limit my lady-friend time to those moments when I wasn’t hanging out with the boys. You get it.

Fortunately, everything worked out, and the three of them got along. So much so, in fact, that after Sarah and I had been seeing one another for a few months, she suggested a weekly dinner--part of her broader campaign to turn us all into a little family--where she’d come over every Monday night after work and cook supper with the boys.

Since then, Monday night dinners have remained a part of our routine, and to Sarah’s credit, it’s been a boon. The boys have learned new cooking skills and are now eating a more varied diet than when it was just the three of us (the good old days, as Finley put it, when we chowed down on cans of beans and gruel and Cheez-its for every meal). Plus, dinner conversations have proven entertaining, especially since Sarah moved in and I knocked her up.

“But how does your body know to make a baby?” Finley, age seven, asked one evening while slurping a forkful of spaghetti. “Do you just think real hard about making one and then it starts to grow?”

“Huh? No. You know how your body is made of a bunch of cells?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, a cell from one person, called a sperm, and a cell from the other person, called an egg, join together and then multiply into billions of other cells that turn into a baby. Cell mitosis. You know what I mean?”

“Yeah… kind of.” He looked down while he turned his fork in the spaghetti. “So which one of you had the sperm and which one had the egg?”

“I had the sperm; Sarah had the egg.”

“Okay, but how do the egg and sperm find each other? Did they, like, float out of your body or something and then meet up and go back into Sarah?”

“Um, no, not exactly. The egg stays in the mom’s body… the person with ovaries, I mean. People with ovaries make eggs and the eggs stay in their bodies… unless they don’t combine with a sperm. Then they comes out when they have their period.”

“What? What’s a period?”

“Well, the uterus is the organ the baby grows inside of. Blood and stuff builds up inside the uterus to help the baby grow if the egg combines with a sperm. But if it doesn’t, the egg and all that blood and stuff falls out of the vagina once a month or so, so it can rebuild fresh blood and stuff for the next egg.”

“Ew, gross!”

“Yeah, well, yeah. Anyways, to make a baby, the egg stays in the person with a uterus’ body. Usually. Sometimes they take it out at the doctor’s office and then put it back in after it meets a sperm. And the sperm came out of my body. People with penises make sperm. Actually, sperms come from your balls, but people with penises have balls, you know?

“The sperm comes out of your penis? Does your penis like, sneeze, or something?”

“Yeah, kind of.”

“Oh my god! There are probably sperms all over the house! How did the sperm get into Sarah? Did it go into her mouth or what?!”

“Um…”

At this point, Leif, who’s five, starts crying and begging us to shut up, so I check on him.

“Leif, what’s wrong, buddy? Are you okay?”

“I don’t want to go through puberty!” he wails.

“What? Why? It happens to everybody. But not until you’re a teenager. You don’t have anything to worry about.”

Unfortunately, that led to the crying escalating. “I don’t want to go through puberty,” he screamed with tears running down his face, “because I don’t want to get my period and have a baby and get ripped in half!” Then he pushed himself away from the table and ran up the stairs to his bedroom.

So I took his plate and put it in the sink with the dirty dishes and called it a day.

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