On The Road ( Again!)

I am really beginning to think that someone should look into a possible link to car accidents and the questions children decide to ask their parent while they are driving. Once again I found myself in the minivan trying to answer my children's very serious questions. It started innocently enough ( it always does!) with our conversation about twins.  We have quite a bit of twins in our family. My oldest daughters are twins, my father and uncle are twins, and my niece and nephew are twins.

Shayna, my four year old wanted to know how people get to be twins so I explained that they share their mommy's tummy at the same time and are born at the same time just like her sisters, her grandfather and great uncle, and of course her beloved cousins who are only nine months younger than her.

"No, Mommy." Shayna explains to me.  Adrianna and Andrew are not twins." At this point I think I knew where she was going and was getting a bit nervous. "um, yes Shayna, they are twins."
"No, Mommy, Adrianna was in Aunt Stephie's tummy and Andrew was in Aunt Mindy's tummy." She told me so matter of factly.

My niece and nephew have two mommies. My children have always accepted this fact and I have never really had to explain much to them. When Hannah was three she announced to me ( in the car of course) that Aunt Stephie and Aunt Mindy are married and that it was okay. She got no argument from me, I was proud of her that she understood something that most adults cannot wrap their head around! But now we were getting into waters that I was not sure how to navigate. I quickly explained to Shayna that no, Aunt Stephie had both of her cousins in her belly and that they were in fact twins, just like her sister.

But the conversation did not end with this explanation (of course not!), because I also had my two ten year old daughters in the car who got just a bit more curious. "Mom?" asks Rachel, "How do two girls have a baby?"

Crap.

"Well....They had a donor..um..I mean a man that helped...I mean there is a website that they went to-"
"WEBSITE!" exclaimed my daughter who only days ago wanted to go to ask.com to research human reproduction.
"No, wait,  Rachel, what I mean is there is a company that helps people who need help having a baby. Your Aunts just contacted them and they gave them what they needed." At this point I am also talking in code because my four year old was in the car and I was not ready to talk to her about that yet.
"Oooh", pipes up Hannah, "I get it. But how does it go in?" She apparently picked up my code but wasn't going to let the subject drop. ugh.

"well, just like when mommy had you and your sister, the doctor helped things along by using a tube ( I had told them previously that I had trouble having a baby and had gone to a special doctor to get pregnant).
"WHAT?!!?" I hear from the peanut gallery,  "YOU WENT TO A WEBSITE, WHAT ABOUT OUR DADDY?"
crap.
"No,no,no!" I said. "Your daddy is your daddy!"  The doctor just took stuff ( code word again) from him and put it in me."
At this point I am speeding to get home but Rachel manages to ask , "So daddy had an operation to get it out?"
double crap.
"No Rachel, there are ways, I'll tell you later ( the hell I will!)."

Hannah pipes in after this, "I don't want to know."  (Thank God.)