The birds and the bees...

Having a garden is educational. More educational then I was expecting, especially when you pay closer attention to the details. So, on Friday morning before work, Jake and I visited his veggie patch, as we do every morning. It was 7:30 and we had a few minutes to kill before leaving for school and work. I was trying to get some photos of Jake's first sunflower of the season and he was messing around, as usual, making sure that everything was as it should be. He came across these 'goggas' (bugs) getting it on and wanted to know what was happening. Thankfully, he was happy with my 'they're mating' answer. This time anyway. He's been very concerned with how baby Connor's going to get out of Jo's tummy and has asked Jo once how the baby got in there, but she told him to come ask me and he'd forgotten the question by the time he got to me. Phew.

I don't actually have any issues discussing the birds and bees with my son and I believe that we have the kind of relationship where he'll feel comfortable asking me these questions, when the time's right.

Here's another example of sex education in the garden. Below is a male butternut flower's bits...

And this is the female one...

The female flower is attached to a fruit and it has to be fertilized in order for the fruit to grow properly. If it's not fertilized, the young fruit dies. Unfortunately, in today's world, there aren't enough bees and butterflies to do the pollination job properly, so one of our 'jobs' in the garden is to fertilise the female flowers with the male flowers. Jake knows which ones are the boy ones and which are the female ones and he knows exactly what he's doing when he picks the boy one and pulls the petals off (undresses it) so that the boy bits can touch against the female bits. It's an education, I tell you!!!