By Sophie Blackall
A little boy hears a baby is coming and spends all day asking everyone where babies come from, gathering one silly wrong answer after another until his parents finally give him a real, gentle one.
A small boy finds out his family is having a baby, and one question takes over his whole day: where do babies come from? So he asks around. The babysitter tells him you plant a seed and a baby tree grows. A bigger child at school says the hospital. Grandpa says an egg. The mailman says the hospital too. Every answer points him somewhere new and stranger, and by bedtime he is thoroughly confused. That is when his mom and dad sit him down and explain it plainly and honestly, in a way that quietly makes sense of all the odd clues he collected. Sophie Blackall keeps the whole thing funny and warm and never once awkward.
This is the where-do-babies-come-from book that actually answers the question. Most books on the subject find a way to change the subject; this one gives a preschooler a true, gentle answer and treats the asking as normal instead of something to blush about. If that conversation has been hanging over you, it hands you a script and a page to point at. And it fits the child who greets news of a new baby with a hundred questions of their own.