Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Real Life Education

Today Quartus is 6 weeks old.  And that means I had my postpartum check-up today.  I took all 4 kids with me so our school day included some real-life lessons today.  Of course, my check-up meant that I had to strip from the waist-down and be in the stirrups. 

Nudity in our family isn't taboo or shameful.  Yet at the same time we stress modesty.  We also use anatomically correct terms and the kids are aware of where the baby came out from.  When I was in my second trimester, I printed out drawings of his weekly fetal development and pictures of his equivalent-sized food (from Baby Center.)  Then the girls and I cut and pasted and matched them up to make a book.  They loved looking at it and talking about how their brother would come out when he grew to be as big as a pumpkin

Anyway, today's visit presented an opportunity to review, reinforce, and teach some important things:
*Private parts are special and private and it is inappropriate to show them to anyone outside our immediate family.
*But it is ok to show to the doctor if needed so the doctor can do his job to help us.
*Yes, the baby came out of Mommy's v**ina [I didn't want to attract unwanted search traffic here.]  That's just a fact of life and it's normal and not secret or shameful to talk about.
*Babies are big and childbirth, while miraculous and rewarding, is stressful for the mommy's body.  The doctor's job is to check and make sure mommy healed well and correctly. 

Secundus was also very curious about "the clippy thing" the doctor used. So I explained it to her and taught her an important new vocabulary word: speculum. lol.

Definitely not the kind of field trip you'd get in public school!

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