Sunday, March 8, 2009

Mommy Laid An Egg by Babette Cole

This is another book that probably will not be featured on my school bookshelf. Kids are definitely curious about where babies come from, which is a tough topic for adults to handle. I appreciate the humor in this book. It definitely would work to cut through the awkwardness. (And I'll admit I was laughing at the different ways these parents tried to tell their children about conception. My two favorites were "Sometimes dinosaurs deliver [the babies]" and that babies are found under rocks. It cracked me up.) If the book had stopped there, I would have loved it.

Of course, had it stopped there, it would have failed to address the issue at hand. The true parts of the book are also the parts I did not really like. Maybe I am still too immature to handle this topic, but I found myself cringing at the explanations. They became WAY too graphic in my opinion. The sentence "This fits in here" with an arrow pointing to...well, you can figure it out... really got me upset. I'm sorry, but that's just weird.

Of course, it continued to get weirder. I was taken aback by a page full of the parents in different sexual positions. No discussion about where babies come from with elementary school students needs to go that far. That is going way beyond the realm of that innocent question.

This book in two words: too far. Or: no thank you. (Whoops, that was three.)

1 comment:

  1. I felt the same way! I thought the first part of the book was really cute but once it got to the actual "learning" part I felt it went into way too much detail. This is not a book that I would want to have in my classroom. I wouldn't want to get complaints about a book like this because I don't know if I would be very happy if my little kids were reading it either!

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