Mommy Laid an Egg: Or, Where Do Babies Come from? [Paperback]

Babette Cole (Author)

Book Description

Grade Level: P and up

In this hilarious twist on one of the most difficult discussions in a child's development, award winning author Babette Cole illustrates the one question all children are bound to ask: Where do babies come from? Mom explains that you can make babies out of gingerbread, grow them from seeds, or squeeze them out of tubes, while Dad says you can find babies under rocks. Amused by their parents' silly answers, the children decide to set the adults straight. In a series of zany diagrams, the children show the adults exactly where babies come from. The offbeat illustrations are accompanied by a text that is short, simple, and anything but predictable. This is a funny book that will delight, entertain, and educate the entire family.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Cole ( Supermoo ) unleashes her endearingly loony sense of humor on the subject of the birds and the bees, and the result is, as expected, hilarious. When a thoroughly befuddled set of '90s parents (he wears his gray hair in a ponytail, she wears Birkenstocks) decides to inform their offspring how babies are made, their explanations (babies are grown from seeds, made out of gingerbread, squeezed from tubes like toothpaste, brought by dinosaurs) are greeted with an explosion of giggles. Their children quickly grab paper and pen and proceed to set the record straight. Cole's drawings and simple text are candid without being offensive and, without getting terribly complicated or serious, communicate the essentials of conception and childbirth in a direct but light-hearted manner that will leave everyone grinning and no one embarrassed. As always, Cole's idiosyncratic, cartoon-style illustrations are a treat--and her renditions of greenhouse babies and baby-paste tubes are outrageously funny. All ages.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From School Library Journal

PreSchool-Grade 2-Someone laid an egg here, but it wasn't Mommy. What begins as an amusing premise gets waylaid along the way. Mom and Dad offer their kids twists on the old cliches about the birds and the bees. The children are wildly amused, and decide to teach their parents the facts of life, illustrated with their own crayon drawings. In the explanation, Mothers have eggs inside their bodies, while daddies have "'seeds in seed pods outside their bodies. Daddies also have a tube. The seeds come out of the pods and through the tube. The tube goes into the mommy's body through a hole.'" On a double-page spread, a line is drawn from Dad's penis to an opening in Mom, labeled "This fits in here." On the next page readers are shown some ways moms and dads fit together, copulating on a skateboard, hanging from balloons, etc. The "crayon" drawings are crude, but everyone gets the picture. Fertilization and birth follow. The cartoon characters and watercolored line drawings are vibrant and amusing-dad's gray hair is in a ponytail, while mom is a blonde earth-mother type. The kids are messy replicas of their parents. Joanna Cole's How You Were Born (Morrow, 1993) still sets the standard; this effort doesn't measure up.
Denise L. Moll, Lone Pine Elementary School, West Bloomfield, MI
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 40 pages
• Publisher: Chronicle Books (March 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811813193
• ISBN-13: 978-0811813198
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 9.9 x 0.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (41 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #825,989 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

47 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Forget the stork. Try dinosaurs!, November 20, 2005

By 

E. R. Bird "Ramseelbird" (Manhattan, NY) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Mommy Laid an Egg: Or, Where Do Babies Come from? (Paperback)

Ah, ire. Lovely lovely ire. Nothing gets parents more hot under the collar than debating the relative merits of a sex-ed picture book. Suddenly, once sane and collected adults erupt into veritable Mount Vesuviuses of indignation. Sure, they want their kids to learns the rudimentary mechanics of procreation, but they want it on THEIR terms. "Mommy Laid An Egg" is a very good example of a sex-ex text that's been banned from libraries, burned in bonfires, and generally demonized by those who see fit to dislike it. Obviously, becoming a banned book does not automatically make you worthwhile reading (just 99.9% of the time, really). When it comes to "Mommy Laid An Egg" debaters, they're usually split into two camps. You have the people who love its irreverence, its wit, and its light-hearted handling of a formerly overly serious subject. Then you have the people who point out that this book contains very little factual information, avoids correct biological terms like the plague, and has a gratuitous sequence that I once heard a librarian refer to as the, "kiddie-lit kama sutra". There's a third camp, I should note, that just hates the book because it talks about sex, but these are the kinds of people who seek out such books so as to hate them and, as such, will be duly ignored. So which of these two takes on the book is the correct one? To find that answer, you need to take a closer look at what, "Mommy Laid An Egg" is all about...

As a crazed assortment of kids, pets, and pillows camp out on the living room sofa, a mother and father (hippies to the core) come in and inform their offspring as to how babies are made. The sugar-hepped-up kids are game and suddenly hear a whole heaping helping of blarney from their beloved parental units. They're told that girls are formed from sugar and spice and that boys are from slugs, and snails and puppy dogs' tails. Babies are delivered via dinosaur, and made out of gingerbread, and all other kinds of essentially implausible ideas. Once the parents finish with this "explanation" their far wiser children yuk it up. "What a bunch of nonsense", they crow. Then, with crayons and paper in hand, the kids go about telling their parents exactly how babies are REALLY made. Mommies have eggs inside and daddies have "seeds" in a kind of "seed pod" outside their bodies. The "tube" from the daddies is inserted into the mommies and then the "seeds" swim inside using their tails. There is then a two page spread of various mommies and daddies getting it on via skateboard, clown acts, whilst falling with balloons, and on a fascinatingly labeled "space hopper". The "seeds" race to the egg in the mommy, fertilize it, create a baby, and "when it's ready, out pops the Baby". The children then say that now YOU know how this occurs and so does everyone else. They open their front door and a bunch of different animals with their babies walk on in, suggesting that perhaps procreation is not limited to balloon toting mommies and daddies.

Okay. There's a lot to talk about here. First of all, let's talk about the fact that the book begins with a weird assortment of fables parents might try to sell their kids on when it comes to making babies. If you don't approve of parents misleading their kids in this fashion, better avoid that Woodie Guthrie picture book, "New Baby Train". It may not be your style. Personally, I thought this was a pretty good way to begin the book. These stories are ridiculously untrue, and carry echoes of Shel Silverstein and other silly picture book artists. Next, we come to a far more difficult part of the book. Ms. Babette Cole has decided not to confuse kids with technical terms like "sperm" and "penis". She's conveying the general idea and not the out-and-out factual terms. Now, the go-to guide for explaining sex to kids is usually author Joanna Cole's, "How You Were Born". In that book's opening note to parents, Ms. Cole says that such explanations can be confusing. She says, "The idea of the ovum as an egg leads some children to think that they hatched from a chicken's egg". So this book's choice to not call body parts by their proper names may, in the end, cause more harm than good. Maybe. Maybe not. It's your call to say.

Then we get to the real reason that "Mommy Laid An Egg" gets so much grief. The sheer variety of sexual positions crudely drawn. You know, I'm gonna have to side with the people who say to chill out on this one. Seriously, people. Let's take a breather here. To a parent, these two pages are kind of shocking. You almost never see people having sex in picture books. Obviously Ms. Cole realized that and chose to negate the shock value by making the people in the pictures very very basic figures. There's nothing gratuitous about these illustrations. What they're doing is showing how people "fit together" in as silly and joyful a way as possible. Your child is not going to see these two pages and freak out. They're going to see these two pages and get a visual answer for what the actual sexual act constitutes without it being explicit in any way. Far better that we get SOME idea, as we do here, than as found in that other picture book sex-ed story, "Where Willy Went". In most sex-ed picture books (and Joanna Cole's book is to blame here as well) kids never really understand what sex is except in the vaguest of terms. "Mommy Laid An Egg" is one of the very few to actual show it in an understandable, if downright bizarre, way.

Whew! Got all of that? Good. Now, I personally believe that there is no number one go-to source of sexual information for very young kids. But different books provide different information for different ages. For very young kids, "Mommy Laid an Egg" is ideal. It conveys difficult-to-grasp ideas in a funny way. After that, you can move on to "Where Willy Went" by Nicholas Allan. That book is bad on visuals but does well with technical terms. Finally, when they're even older than that, get 'em an updated edition of Joanna Cole's, "How You Were Born". That book has photographs and is really the number one sex-ed source for children. Decrying the evils of "Mommy Laid An Egg" may make you feel good at the time, but the book really does fulfill a need. It's not an ideal book, no. But it's one of the few that actually has some fun with its subject. I suspect that the real objection so many people have to it is that it doesn't teach its subject with a dour expression on its face. Nothing disturbs people more than goofiness. If you don't believe me, check out some of the negative reviews for this book.

30 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Humorous, engaging and just enough information., October 16, 1999

By 

Maggi Rohde "librarian and mom" (Ann Arbor, MI) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Mommy Laid an Egg: Or, Where Do Babies Come from? (Paperback)

Writer and illustrator Babette Cole won the LA Parent Magazine Book Award for this decidedly non-sentimental look at where babies come from. The book begins with the parents telling their kids all the fanciful myths about babies' origins - "You can make them out of gingerbread," "Sometimes you just find them under rocks." Then the children, amused at their parents' lack of knowledge, proceed to explain just where babies do come from, complete with child-like illustrations. A wonderful book, with just enough information for small children.

30 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Easy Approach to what-should-be-an-easy topic, May 4, 2000

By 

Constance P. Mccaslin "cmcca776" (Warsaw, Poland) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Mommy Laid an Egg: Or, Where Do Babies Come from? (Paperback)

Mommy Laid an Egg offers me the opportunity to explain reproduction--and the intricacies that surround it, such as how the egg is actually placed into mommy's uterus--exactly the way I would want a child to understand it...not too much, not too little. It walks the fine line between medical over-articulation, speculative "love talk" (ie: When a man loves a woman...), and baby talk. And best of all, it takes the approach that most children take on this subject--something they already knew. When the parents attempt to offer a childish explanation of where babies come from, the children offer their own explanation in their own language. Children will enjoy getting the upper hand, as the children in the story do. I highly recommend this to all like-minded parents.