(*dc) that one word

i've recently started spending time with nia and jasmine (7 and 9), daughters of a friend of mine in capitol heights. i've started taking them to children's classes at the baha'i center on sundays, after which we usually do something fun together. yesterday we invited a third girl, who is 8, to join us for pizza. the three of them sat in my back seat and gleefully went through all the songs they knew together, singing them at the top of their lungs and sometimes making up new words. i was shocked at the things they sang. they're all mixed kids and apparently exposed to some serious hip hop - they said from BET - at home. i learned a lot by listening to them. one of their favorites seemed to be "you're goin' down"...sometimes i asked them if they knew what the things they were singing about meant. they knew which songs were by whom (50 cent, kanye west, usher, destiny's child, etc.), but usually didn't know the meanings. i tried to explain a couple things. they seemed broken-hearted, like they couldn't really sing with quite as much glee when it's about wanting to beat someone up or kill them or defeat them in some sort of challenge. and despite how hard i tried to cover it up i think they could hear in my loving voice the sadness at these 7-9 year olds singing/rapping such inappropriate things.

after i dropped off jasmine and nia, that left the 8-yr-old in the car with me for the half hour drive home. sometime into a sweet and interesting conversation, she seemed to get up the nerve to ask me,

"umm...miss kelly...do you have to have 's' to make a baby?"

i was a little thrown on this one, but i decided to go for the full disclosure and comfortable honesty route.

"do you mean do you have to have sex to have a baby?"

"yeah."

"well, usually, yes."

she seemed a bit dissatisfied with my answer. i thought more deeply about it and decided to give her more information.

i told her that usually you have to have sex, but that there are other ways that people can have babies. i told her they can adopt and that there are also ways of making a baby inside a woman artificially. she wanted to know more about this, so i told her about how they can take an egg out of a woman with a needle and then put it together with a man's sperm so that it gets fertilized. then they can put it back into a woman so that it could grow inside the woman.

she said "yeah yeah that's what my sister was telling me!!! but she wouldn't tell me that word. could you say those words again?? what did you say??"

she was very animated. i didn't know which word she was interested in. i went through it all again, slowly, and when i got to "sperm" she said, "YEAH!! THAT WORD!! SPERM! THAT'S WHAT MY SISTER WOUDLN'T TELL ME!"

her sister is 10.

i explained to her in as simple terms as i could what sperm was. i told her that women had eggs and men had sperm and that an egg by itself will die and sperm by itself will die, but if you put them together sometimes they can make a new life that turns into a baby.

i tried to remember back to when i was 10 and 8 and i'm pretty sure i didn't know about sperm and eggs, or any of the mechanics of how they make babies, either naturally or artificially. i hoped i hadn't just overstepped my boundaries as a family friend and divulged too much info.

i didn't tell her about penises and vaginas or sex.

but my approach is that information is power, even for an 8 year old. for crying out loud, they're singing about graphic sex and violence, they might as well know a tiny bit about what they're talking about.

jasmine said she got an A on her descriptive writing assignment, in which she wrote about the day we spent at NASA last month. i asked her if i could read it and she said it was still up in the display case at her school. this was so sweet i almost cried.