Why is mommy's tummy so big?

A couple of dozen years ago, a young boy walked up to his mother and asked her, "Mommy, why is your tummy so big?"

Such questions tend to be very awkward for the parent concerned, since they mostly come from children whom until a few seconds before you assumed were several gazillion years away from beginning to understand the dynamics behind gestation and the accompanying physical attributes which afflict women involved in the process of gestation. Other questions in this genre include gems such as "Where did we come from?" Or, "Mommy, why do you like eating stones and yet you beat me when I do?"

Now, if you are a parent with even the slightest inkling of an idea on what ideal parenting is, then at some point in time you must have been involved in such an excruciating scenario. It is nature's way of reminding us that whatever we think, that very active mass of matter inside your child's head won't remain stagnated in childhood forever, and of informing us that raising our kids just got a hell lot trickier.

When such questions begin coming our way from the little brats, they can take on the atmosphere of an inquisition and won't go away until a satisfactory answer or a hefty enough bribe is obtained to defer their attention. As it was, this aforementioned boy was more inquisitive than most children, and so it took a highly creative tale about the stones clearing worms in Mommy's stomach to clear his curiosity and a very huge five shilling coin to curtail another torrent of questions along the same vein.

But what goes around really does come around. Boys tend to be freer with their mothers while girls can twist their fathers round their little finger. How are these two phenomena related? Well, last week, this boy, now a fully grown man with one daughter and another one on the way, was seated in the house doing nothing in general and nothing in particular, when his daughter walked up to him and asked, "Daddy, why is Mommy's tummy so big?"

Usually, this man refers the child to her mother when she starts asking questions of this kind, but this time the daughter was very insistent. He couldn't bribe her because he was flat broke, and attempting the explanation he once heard from his mother about worms was futile since the wife in question never puts anything that even vaguely resembles a stone anywhere near her mouth.

To cut a long story short, each and every one of us, as we grow tend to go through the following stages:
1.Dad knows everything
2.Dad knows almost everything
3.Dad knows many things
4.Dad knows one or two things
5.Dad knows nothing
6.Maybe Dad does know one or two things
7.Actually Dad knows many things
8.Dad knows everything.

Well, by the time my daughter was through with me, I moved from No.1 to No.5 without going through 2 to 4. I can only pray I get to 8 really soon.