Medical impossibility.

I was digging through the cabinet last night, scrounging for something to eat, as I was feeling unusually picky last night when normally I couldn't care less, but that's really irrelevant. Raiden came in the kitchen with me and started looking through the cabinet as well. He saw the bear-shaped honey container and asked, "Is this for Weston?" (Mel's baby.) I told him no, that's for us.

"Daddy and me and you and me?"

I chuckled and said, yes, Daddy and me and you and me.

He thought it was silly that I repeated it that way and expanded it, something like, "Daddy and me and you and me and Daddy and you and Daddy and me and you and Daddy and me?"

I laughed and replied with something fairly similar.

He asked, "What about the rest of us."

I said, "That's all of us. You and me and Daddy."

He asked, "Can you get a baby in your tummy sometimes?" (He almost always says "sometimes" rather than "sometime.")

I asked something like, "You want me to, huh?" and he said that yes, he does, and that when he's older, he'll have a baby in his tummy. I told him that only girls can have babies in their tummies, so he'd have to help a girl get a baby in her tummy. AND THEN QUICKLY MODIFIED that only grown-up bodies can do that. Then I chuckled a little and told him to go tell Daddy what he'd asked me.

(As an aside: my son knows probably more than most 12 year olds are comfortable with about the whole Where Babies Come From process. He doesn't know the specifics, but he asks questions and I give him real, age-appropriate answers. Over several talks about this he knows that it takes a mommy and a daddy to make a baby, that the daddy helps put the baby in the mommy's tummy, that it's a different part of the tummy than where your food goes [which was clarified when he informed me that "When I was a little baby, I was in your tummy, and you ate me!"], and that then the baby has to grow until it's healthy enough to live outside of the mommy's tummy, and it comes out a special kind of baby door that only women have, and that babies are supposed to come through the door head-first, and when he was in my tummy, he turned around and had his feet at the door, so the doctors had to cut open my tummy to get him out instead. To this he said, "NO!!!" and I said, "Yeah, I wasn't thrilled about that either, kid.")

He ran in the living room excitedly and asked, "Daddy! Can you help Mommy get a baby in her tummy sometimes?" He smiled and asked him a few questions about if he'd like having a baby around, and if he wanted a boy baby or a girl baby. He said he wanted a boy, and Rich asked, "What if it's a girl?" Raiden said NO, he wants a boy. I yelled in and told him to explain that we don't get to choose, which I then heard him do, and he re-asked if it would be okay if it was a girl baby, and Raiden said yes, it was.

Several minutes later when I was back in the living room, having finished eaten the bowl of cereal I settled for as dinner, Raiden came to sit on my lap, and I asked him again if he'd like a little brother or sister, if he'd prefer a girl or a boy.

He replied *drumroll*:

"Can it be a robot?"

...

*laugh*

I told him that no, it couldn't be a robot, that humans grow human babies. He said, "NO!! Please please PLEEEEAAAASE can it be a robot?"

I said, "You want the baby to be a robot." It wasn't a question. It was an eyebrow-raised statement.

"Yes! Like THIS BIG!!" he said with his hands held high above his head.

I yelled into the kitchen, where the husband was foraging for grapes, that Raiden has now requested that the baby be a robot. "A BIG robot!" Raiden clarified.

We finally settled on: Okay, we'll try to grow you a robot brother, but, you know, no promises.