Read an Excerpt
"Where Did I Come From?"
By Peter Mayle, Arthur Robins KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.
Copyright © 1977 Peter Mayle
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8184-0796-3
CHAPTER 1
This book is all about you.
We wrote it because we thought you'd like to know exactly where you came from, and how it all happened.
And we know (because we have children of our own) how difficult it is to tell the truth without getting red in the face and mumbling.
Anyway, before we wrote all this down, we asked some boys and girls your age where they thought they had come from.
Here's what some of them said:
"I was brought special delivery by the stork."
"The cat brought me in one night."
"Dad got me from the saloon."
"Mom found me at the hospital."
"I was a Christmas present from the fairies."
Now, you know that none of that is true. The truth is much more interesting than that. So we'll start at the very beginning.
Little people are made by bigger people.
The first thing to know is that babies are made by grownups. One of them has to be a woman, and one a man. In other words, the two people who made you were your mother and your father.
Now, if you put your mother and your father in the bath together, you'd notice something interesting.
They are not made at all the same way. You've probably noticed that already, but you notice it much more when you put them in the bath together.
Quite apart from being different sizes, they are different shapes. And they have different parts to their bodies.
What the differences are.
This is important, because it's the different parts that make it possible for your mother and your father to make you.
In fact, it's so important that we've done two big pictures so that you can see just what's what.
Don't worry if the pictures don't look too much like your mother and father. The important parts are the same on all of us. (Even you.)
Let's start at the top of the pictures and see what the differences are.
First of all, you'll see that the man has a flat chest. But the woman has two round bumps on her chest.
These bumps have a lot of names. Some people call them the bosom (which you say like this: boozum). Other people call them titties, or boobs. (Don't ask us why.)
Breasts.
But the proper name for them is breasts, and that's the name we want you to remember.
When you were just born, your mother's breasts were rather like a mobile milk bar. For the first few months of your life, the only food you could eat was milk. (Because at that time, you didn't have any teeth; so you couldn't eat hot dogs or hamburgers or french fries or candy or anything. You had to drink your food.)
Well, the milk that kept you alive for those first few months either came from a bottle, or your mother's breasts. So it's a quick thank you to breasts before we move on.
Take a look further down the pictures. You'll see that just below the middle, the woman spreads out, but the man doesn't.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from "Where Did I Come From?" by Peter Mayle, Arthur Robins. Copyright © 1977 Peter Mayle. Excerpted by permission of KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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