i laboured under the rather terrifying belief that in order to make a baby my seed would have to be put into my wife. why so terrible? unfortunately i thought surgery would be involved in removing one of my two 'seeds' (i now understand the surgery to be known as castration and largely unrelated to dedicated couples reproducing). as you can imagine, it took me a long time to realise that one day i'd actually love to father children: consequently, i blame the parents!

tony

The mom of one of my close friends growing up always craved oranges when pregnant. She was sure, and convinced the rest of her girl friends, that oranges could make you pregnant. Sad to say we worried about that till freshman year of high school. We were late bloomers!

Mary Anderson

When I was little I used to think that all girls were born with a baby inside them, but it was really small (like the size of a nail) and it just grew bigger as you grew up till you got married and then it just came out of your tummy. on finding out how babies really came to be, i was devestated!

Gems, Queen of the World

When I was about 8 and just finding out about how babies were made, I used to think that the sex of the baby depended on which parent had been 'trying harder'when they made the baby. If the dad had been trying harder, the baby would be a boy, and if the mom had, it would be a girl.

steve

When my auntie was in hospital having given birth to my cousin (she was in her 20's) she couldn't understand how the woman in the next bed had had a aby when she wasn't married. She had to ask her mother when she came to visit. I'm not sure whether she thought that you couldn't get pregnant until you were married (even if you had sex) or that you were physically unable to have sex until you were married. There is also the possibility that she didn't know which part of being married had got her pregnant but I've never like to ask :-)

H (Edinburgh)

When I was about 5 I assumed that baby boys come from men, and baby girls come from woman. Hence, I thought I came from my dad. My parents laughed ever so hard when I told them. It just didn't make sense that I could come from my mom if I was boy. Bleh.

Giordano

when i was bout 5 me and my family were watchin a film which showed a new born baby. i then turned round to my dad and asked how you could tell if a baby was a boy or a girl.... as he was really embaressed infront of my older brother and my mum he just said it was cos of the colour of the baby. i got really confused cos me and my brother are the same colour (well in th eyes of a 5 yr old anyways) so i thought he must have been a girl as well but he jus had short hair cos he liked it

shhaazz

i used to think that the delivery man would bring you a new baby to the door and if he were a month late then you would get it for free!!

George

No one told me, but I assumed that when a woman was pregnant, she had to spend the whole nine months in the hospital. I freaked out when my parents asked me if I wanted a sibling, not wishing to part with my mother for so long. I didn't tell them why I was so upset, otherwise they could have set me straight. I'm an only child :)

Anon

I used to believe that a man only had six sperms (I somehow got confused when my mom was telling me the facts of life) and I couldn't quite figure out how come my aunt and uncle had seven kids.

Betty

When I was about 6-7 I asked my mum how I was made. She told me that she planted an apple pip in her belly button and waited for the tree to grow. For the nine month she had to lie flat on her back so the tree could grow. Once it produced fruit (babies) she had to choose the best one from the tree (me!). Apparently I used to squeak alot so she nicknamed me squeaky pip from her pip tree. Years later she had my sister and made my sister beleive that when she was inside my mums stomach she could see the world through her belly button.... just wierd.

Becki M UK

Once when I was little, I heard someone referring to "Cabbage Patch Babies" (as in the toy doll). I took this to mean that babies came from cabbages. You went and got one from the grocery store and took it home. When you had waited long enough, the cabbage would grow into a baby.

Imagine my horror when I walked into the kitchen one day and found my mother cutting up a cabbage to make cole slaw!
I started screaming that she was "killing the baby". It took her like an hour to calm me down so she could figure out why I was so upset!

Daughter of a Cabbage Killer

My best friend's mom liked to amuse herself by giving her two girls imaginitive answers to their questions, such as, the original purpose of the many freeways and overpasses in our city were once made as dinosaur trails and only after they died did people start driving around on them. This habit, incedentally, ruined her credibility when explained the truth about where babies come from to her older daughter, who retorted "nuh-uh, you're making it up." The truth was stranger than fiction.

Krista

i thought - when i was pregnant - i could dye my hair blond, and my baby wouldn´t be brunette as i am.

judi (peru)

When I was 16 and my stepmother was 34, we were talking about a man who was proud of having eight sons. She said, "That's nothing to be proud of -- it just depends on which testicle the sperm came out of." She thought the girl sperm came from one and the boy sperm from the other. I was stunned.

Bee

I believed (thanks to my mum) that babies grew on "baby trees" and simply 'fell off' when they were ripe!!!

Stace

For a short while, when I was about 6 or 7, my friends and I thought that all girls were born pregnant. Then,when we got married, the baby would be born. We would push our bikes around instead of riding in case we might hurt the fetus.

Boo

When I was 3 I popped the big question to my dad: "Where do babies come from?". My dad, being a somewhat embarrassed scientist, and not feeling quite up to explaining sex to me, instead decided to give me a very detailed and quite accurate description of artificial insemination, starting with the man "peeing" in a petri dish, and all the way to implantation of the embryo.

I thought this was rather involved, but believed it for years.

Scientist

That to make a baby a man (over 21 & under 25) had to kiss a woman (over 19 & under 21).

Johny

In 5th grade, we had a test on sex education. We were given a pretest. A multiple choice question asked where is the baby kept in the mother (someting like that). I picked stomach. I failed the test.

Anon