Preparing my older child for her preschool’s field trip to the Dairy Farm, I asked her if she knew where milk comes from. She replied, “Oh, yes. I know where milk comes from. You pull on the cow’s vulva, and the milk comes out!”

I, of course, then snarfed my coffee, spilling it down the front of my shirt.

Upon recovering, I explained the cow’s apparatus for supplying us with milk, using the analogy of a mother’s breasts for the feeding of her babies. I watched her face as she struggled to match up a woman’s breasts with a baby and a cow’s udders with … a gallon container of milk. To clear up her obvious confusion, I then explained that a cow produces milk for its calf, that calves drink milk.

She took this in stride, but then made the leap to this statement: “Oh, like when Laurel hurt her leg, and she had to wear a calves?”

So I separated the discussion of Laurel’s leg injury that necessitated she wear a cast and brought it back to cows. I explained that a cow produces milk for humans AND calves to drink, just as a human mother produces milk for her baby.

And then she asked why humans drink cows’ milk, when they could drink milk from their own mothers. I replied that humans don’t NEED to drink milk past a certain stage of development, but that a lot of humans LIKE cows’ milk and all the things that are made from cows’ milk. This explanation seemed to satisfy her. I decided to let it drop.

Then, last night, while watching a horrendously insipid Disney movie called Home on the Range, my older child pointed to the main character — a very well endowed dairy cow named Maggie — and made the comment, “Look, Mommy, her vulvas are hanging down!”

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