Having the sex talk while your husband is deployed.

I never saw it coming. Then again, I didn't grow up with pets. I bought Ethan, now 7 years old, and Estee, now 5, a guinea pig when their dad deployed last summer, and last week we acquired a second guinea pig, a surprise birthday gift from a family friend. One of the neighbors, a slightly older boy named Sam, was playing at our house when the new rodent made her debut. I wasn't in the room at the time, but found out later that he proclaimed that guinea pig babies would be in our future; to help matters along, he instructed the kids to place the female in the same cage as the male.

Ethan was puzzled by this announcement. Because of my husband's frequent and lengthy absences, many milestone father-son moments—like the sex talk—seem to pass us by or occur late. This is common for many military families, and not just regarding the birds and the bees. One friend hired a baseball coach for her son, because her husband was away for so long she worried that the little boy would fall behind his pals who practice with their dads for weekly games. One Army officer returned from back-to-back deployments to discover that his young son delicately wipes his penis after going to the bathroom due to diligent potty training by mom and older sisters.

I hadn't given any thought to the sex talk. I assumed it would happen at some convenient, appropriate time in the future, long after my husband returned. Ethan had been perfectly happy with my explanation that a Mommy and Daddy's "magic hug" results in a newborn. I lifted the "magic hug" from a child-rearing book, and it seemed fine until the instant Sam moved us closer to the facts of life.

"Mom, Sam told me a horrible lie," Ethan said, angrily, after his buddy walked out the door.

"What was it?" I asked.

Ethan hesitated, looked momentarily sheepish, but barreled ahead.

"It's a big one. He said that the boy guinea pig puts his penis in the girl guinea pig's vagina to make babies. Can you believe he would say that?"

I looked at both kids. I suddenly realized that I had read about the "magic hug" when the kids were only 4 and 2. Scott and I hadn't had any discussion since then about how to explain reproduction, and when he deployed last summer for 12 months in Iraq, it was the last thing on my mind.

Ethan and Estee just stared at me, waiting. The room was quiet. I knew it was an important moment; I just had no idea what to say. I took a deep breath.

"Yep, he's right," I nodded. "That's how babies get made, all babies, animals and humans." I muddled through an abbreviated explanation about sperm and eggs, matter-of-fact and forthright. I don't have a problem with the truth; I just didn't know I'd be sharing it, by myself, on that particular Sunday.