HOW do babies get into your tummy mummy?” my four-year-old daughter asked nonchalantly on the way to school. Not again, I sighed.

There are many benefits to having four children but having to repeat the facts of life over and over again until you begin to wonder the reality yourself is not one of them.

Of course, the done thing is to explain things without said child trying to jump out of a moving car when they finally understand what you’re talking about.

And I still remember returning home from our school’s ‘birds and the bees’ chat, which involved lots of bananas and apples, unable to look my parents in the eye for at least a week, and then for weeks afterwards with a secret look of distaste.

After all, how could they?

So we had ‘the chat’ about special hugs, and the handing over of eggs and seeds, concluding with ‘and that’s where you came from,’ delighted that my reproductive talk was finally over after 14 years of public speaking, or until they reach teenage years, when the more graphic the better, as far as I’m concerned.

“But how does the baby actually get into your tummy,” my daughter persevered.

“Well daddy has a seed and mummy has an egg,” I persisted, getting as biological as possible and trying to blind her with science.

Because let’s face it, a four-year-old doesn’t really want to know the full scenario.

She would have to have therapy for a lifetime to get over the real deal. What she wants to know is something comforting, something fluffy.

She doesn’t want to be fobbed off, but then neither does she want the truth. How would David Attenborough put it, or Dr Robert Winston, I wondered?

“But how does the baby actually get into your tummy,” she said again patiently, in a voice that Margaret Thatcher would have been proud of, and a tone which would freeze dry ice.

“Awkward,” my teenage son said from the passenger seat.

So I did what all good mothers do: turned the radio up as loudly as possible to drown out any further possible questions, feigned utter ignorance, muttered loudly about keeping your legs crossed and told her to ask Daddy when he got home.

Passing the buck? You bet – after giving birth four times, he owes me.