Now that my morning sickness has subsided, I’m beginning to enjoy being pregnant — well, sort of. Since this is the fifth time around, much of the day-to-day pleasure of knowing I’m going to have a baby comes from observing my older children, who are ecstatic at the thought of our expanding family.

“Hey, little dude,” my 8-year-old son says to my stomach nearly every day. “What if it’s a girl?” I ask him. “Hey, little dudette,” he says without missing a beat, before continuing to whisper sweet nothings to the baby about himself and how excited he is to meet the new dude (or dudette).

For my almost-5-year-old daughter, Kira, though, the news of my pregnancy has sparked a series of relentless questions that have taxed my mental abilities. She asked how and when the “seed” — I don’t know how she chose that word — got inside of me. I don’t even know where she got the word “seed.” This has been followed by, “How does the baby get out of you?” and “Why can’t the seed grow inside a boy’s tummy?”

It’s not just that it’s difficult for me to know how much information to give to this inquiring mind. What’s more challenging — and occasionally awkward — are the surroundings in which I find myself trying to answer these perfectly natural questions.

Last week, I was at the hardware store trying to find the right light bulb to fit a strange fixture. Frustrated, I asked the crusty octogenarian behind the cash register if he knew where I might find this particular bulb. He came to help me search. Kira, my errand partner during the month of August, decided to ask those daunting questions right then and there, next to the old geezer.

I smiled at the man as his face turned a deep shade of crimson, and thanked him for helping me navigate the tricky light aisle. “How would I find this bulb without you?” I cooed.

The outbreak of Kira’s queries, as well as the older boys’ even more challenging baby-related questions — “Could the baby die?” and “What can the baby hear?” and “What happens if the baby’s sick?” — on top of the regular doozies that come out of my children’s mouths in the course of any week such as “Why are there 24 hours in a day?” and “What do you think happens when you die?” and “Why does the sun set in the west?” — are exhausting. This is especially true given the diminished state of my mental facilities that only someone who has been pregnant five times in nine years can honestly acknowledge.

It was with great amusement, then, that I began to read Wendell Jamieson’s “Father Knows Less Or ‘Can I Cook My Sister?’: One Dad’s Quest to Answer His Son’s Most Baffling Questions” (Putnam), which is to be released in September.

Mr. Jamieson, the city editor of the New York Times, also found himself inundated by his son’s questions. My responses to my children’s baffling queries include “What do you think?” or “Let me think about that a while and get back to you,” or “What a great question! I don’t know,” as well the occasional effort to actually answer the question as best I can. Mr. Jamieson, on the other hand, has taken a completely different tactic.

When his son asked, “What would hurt more — getting run over by a car, or getting stung by a jellyfish?” Mr. Jamieson asked the director of the Division of Pain Medicine at a New York hospital for his thoughts (the answer is the jellyfish sting). When the question “Why do policemen like doughnuts?”popped up, he turned to the chief of the Miami police department.

Mr. Jamieson has compiled oddball questions from curious children all over the country and then asked experts in the field to respond. When a girl from Connecticut asks how many hours of television will turn your brain into mush, it is the CEO of NBC Television, Jeff Zucker, who provides an answer. When a young Brooklynite asks why the Beatles broke up, Yoko Ono weighs in.

Midway through the book I was reminded of my favorite professor in college, an arrogant but wonderfully charming expert in the field of Jewish history, Yosef Yerushalmi. He was an outstanding lecturer, and would occasionally add a personal story to keep the lecture lively. One crisp fall day, when Mr. Yerushalmi opened the floor to questions, there were none, much to his dismay. While I’m sure this had something to do with the intimidating nature of the professor himself, he appeared to be in a state of disbelief.

To break the silence, he told the group that each day after school, his mother, unlike ordinary mothers, did not ask little Yosef about his day. She did not want to hear something especially good or bad that might have happened. Mrs. Yerushalmi asked her son one thing, each and every day, and that was whether or not he had asked any good questions.

Now that I have children of my own, I wonder if Mrs. Yerushalmi was simply trying to emphasize the importance of asking questions, or if she was trying subtly to convince her son to ask all his questions at school, so that she would not have the terrifying task of answering them herself.

I’m really not so sure. But now that I think about it, I might have to try this tactic myself.

sarasberman@aol.com