Yes, indeed! When you were being formed inside your mother’s uterus, you were connected from your abdomen to her body by a rope-like tube called the umbilical cord. Everything you needed to live and grow during the nine months before you were born, oxygen and food from your mother’s blood, came to you from your mother through the vein in the umbilical chord. And the wastes from your tiny body left through the two arteries in the umbilical cord.
However, after birth, you no longer needed this umbilical cord because you could now eat, drink, breathe, and get rid of your body’s wastes by yourself. So the doctor who delivered you carefully clamped or tied the cord, then cut it off as close to your abdomen as possible. That cutting did not hurt you or your mother. Then after about a week, that tiny stump of the cord dried up and fell off. The scar that was left on your abdomen is called your navel, or belly button.
