No question is ever dumb.
Birthing a quilt is when you place the backing fabric right-side up and the quilt top right-side down on top of it. Sew around all 4 edges leaving an opening. Turn it right-side out and stitch the opening closed. Then quilt as desired. I've just been doing SITD on these. If you use batting, it's backing fabric, quilt top, batting (I think I actually did use batting and regular cotton backing on the "Zoo" quilt. This is a little faster because you don't use any binding. At first it seemed so wrong to have the batting on top. But if you sandwich it in the middle like we normally do, it won't end up between them when you turn it.