Boy or Girl--What Will 'It' Be?

Well, provided that Baby decides to cooperate, we will be able to find out on Monday! Which is a good thing, because my maternal “gut feeling” has been wrong now twice. You know how some moms just know? Well, apparently, I just don’t.

I swore up and down till the moment Marie was born that she was a boy. Yes, we tried to find out. No, she did not cooperate. So we took that as the sign that ‘it’ should remain a surprise, even when we had the opportunity to find out during subsequent ultrasounds. But I just knew she was a boy until the very second she came out and I exclaimed incredulously, “It’s a…girl!”

With Erik, I convinced myself for the longest time that I didn’t have any gut feeling as to whether ‘it’ would be a boy or a girl. Peter was about to deploy, so he got the vote to either find out or keep it a surprise, and he decided that he wanted to find out the gender at the same time. And ‘at same time’ would not be until the baby was born, providing that the baby’s timing lined up with Peter’s 2 weeks of scheduled R&R. (Thankfully, it did). So I told the ultrasound tech that we wanted to be surprised, and she kindly made us a CD chock full of ultrasound pictures that I could send to Peter. That night, I promptly whipped out the disk and spent the next few hours comparing our baby’s pictures to every last Google image I could find of boy or girl ultrasound pictures, from 6 weeks all the way up to 40 weeks. After all my sleuthing and studying, I was convinced we were having another girl. After all, I’d clearly seen the three lines that equal ‘girl’ (I still maintain that I saw them!) and I even felt a little guilty that I’d figured it out in all my cleverness without my husband’s consent. Eventually I told Peter that I had a hunch based on the pictures because I just couldn’t take the guilt any longer. Until, of course, Erik was born…boy parts and all.

This time, I got the vote as to whether or not we find out. I’ve felt very strongly from the moment I saw the positive test that I wanted to know whether this baby was a boy or a girl. I wanted some way to bond more closely with this baby, to call him or her by name while I was still pregnant, because I didn’t get that chance with our two children in heaven. Though we’ve given them special names and remember them in prayer every night, I still hate the fact that as their mother, I don’t know whether they are my son or daughter. The fact that God knows is a comfort, but I still wish I could. And since God’s given us the wonderful time we’ve had thus far with this miracle baby, I plan on taking full advantage of the technology that can allow us to get to know him or her better!



18 Weeks!

That said, I know that others will certainly still have their opinion. It seems to happen the most with complete strangers…you can see them look twice, trying to figure out if you just ate too many burgers or if that bump is indeed from a baby. The conversations always start out the same:

“When are you due? Is this your first? Do you know if it’s a boy or a girl?”

If it’s your first, you have to be prepared to hear more advice and birth stories than you’d ever have time for. And if you don’t know what ‘it’ is, you have to then be prepared for a full blown analysis of how high or low you are carrying, what your birth order is, if you have the dark line on your stomach, what your astrological sign is, what the child’s is supposed to be based on the due date, what color hair you have, how tall you are, and whether or not you’re craving wasabi peas (among other old wives’ tales that originated in the middle ages).

My favorite encounter was the time we were shopping in the paint department before Marie was born, minding our own business while trying to decide between shades of green for the gender-neutral jungle-themed room. The questions from the employee behind the counter began, true to form, and when we got to the part where we didn’t know if ‘it’ was a boy or a girl because the baby hadn’t cooperated during the ultra sound, the analysis began. In the space of five minutes she swore up and down that it was a girl while inspecting my height, width, and bump position, and walking around behind me to make sure she didn’t miss anything (AWKward). She even called over another coworker to aide in the analysis. And by the end of the inspection, she’d changed her mind and was now 100% certain that it was a boy. I didn’t have it in me to tell the lady at the paint counter—the sweet, sweet lady who had never before seen me in her life—that maybe my anatomy had a little more to do with the ‘way I was carrying’ than my child’s gender. Because to my knowledge, the only non-invasive way to determine whether the x or y chromosome won the race is through an ultrasound. Unless you’re lucky enough to have a winged messenger appear and tell you you’re having a son (who will save the world).

But be it sugar and spice or snips and snails, we’re already thankful. And beyond lucky to be in this position, where people will ask such questions or make well-intentioned comments, old wives' tales and all!

3 days and counting!