To find out or not to find out?
That is the question every new parent has to answer.
Folks in my parents' generation had to rely on twigs, mud and the eye of a newt to find out the sex of their child.
But parents today can find out about anything they want about their child before it is born: sex, hair color, future earning potential and whether or not he or she will move out at 18 years of age or sponge off the parents for life.
There are two schools of thought on this subject: First, there are the people who want to find out the sex of the child so they can plan clothes, toys, decorations in the room and whether the child will play in the WNBA or the NBA. Second are the people who don't want to know the sex until birth because they are clinically insane.
Seriously some people want to get that surprise in the delivery room. Personally, I am fairly certain I am going to pass out in the delivery room so I want to know now.
My wife was part of the clinically insane group. She insisted that - like our stone-age parents - we would not find out the sex until it was born. I was of the belief that we should find out everything we could now, because I am pretty sure that the minute the baby is born we won't know a darn thing.
I argued that if we knew the sex we could start calling the baby in her belly a "he" or "she" instead of "it" which I think seriously warps the tiny mind of the kid and turns him or her into a bizarre performance artist, serial killer or politician.
I also pointed out that since my sister works at a children's clothing store she would be able to clothe our kid pretty well in advance, if she knew what sex to buy for.
Despite my logical arguments, my wife appeared dead-set against finding out.
It's not that I really care one way or the other about what sex our baby is. I mean, if it's a boy, I can teach him to play baseball and football and how to catch slimy critters and show them to his mom.
If it were a girl, well, I would like to have a girl because they tend to be more mature, but the last thing I really need is my child to be more mature than I am.
Eventually I wore my wife down with an endless tirade of "C'mon, pleeeeeeeease." She finally decided that she would either have to divorce me or find out the sex and finding out would mean a lot fewer lawyers, so she went along.
The most common way of finding out the sex of the baby is through the ultrasound. This is an amazing device that uses sound waves (I understand the sound is similar to a number of Seattle grunge bands) that bounce off the baby. These bounces are recorded on a screen to draw a picture of the baby.
That's what they tell you at least.
After looking at the picture on the screen, I am now a firm believer that what I was seeing was a satellite weather image of the Atlantic coastline. The friendly lady running the machine pointed to the image and explained the area I thought was New York was actually my baby's head. The railroad tracks leading to New Jersey were the spine.
I was just interested to see if we could see the Florida peninsula or not.
After awhile, my wife and I had been hypnotized enough to believe that we were really seeing inside her belly and not the weather Channel.
And then out of the fog we saw it. OK, technically, she had to point it out to us and it still looked a lot less like a peninsula and a lot more like a one-boat dock, but it was there!
We are having a boy. That means for the first time ever there will be two males in our house to vote against my wife. Don't get me wrong. I know that two-to-one still doesn't win when the "one" is my wife, but if we end up having about six or so other sons, I might stand a chance.
My wife is more than a little nervous. She now has a lot more things to worry about. She has to fret over potty-training a human sprinkler, teaching him how to make that "toot" sound with his armpit and learning to admire mud pies for their creative expression.
At least now she has a few months to prepare (or plan her escape).
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