I totally wanted a girl and was upset to hear I was having a boy. But now, many years later, I have 3 boys and one girl… and I totally relate to the boys better than the girl.
I think it’s because I never had brothers, so I went into the boy relationship without preconceived expectations. They are who they are (and 2 of the 3 are HUGE readers). But the girl I thought would be like me, or at least like how I was when I was a girl. But she’s not at all and I find myself fighting with her way more than the boys. She just turned 12 last week and she is always sneaking off to wear makeup and wanting to wear skin-tight short-shorts. I’ve never cared that much about my appearance, and was more into sports, while she is into One Direction and doing whatever it takes to be one of the popular kids. In some ways she is like the girls I resented in middle school, which is probably why she and I have had a difficult time lately. She says I am harder on her than on her brothers, and I don’t think that it’s true but it might be.
Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that you have an idea in your head as to what a boy is like and what a girl is like, and it isn’t necessarily so. They are who they are, and getting a girl doesn’t mean getting the kind of girl you are imagining.
Four months is plenty of time to make an absolute shit-ton of animal ear hats. I showed one of my coworkers a few basic stitches on afternoon before leaving for a week’s vacation, and when I came back three of them were making headbands and such. By the end of the month they were making and selling animal and character hats.
Any kid can be a reader if you have lots of books in the house and encourage them to read. So don’t let that worry you. I have known lots of boys throughout the years who were more into books than sports.
Anyway, I’m not judging you. If I ever have a kid, I really want my firstborn to be a boy. My 2nd can be a girl, but if I don’t have at least one boy, I’d definitely mourn that.
The Tamora Pierce is what totally got me. I just sort of quietly took the Lioness Quartet down and put them back on my shelf; not that a boy might not enjoy them but they wouldn’t be nearly as important to a boy as they were to me.
Again NETA for time: lavenderviolet, I don’t want to turn this thread into an abortion thread, but the reason I wouldn’t get rid of it now isn’t that it has toenails and pees and makes faces, according to What to Expect. I think it’s insulting to reduce this to how cute or uncute it is. I wouldn’t get rid of it now because it’s been 16 weeks and if I were going to have an abortion I’d have done it way before now; certainly before it was totally obvious to everybody, before I spent a couple months feeling sick as a dog, and before I stopped being able to sleep on my back. I deeply suspect that “access” is a problem that has, indeed, risen quite a bit since the late 80’s in many states, considering that in some places there is only one clinic for hundreds and hundreds of miles. And that the vast majority of women with access to prenatal care, awareness of their pregnancies, and access to abortion facilities are not going to wait until 16 weeks to abort an unwanted fetus. Especially since pregnancy tests have gotten more sensitive since then as well; I knew I was knocked up two weeks in.
Y’all, my daughter won’t read Laura Ingalls Wilder, either! I know she would love those books! If she won’t read Anne of Green Gables in a few years, I don’t even know what I’ll do.
Y’all, we’re going to have to create a support group/book club for all us disappointed mothers. My kids hate Anne of Green Gables and have very little interest in Little House books. Meanwhile, trying to get them into Anne, I was having a grand old time, finding the story just as amusing as when I was a tween. I’ve also failed to interest the older one in Tolkein, Harry Potter, or any other wizard-y fiction. Thank goodness she likes Doctor Who, or I might have to disown her.
You could just you know, wait it out and then keep having more kids
Picking boy names is much more difficult than picking girl names. And boy clothes are boring compared to girl clothes. But…I bet baby girls never accidentally peed in their own mouths so that’s a …plus?
I hope you’ve got the support to make you feel… normal, now. Just wanted to chime in with yet more! We agreed not to find out the gender of our first, but I was absolutely convinced I was having a boy. I was really excited about it and when the midwife told us she was a girl my genuine first word was “really?”.
For our second we agreed to find out, and I wanted so badly to have a boy. I really really wanted the full set (I know, it’s pathetic) plus my oldest is kind of a strange and wonderful person, and I wanted more than anything for the second to be as different as possible from her, for their own sake. Well, the universe shat in my hat, obviously. When they confirmed at the ultrasound that she was a girl I cannot deny that I was disappointed. I got over it fairly quickly but there was a real sense of loss - compounded by the fact that I knew, because of my age, and health and just because, that this would be my last child. Now, she’s 2 1/2 and I still look wistfully occasionally at baby boy clothes. I knew my son, however briefly - I know his name (which I’ve told nobody). It is what it is.
Now that she’s here of course, she is the absolute light of my life. I literally cannot imagine loving another human being as much as I do her. My oldest is my first-born, my heart and soul and the greatest thing I ever contributed to. But the second? she’s mine. And of course, in the greatest tradition of being careful what you wish for, she is indeed as different from her sister as she could possibly be.
And it’s awesome in much different ways than Harriet the Spy was awesome. Called “The Long Secret” if anyone wishes to recommend it to your picky-ass kid.
On the plus side, my daughter was the one who got me into Harry Potter, and she does read some cool books now.
My friend’s brother was 100% convinced that his wife was having a boy, so much so that when he first saw his daughter arrive, before the “it’s a…” announcement, his exhausted brain looked at her anatomy and came up with “oh my god, my son was born without a penis.”
I was at least pleased that our ultrasound results gave me the opportunity to post this as my Facebook status:
[QUOTE=Nursey from Blackadder II]
And then I said “A boy without a winkle? God be praised, it is a miracle. A boy without a winkle!” And then Sir Thomas More pointed out that a boy without a winkle is a girl.
[/QUOTE]
One of my friends replied with a version of the correct next line (“but nobody was really disappointed”) , which pleased me greatly.
(Lately I’ve been doing a lot of rereading of the books I loved as a kid that I guess are more “pre-teen” than what’s YA now - holy shit, y’all, Flubber is mean. Somehow I remembered it as a fat-girl-gets-her-moment-and-sticks-it-to-the-bullies book. It is NOT.)
ETA - the boy name thing is not going well. Nobody will tell me what’s wrong with Rufus, just that it is evidently… self-evidently wrong.
Germanic names aren’t terribly popular at the moment. It sounds like a grandpa’s name. He’s gonna get called Woofey. It sounds like a dog barking. Kids will make fun of him and bark at him until he cries. Everyone will think you named him after Rufus Wainwright. If you did name him after Rufus Wainwright, he will grow up to hate Rufus Wainwright. Take your pick. One or more of these is going through the head of people who won’t tell you what’s wrong with the name.
But you know what? All of that applies to the amorphous idea of a kid named Rufus, and not a bit of it applies to your baby, Rufus. And no matter what name you pick, 70% of the people you tell before the birth will hate it, and not be the littlest bit shy about telling you. After the birth, no one will dare tell you to your face that they don’t like his name. So name him whatever the hell you like, and just don’t tell anyone until after he’s born.
Not a mom, but an aunt who is close to both her niece and her nephew. My niece has always been the prickly one. Always had to be prompted to hug family goodbye, etc. Began being hateful to her dad at 15 and is now, at 19, just starting to emerge from that phase.
My nephew started running to hug me hello as soon as he learned to walk. He’s fifteen and, despite some occasional moodiness, still a sweet kid who hugs and tells his dad he loves him. He’s 6’ tall and built like a football player, but he’s asleep on the couch in the living room right now and still looks like a little angel. (Don’t tell him I said that.)
Though I’ve never read them, I’ve heard there are entire forums devoted to “gender disappointment” on parenting boards. So it’s probably common as mud to feel that way and not a big deal overall.
I always say you never realize how many people in the world you can’t stand until you try to name a baby.“Carrie? Hell naw…Carrie was that little bitch who pulled my hair in second grade!” <----real example.
It’s so true! So many perfectly great names are off limits because of things like “that’s my sister’s ex boyfriend’s name, and he was a jerk.” Or names that are linked to pop culture in some way that you’re not happy with - “Ew, can’t go with Justin, everyone will think of that damned Beiber.” And it’s not just names that affect us, either - everyone else will have reasons for not liking the great name you’ve settled on, because of their own biases.
And that’s exactly why I won’t be sharing the name with friends and family until the baby’s here. People are a lot more likely to throw in their unwanted two cents while they still think there’s time to change your mind. The last thing you need in the last weeks of pregnancy is Aunt Elaine asking why you’re naming the kiddo after Grandpa on that side of the family, instead of the one on this side. (Which is why my poor brother ended up with two middle names, one of them “Herbert.”) Most people will keep their mouths shut and smile and keep their opinions to themselves once the name’s set in the stone of the birth certificate. Most. Your “Aunt Elaine” may vary.
You can tell us, though, because we’re nosy and opinionated and we don’t really count anyway.
Yeah, he kinda gets a vote, doesn’t he?