I found myself getting into the unfortunate habit of calling my baby to be an “it” which annoyed me no end. Knowing it’ll probably* be a girl helps me call her a her
A friend of the mother’s and myself asked not to know and then ended up wishing she did. It would do no harm not to know, adds a bit of excitement to the whole thing, but after one scare it was good to know as much as possible about our unborn child.
probably because our little girl was moving around an awful lot in the womb, hiding her face and moving her legs around too much for the radiographer to know for sure
We chose to wait and see with both of ours; the basis for this decision was that (at that time):
[ul][li]The safe method - ultrasound - was not entirely reliable; to ‘know’ the sex of the baby, then be wrong could be costly and possibly disappointing.[/li][li]The reliable method - amniocentesis - was not entirely safe; we had already suffered two miscarriages and to increase the risk(however slightly) just to determine something that we would eventually discover anyway, seemed unnecessary.[/li][li]Yeah, it did seem a bit like unwrapping the presents before Christmas.[/li][/ul]
It still puzzles me why so many people seem to want a surprise to go along with giving birth. Isn’t it enough to be looking forward to being a PARENT, rather than looking forward to a surprise? Infact, why stop there…let the surprise last for a couple of years and see if you can GUESS the gender based on how the child behaves! Again, as I am neither a parent nor do I have any desire to be one (at least to a human child), I probably look at this situation with different feeling.
And for those of you who seem to have your heart so set on having a boy or a girl, you probably shouldn’t be breeding in the first place. I’m sure an adoption agency will set you up with what you want, and then you don’t have to take the risk of being responsible for an unwanted person entering the world (god, I hope that some of your children don’t come on this board in a couple of years and search through your old posts!)
Oh please. It’s only been the last 10-20 years that people have been able to be more reliably told the sex of a child in advance, and it’s still not that reliable…I have a friend whose granddaughter turned into a grandson at delivery, despite an ultrasound the day before that “confirmed” a girl. Since the dawn of time we have not known the sex of our unborn children, and we’ve gotten along fine. You only have to look at the consequences in China to see how the technology and the desire for one sex over the other has affected lives.
I realize your comment was a joke, but I’m always dismayed by the eagerness of young parents-to-be to spoil the best surprise of their life, for nothing more important that paint color choices and clothing. And I was one of those people who really wanted to have a girl first, because I knew how to raise a girl…or so I thought. Now I wish I had had my son first, because he was so much easier to deal with!
Every day I deal with people who “know” what baby they are going to have, and have told all their friends the name, and even the expected induction date, and are a bit surprised when I discourage them from getting this information engraved on something before the actual birth. I tell them (or their friends) that the tests could be wrong, you may go into labor early, you may change your mind at the last second on the name or the spelling thereof based on any of those wacky criteria some people use for choosing names like haircolor or the weather, or, tragically, something may go wrong with the birth and you won’t have a baby at all. Peple seem so amazed that having a baby isn’t as predictable as making an appointment to get your brakes adjusted. How did we get to this point in one generation?
When my daughter gets pregnant, I’m telling her that I don’t want to know the sex of the baby in advance. Knowing everything in advance would make the actual birth so anticlimactic…especially when some of these babies have whole scrapbooks and photo albums completed for them before they take their first breath.
We wanted the full emotional package during the birth. Finding out in the doc’s office would have been a neat little thing on its own, but the whole all-together package at the hospital was worth it. Huge rush of emotions and togetherness and life and all that with the added joy of the surprise like a cherry on top.
Plus it was neat to have two sets of dreams to discuss during the pregnancy. What will she be like? Will he walk first or talk first? Will she curse us with a love for Barbie dolls? Will he curse us with a love for Barbie dolls ( )? IT was just plain fun to guess and talk and speculate and dream and all that. Finding out before would have simply turned the much of the dreaming into planning for reality.
There are different kinds of surprise and it doesn’t help to treat them as if they are all the same - your child will either be male or female, but for a certain time you don’t know which - so it will be a surprise, but within a finite, anticipated range of possibilities, all of which may be considered agreeable.
A random stranger dropping a piano on your head may also be a surprise (indeed, more so) but it arises from range of possibilities that was not anticipated and/or is not agreeable.
We decided to find out the sex of both munchkins. We aren’t good at waiting for stuff but also I hade a lot of ultrasounds… they started monthly and got closer together as the birth approached. The temptation is far too great!
Also it was a great surprise when we learned the sex. Draws pregnancy out as a long string of surprises. Wow we’re pregnant! Eeek it’s a girl/boy. Oh the baby comes today?
There won’t be a third but if there were I’d need to know so I could prepare one of my existing kids to share a room. That’s not a surprise I’d want to only have a few days to deal with!
I wasn’t worried about clothes or nursery colors with the first two… I was worried about names! And I liked referring to the baby as she and then he while I was pregnant. Made the babies seem like real people rather than the abstract “it/baby/whatever” in my belly playing drums on my bladder.
I know it isn’t 100% accurate to determine sex through ultrasound but we had enough of them and high level ultrasound scans and the nice tour of the baby by my ob that we were confident in his assessments.
My husband’s grandmother was going into the hospital for surgery a couple of days after the ultrasound that told us we were having a boy. She was overjoyed that her grandson was having a son of his own. That early surprise made her very happy. The last night I saw her she lamented not having yarn to make a blanket for her first great grandson. She died the next day.
Neither my husband or I wanted to find out, either. It was just something we both agreed on from the beginning. The planning was no big deal – did a brightly colored nursery in an animal theme and the bonus was that when you open the closet door you weren’t overwhelmed with a wall of pink or blue.
We both had our thoughts about what I was having during the pregnancy. My husband kept having dreams that I had a girl, and I just knew somehow it was a boy.
When my son was born my husband watched him enter the world, and I’ll never forget the moment when he yelled through tears, “It’s a boy! Oh my gosh it’s a beautiful boy!” I wouldn’t have done it any other way just to be able to paint his room blue.
Wow, some people take this much more seriously than I do.
“Best surprise of your life”? Really? How about the first word, or, even better, the first time the baby reaches out with real intent and grasps your finger? The first smile? There are tons of important firsts which come as a surprise yet don’t revovle around my child’s genitals.
And, aside from that, how is it less surprising to find out at 4 months than at 9 months? While I “knew” the gender of each child, (but only confirmed it with the second), we left that office visit beaming like drunken puppies, and called the grandmas and my best friend before we made it all the way out the front door. But knowing we had the girl we hoped for didn’t make the birth announcement phone calls less exciting in any way.
Actually, we probably had one of the rare circumstances where knowing the gender was important for a medical decision. I started bleeding at 23 weeks, and the doctors wanted the baby out: they gave us the option of vaginal induction and allowing the baby to die in our arms or emergency c-section and a chance of life. The statistics for survival for 23-weekers are vastly different for boys and for girls. Girls have a much better chance of suriving without major disabilities. So we chose the c-section and she’s doing just fine. Had we known she was a boy, we would not have made the same decision - his chances of brain damage and a miserable, painful life would have been far greater.
I didn’t find out with my first, because people convinced me I should be “surprised” and I was young and stupid. With my second, thirteen years later, I simply wanted to know. No big deal. They were doing the ultrasound anyway, for medical testing, and I wanted to know. So did my husband, although I think he did have some element of wanting to adjust his mind-set if it wasn’t the girl he was hoping for. Neither of us would have been devastated to have a son, but we have one already and were hoping for a girl this time. We got her!
I did not want to know with either of my kids. For me, the surprise of the gender was part of the joy, just like opening your Christmas presents on Christmas day. Once, many years ago, my older sisters found where my parents hid the presents and convinced me that I should look, too. That was the worst Christmas, since half the fun was ruined just by knowing what was coming. That’s the same reasoning for not wanting to know the gender. When my second child was born and the doctor held him up, I remember looking at him and exclaiming to my husband, “Look what we got!”
See, I feel like there’s a misconception here that those of us who found out are all rabid gender-stereotyping fools with pink paint buckets in one hand and blue in the other and won’t let our girls wear blue jeans or our boys hold a Barbie. In my case, at least, nothing could be further from the truth. I’m pretty rabidly anti-gender stereotyping.
It’s actually because I was so “meh” about which one I was having that I decided to find out. “Well, I think it’s a girl” went my thought process. "Which would be cool. Of course, if it isn’t, it’s a boy, which would be cool. Let’s just find out and stop calling it ‘It.’ " I wasn’t hooked into “the surprise” at birth, because to me the surprise is the baby. It’s the person, not the gender, that I want to meet. It’s always sort of bugged me that the first question everyone asks is “boy or girl?” Um…“person,” actually. Thanks for asking.
My kid doesn’t have her own room, but if she did, it’d be green, boy or girl. Even knowing ahead of time.
OK, so she wears frills. Oooh, yeah. Frills are cute, I’ll give you that. But her favorite toy is a mini-football, and her favorite books are “Trucks and Fire Engines” and “Moonhorse”, so there you go.
I did not want to know. I wanted the “magic moment” when the Doctor says, “It’s a boy/girl!” It was one of the final straws that ended an already broken relationship when the mother of my son insisted on telling me despite my protests.
I am 11 weeks pregnant today. I do not want to know the gender before birth, and my husband doesn’t care. Therefore, no pre-knowledge for us! My mother-in-law desperately wants to know beforehand, but it ain’t gonna happen. (She was with my SIL during her ultrasounds and found out the gender with all 3 - they both wanted to know, as did SIL’s mom.)
kittenblue --you are very wise. Nothing in this life is guaranteed–but we all seem to think we are entitled to healthy newborns–we even plan deliveries around the doc’s schedule or the mother’s convenience. I don’t approve of that (I am talking here of normal pregnancies-not obstetric emergencies or unstable conditions for mother or baby). I know of people who have the nursery done, name picked and engraved on everything etc–and then she arrives and she doesn’t seem to fit the name Olivia at all…
Another reason to NOT know is to avoid the very tedious and rude conversations that go something like this:
“what are you having? A girl! Wow. When are you due? In 2 months? Wow-you’re big! And a girl. Ha! You’ve got your work cut out for you! Does Daddy have his shotgun ready, yet? In His wisdom, God gave me boys–there is no way I could raise a girl. Best of luck to you.”
or
“Ooh, a boy. Well-that’ll be a change for you! Just wait…that nursery rhyme is right, you know.” (leaving me to wonder, for which one was the reference made…)
:rolleyes:
I knew with one of my kids–and I told noone, because I had witnessed so many similiarly moronic conversations.
It’s bad enough that women are pestered daily while pregnant with people wanting to touch their bellys, cross examining them about their vitamin intake, outwardly disapproving of that glass of wine in the restarant–whatever.
Frankly, my not telling (and then not wanting to know) had more to do with cutting the above crap off at the pass. I also like the idea of experiencing (however minutely) birth the way my ancestors did–awe and wonder of the process, with a little extra suprise added in.
I don’t think that everyone who wants or needs to know ahead of time is some kind of ubercontrolling parent. There are myriad reasons to know.
It’s a personal preference. I would just not take whatever you’re told as guaranteed.
I want to know. It’s still a surprise, it’s just a few months earlier than it would have been. Also–like all of you said–it’s not an absolute guarantee of boy or girl, so there might still be a surprise at the birth. The doctor will still yell “It’s a girl/boy!” and Bird Man and I will still be shocked and surprised that these medical professionals are actually allowing us to reproduce and take said offspring home where we will surely screw it up for life. :eek:
Anyway, we’ve had our fill of surprises these past two years. Some of them were not pleasant and it would have been nice to have a few months to prepare.
I agree that it’s not a big deal either way. If you want to know, go ahead and try to find out. If you want to wait, that’s great for you! Do what you want and don’t let others’ opinions sway you. People have such strong emotions sometimes about anything to do with pregnancy and babies and this is really not worth it. I would never pressure anyone to find out or not, it is a wonderful experience either way.
I did choose to find out with my baby but I had several ultrasounds and it would have been really, really hard not to know. By the 4th one I could see his boyhood plain as day, and I had a few of the new 3-D ultrasounds where it was even more obvious, and I didn’t want to miss watching it because I was trying not to know the sex. If other people did not want to know I would not have told them. I guess some people would not want the new kind of ultrasound either since you can what the baby looks like, but I found it amazing and I had a whole album of pictures before he was born.
I still had a wonderful and emotional birth experience. It was not a let down or anticlimatic at all! I finally got to meet and hold this person that I knew and loved and he suprises me everyday as he grows.
If we have another child I might find out, I might not. We’ll see how it goes and maybe we’ll try not knowing, but if I did find out by accident or something I wouldn’t be heartbroken about it. Likewise if I do want to know and can’t see on the ultrasound, then we’ll just wait.
With my first I wanted it to be a surprise, although I “knew” it was going to be a girl. I was right. With the second, so many years later, I wanted to know before the birth. No I didn’t need to paint the room or buy a bunch of gender specific stuff, I just wanted time to mentally prepare. I “knew” that I was having a boy, wanted a boy - the dad was excited about the possibility of having a boy, but we had a girl. No we weren’t “shattered” but it took a little while to come up with a girl name. I still didn’t have one ready when I went into labor a month early.
As someone said above, surprises don’t stop when they’re born. Each milestone they reach, you never know exactly when or where or how it’s going to happen. The first smile, the first laugh, the first steps, the first word, the first tooth - none of that is scheduled. Plus the personality of the child is a surprise. No matter when you find out the gender, none of the rest is predictable.
Well, I’m pregnany now (14 weeks) and we definitely want to know. I want to be able to plan everything and I don’t want a dresser full of green and yellow onsies. Besides, I don’t care which sex the baby is, as long as he/she is healthy.
My aunt had 2 boys and got pregnant again, hoping for a girl. So after she delivered her third boy, she refused to see him for 2 days.
She’s quite a bitch overall and her boys turned out to be really great guys, despite the lack of affection any of them got.
)? IT was just plain fun to guess and talk and speculate and dream and all that. Finding out before would have simply turned the much of the dreaming into planning for reality.