Testing Part II (Dad)

There are two questions that everyone asks the moment you tell them that you're expecting:

1) Are you going to find out if it's a boy or a girl?
2) Do you have names picked out?

I'm not making fun of these questions or of anyone who has asked them, but it's kind of the old standby for when someone breaks the news that a baby's on the way. What else are you going to ask, "So, is your wife extra gassy these days?"

For the longest time, I figured I wouldn't want to know whether it was a boy or a girl. Not because of any particular reason. It just seemed like the classy, old-fashioned way to do things. But these days, with baby showers and registries and the expectations placed on the husband to completely repaint the nursery and so forth, it's very practical to find out what the baby is beforehand. Plus it cuts down some of the name stress when you can eliminate half of the roughly one zillion names in the English language. Finally, from a blogger's point of view, it gets really annoying typing his/her and he/she all the time (because I'm not about to violate the ultimate English major's taboo of using the plural possessive pronoun 'their' as a substitute for the bulkier yet grammatically correct his/her, nor am I going to refer to my impending offspring as 'it'!). I'm really craving a gender-specific pronoun about now!

So yes, we are most likely going to find out. If the baby plays along, that is, and strikes the proper pose for us during the next ultrasound. There'll be enough excitement on his/her day of birth that the added gender surprise really adds very little for the cost of waiting and having to wade through all of those additional names.