It's a Girl (!)

It has occurred to me a few times that what I write here about the pregnancy and my feelings about this new parenthood might have some benefit to posterity, and that potentially some day in the far future, my daughter will be able to read this. I don't of course write "to" her--because that would be weird--but sometimes I do understand that she may see it. That maybe makes what I'm about to say sound even worse.
I admit that I was a little disappointed when we first found out that our fetus's gender was female. That was three or four weeks ago, and only now am I completely sure that any and all disappointment has vanished. I'm very happy with our future girl and I can hardly remember that I was disappointed in the first place. I no longer think about any differences due to it being boy or girl or anything like that. It is a girl and it seems silly to think about it being anything else. But initially I had a strange reaction to finding out the news.
The last big thing to be anxious about in a pregnancy (beside the birth of course) is when you find out the gender, which is at 18 weeks, plus or minus a few. I was certainly very excited, so for one thing after we found out I had that normal post-anxious-excitement letdown. I guess that made me feel like I was more disappointed than I really was. Still, during the many weeks after becoming pregnant and before finding out the gender, unconsciously I mostly imagined it being a boy. I think as a man that when you first learn you're going to be a "father," your instinct is to think "son." That's what all fathers once were, after all. Probably this contains selective bias, but it has always seemed to me that a boy has a special relationship with his father, moreso than mother-daughter, mother-son, or father-daughter. What I'm saying is that there was a fairly strong default setting in me regarding expecting a boy.
The more important factor which caused me to hope for a boy relates to Sara. In her family there is something of a curse or whatever you might call it, so much so that it is something they openly talk and joke about. The women only produce girls. Sara's mother is from a family of just two girls. Her aunt had two children, both girls. Sara's mother had two girls. Her sister thus far has two kids, both girls, naturally. I don't believe in voodoo and am a religious follower of stats and probability so the idea that there is something fishy that causes her family to only have girls seems totally implausible. If a doctor doesn't confirm it, I won't believe it. Sara is not as staunchly scientific as me, though, and she has said many times that she wants to have boys (I'm sure she's very happy to have a girl, but for some reason she's shown a desire for male offspring). Being a wonderful husband, I am of course sensitive to her desires. So if she thinks that she's "doomed" to only produce girls, I want to be able to comfort or reassure her. What this all means is that it would have been much easier to have a boy with the first one when there is no pressure, so that the voodoo idea isn't allowed to get inside her head and create an unnecessary sense of anxiety about any future pregnancies. Basically, we are happy to have either a boy or girl with number one, but with any subsequent kids we will start caring much more that the little fetus be recognized as male.
I don't really want to be one of those couples that allows themselves to be disappointed by news of the gender of their fetus. There was a family in my church when I was younger that had 4 or 5 boys in a row to start. Every time the woman got pregnant there was more and more finger-crossing that this would be the time a girl came. Finally it happened, but being in the middle of that would be maddening to me. The specter of there being a girl-dominant gene inside Sara would make this anxiety multiply. So there you go.
Anyway, here we are now, 22 weeks in, more than halfway, and I'm happily looking forward to our future girl. I won't think much at all about having a boy until after she's at least a year old probably, if even then. It's way too early to consider something like this, but I'm actually starting realize that I wouldn't mind having three kids instead of always assuming it would be two (I come from two and so does Sara so it would seem that is the natural way). So whatever potential anxiety I talked about just now would really be deferred at least for a handful of years, so far in the future that it's irrelevant right now. Which it is.
In other baby news, Sara has decided to knit a blanket for the baby. I think this is a fantastic idea (I bought her the yarn for Christmas, after all). She had an excellent question a few days ago, though, wondering since she was spending so much time working on something for it, what was going to be my pre-birth baby-bonding exercise? Hmm. I can't make it a fast runner, that would already be in the DNA. I can't teach it how to appreciate baseball statistics. I can't organize or coordinate for it. I can't rationalize for it or break something down with logic and without bias. I could write something for it or to it, I suppose, but like I said I don't really like the idea of writing to it, and it would feel a little too Hallmark-y to purposefully write something for it. These are some of things for which I possess skill. Finally, I think I've decided that I'm going to build it a dresser. This is sorta cheating, because we need to buy a small dresser to store things anyway, so it's more a present for Sara and me. Nonetheless, it gives me something to do nominally for the baby, something to spend time on and therefore presumably something for me to do that is fatherly. In this way, it is wonderful, and I very carefully and even more pridefully will do it.