It doesn’t have to be a hard decision.
When you find out you’re pregnant there are so many decisions ahead of you; breast or bottle, cloth or disposable, chameleon or donkey (prams not pets). Doctors. Hospitals. Names. Birth plans. Nursery furniture. It’s just one big long list of things to do and stuff to pick. I have it on good authority (my own) that pregnancy is not for the indecisive.
One of the biggest and often most hotly debated of these big life decisions lies in whether or not to find out the sex of your baby ahead of the birth. When it comes to the great gender reveal debate, I’ve been lucky enough to have had it both ways.
There were undeniable merits in finding out our first baby’s gender whilst pregnant, particularly as my first baby ended up not just baby, but babies. As surprises go, discovering during an early scan that we were expecting fraternal twins rated pretty highly on the wow-ometer. We kind of felt like we had won the genetic lottery when we found out at 21 weeks that we were expecting a boy and a girl. The second time around, however, when pregnant with our third and final, we requested that the sonographer keep mum on the gender of our little apprentice human.
And speaking from experience… The surprise? Way way way better.
I should probably mention in the interests of full disclosure that that I'm a notorious planner. I like to know things. To be prepared. I've been known to organise my organiser. I have implemented an intricate and precise system of colour coding for my children's picture books. And yet despite these (charming) personality flaw traits, if I were to have another baby, I would opt for another gender surprise any day of the week, and here's why.
1. Elimination of awkward silences.
Carrying low and out front? Boy. High and looking like someone just dragged you face down, over a gravel road for 10km at high speed, tethered to a hilux? Girl. Or so the story goes.
Aren't those conversations so much FUN? Isn't it enlightening, enthralling and down right gratifying each and every time you're told your ass has expanded so exponentially that you simply must be having a girl? So many things to speculate on when you don't know the gender of your unborn.
Rings to dangle over your much examined bump.
Draino to wee into (my personal favourite fail safe method of gender prediction).
In depth analysis of fascinating facts like the foetal heart rate, the nature of your cravings, the frequency in which you've taken to riding the porcelain bus, which direction your pillow faces on the bed (because: science).
To some, these things may sound tedious. But to the well trained mind these seemingly mundane conversations are the perfect antedote to the good old awkward silence. When you don't know the gender of your unborn baby there's always something to talk about when random strangers decide to strike up a conversation with you while you're waiting in line at the supermarket checkout, or whiling away the hours in the doctors surgery waiting room.