Boy or Girl? Should You Find Out?

While you and your spouse wait for the fateful day of your offspring"s arrival you"ll be barraged with questions from well-meaning observers. One of the more popular questions my wife and I encountered was, "Are you going to find out what you"re having?" People will ask you, too. Be prepared for how seriously some people take this very divisive issue.

In my experience, some people felt very strongly against Finding Out, many of them complete strangers. When we told them we were leaning towards Finding Out, cordiality suddenly disappeared. They"d look at us like we"d just kicked a puppy and storm off with a vigorous harrumph. Others would counter with a haughty, "Don"t you want to be surprised?"

Surprised? Finding a twenty dollar bill in an old jacket pocket or getting a flat tire at night on a desolate rural route in Maine—those are surprises. You"re either going to have a boy or a girl. Fifty-fifty chance either way. The same odds as flipping a coin. And if you think your wife is going to care about a "surprise" in the delivery room as she grunts through the pain of passing an eight-pound object through her pelvis, you"ve been grossly misinformed.

Much to the chagrin of the detractors, my wife and I came down on the affirmative side of the Finding Out argument. Regardless of how wishy-washy we might have been when responding to Finding Out inquiries, we truly decided that we wanted to know the sex of our child shortly after the stick turned pink.

Finding Out was a no-brainer for us. In addition to being completely impatient, we"re both big on planning and saw distinct practical and emotional advantages to knowing the sex of our child ahead of time. My wife did have a little last minute Finding Out jitters just before the ultrasound, but in the end we learned that the little uterus dweller was a boy.  (Note: Don"t bother asking the ultrasound technician for Finding Out advice. They"ll simply tell you that half of the couples do and half of them don"t. Fifty-fifty. How ironic.)

Once we Found Out we opened a new door in the journey to birth. We widened the color palette options for the nursery, no longer stuck comparing only gender-neutral yellow and green paint chips from Home Depot.  Now we only had to sift through 5,000 monikers in the 10,000 Baby Names book, saving ourselves valuable time by skipping over the fifteen ethnic variants of "Jennifer" in the girls" section.

By far, the biggest advantage to Finding Out was that we now thought of our child as a person and not just "the baby". We named him, talked to him, and read to him.  For us, Finding Out strengthened the bonding process. By the time he joined us we felt like we already knew him. We did the same thing with our second boy.

I"d advise any expectant couple to have the ultrasound technician tell them if anything"s dangling between the legs. As your child grows older he or she will offer plenty of surprises far more shocking than their gender. If you"ll excuse me now, I"ve got to go and remove a slice of bologna from the DVD player.