I was sworn to secrecy… until today. As my daughter nears the end of her pregnancy (their baby boy is due to arrive in late December), my son and daughter-in-law recently informed us that they are expecting their second child (gender TBD) in May! (I tell you sibling rivalry never ends: For those of you new to this column, my son and daughter had their first babies within ten days of one another in January 2010.)
The way I figure it, my husband and I will be the proud grandparents of a total of 3 boys and one gender TBD by this spring. This is a little mind-numbing. I feel like a matriarch – defined in dictionary.com as “a venerable old woman” – the emphasis, in my mind, on the word “old.” I have yet to ask my husband if he feels like a patriarch! By the way, the word “patriarch,” in dictionary.com, has many more positive definitions assigned to it. Why am I not surprised!
In any case, my son and daughter-in-law have decided not to entertain any gender information from their physician until the MOMENT OF. I started to worry about preparing the nursery and buying the layette – What colors would they use? Doesn’t this have to be done in advance? I should have known – my daughter-in-law has a decorating plan and has everything under control. Then I remembered that back in the day, no one knew the gender before the MOMENT OF. As one of the few admitted LaMaze failures, I didn’t know the gender until 5 hours after the MOMENT OF. My kids still grew up to have plenty of fashion sense – even though they both wore yellow for a very long time.
