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Baby stats:
Aimee's belly circumference: 43"
Victoria Beckham's waist size: 23"
Exchange Rate: 1 AW = 1.87 VBW
Developed this week: The ability of London Underground riders to see my 'fragile' condition and begin to offer me seats!
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Aimee's thoughts:
Boy or girl. Boy or girl. The thoughts keep on flipping around in my head throughout the day and they're beginning to invade my dreams.
So far, I've had three dreams it's going to be a girl. The first was just a very simple dream about holding a baby girl. No real identity to her.
The second dream involved an older girl who looked very, very cute and was most definitely ours.
The third dream got into even more specifics by proving me with a name for our little girl - Asterisk. Don't worry, this isn't the name we've chosen, but it's a doozey, isn't it? I mean, here I am dreaming about having a girl when my waking thoughts are about which gender the baby will be and I name my child Asterisk, which is the symbol for wild card. That's some serious subconsience computing there.
I'm not alone in my girl dreams. Kevin had a dream about taking a little girl shopping and her wanting ham and cheese sandwiches. On further inspection, it was actually his neice Katrina who has never had a ham and cheese sandwich in her life (perhaps that's why she wanted one!), so either Kevin has plans for kidnapping Katrina or he too is thinking our baby might be a girl. Oddly enough, on the same night as Kevin's dream, my friend Caroline had a dream that we had a baby girl too. There are definite girl thoughts floating around the brain waves in London.
After five girl dreams, you could easily understand us being certain it's a girl. And Kevin certainly is certain. I am not.
Here's what happened: after I had those three girl dreams, I had a boy dream. The boy dream seemed much more certain than all of the girl dreams put together. Enough to change my mind and put me squarely into boy camp.
So how much value should we put in our dreams? Are they visions of our future or past lives? Are they transmissions from other planes of existance? Or are they simply thought-residue, coming forward in a deluge of mismatched images as our brain attempts to file away the days events in some sort of nonsensical synapse database?
I turned to the magic of the information superhighway for some answers. If it's on the internet, it MUST be true!
If one dreams about a baby:
A new event , happening, beginning for the subject of the dream. Can mean a baby if the dream is about a pregnant person or someone wanting to have one. Wish fulfillment. Fills one's sense of lacking or incompleteness.
Hmmm. That was pretty vague and dumb.
I wonder what the baby experts say. I asked (okay, someone else online asked) ultrasound expert Jane Foley about the accuracy of gender dreams. Here's what she said:
I have found a high correct prediction level with people who have an emotional dream or a
very solid dream where you wake up with that KNOWING -- a dream that sticks with you all day.
These are very accurate! I have asked hundreds and hundreds of patients about their dreams
about pregnancy. I have been taken aback at the accuracy of a dream like that about their
pregnancy.
A bit more interesting - but if I've had three medium dreams about a girl and one strong dream about a boy, which to believe?
And what of the frog dream I had last night?
If one dreams abut a frog:
Mysterious, or magical feeling intended. If it is staring at you: a spiritual significance of being
watched. If the dream focus is not on the frog, but something else: it represents another person in
your life. It also signifies something is known about you by others, but not known by you.
So, maybe the frog represents Kevin, and he knows something about me that I don't. Does that mean I should
trust Kevin's instincts about the gender of the baby?
Nah, the only thing Kevin knows that I don't is the colour of my toenails... I haven't seen them in weeks.
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Kevin's thoughts:
As you may know, the beginning of Week 20 is an important day for us. As far as I'm concerned, other than the birthdate, it's the most exciting day of the baby's development. It's the day we find out if we're having a little girl or a little boy! Aimee and I are bouncing off the walls with excitement.
Sure sure, we've heard all the arguments for waiting until the delivery room, but I'm sorry, they're not for us. From the moment we got pregnant, we knew that we wanted to find out the sex of the baby as soon as possible.
Surprisingly, more people are on our side than we originally thought. A few weeks ago we had a poll that asked, "Would you find out the sex of your baby?" I was expecting a 50/50 split; it would seem upon talking to my pregnant or recently-pregnant friends that there were just as many who did find out as didn't.
However, the poll has spoken, and it seems around 3 out of 4 Beimers.com readers agree: We want to know.
The debates are interesting on the subject. Most people have fairly strong views on it, and it's rare to find a flip-flopper. You either want to know or you don't, but you either know you want to know, or you know you don't want to know. You rarely don't know if you want to know or not know, you know?
What's most interesting about the debate is that it seems each side of the fence makes assumptions about the other. The average not-knower thinks the knowers just want to find out so they can paint the baby's room in an appropriate colour. The average knower thinks the not-knowers are just out to prove something to the world, or that they think they'll be disappointed by the result if they find out sooner, spending the last trimester sulking that they got the wrong sex.
Both assumptions are ridiculous and only serve to fortify one's own decision by attacking the shortcomings of the other, like a political slur campaign. What a not-knower calls spoiling the surprise, a knower calls doubling it. What a knower calls stubbornness, a not-knower calls anticipation.
Six of one, half dozen of the other, I say. There are merits to both sides, and you pick what's right for you, as long as it's based on how good your choice was, and not how bad the other would have been.
Why do we want to know? It's not about colours, or control, or even the usual Kevin & Aimee answer to most questions: "Why not?"
It's about identity. Personally, I get tired of calling my baby the ambiguous "it". I don't like the continued swapping of gender pronouns, making sure if I say "he" I follow it up with "or she". I've written all of my articles for this site in the infinitive, always saying "the baby", "the child", "our little one".
Our baby is a person, not an "it". We want to bond with him/her. She/he needs to be called by his/her name, knowing the sound of her/his parents' voices, and know that they're speaking to him/her. She/he can hear us talking about her/him as early as Week 9, and it's about time he/she became someone.
You see how silly that last paragraph sounded? With all that him/her/he/she stuff, it just sounds like my baby is a genderless shell waiting to be imprinted in the delivery room, an androgynous hermaphrodite in a Schrodinger-esque dual state of perpetual flux until the standing wave is collapsed by the presence of the OBSERVER (that's me) into a single, solid state. And at THAT moment, the baby ceases to be an "it" and becomes a "boy" or a "girl", a "he" or a "she". Not a something, but a someone.
Not just an entity, but an identity.
And that, my friends, is my reason to find out the sex. It just goes to show you that when it comes to babies, we've all got our reasons, whether it's anticipation, preparation... or quantum physics.
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Did you know? |
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For years, people (okay, men mostly) have thought that women's brains shrink while they're pregnant - the so-called Baby Fog.
However, in a recent study, the exact opposite was found to be true! Women's brains increase in size during pregnancy and after giving birth!
So how do we account for those bouts of fogginess? I think Kev's dad says it best:
"The kids must have their mother's brains, since I still have mine."
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Baby's Book of the Week |
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 Mr Gumpy's Outing
By John Burningham
I believe this book to be an stunning allegory about death and the afterlife.
Mr Gumpy portrays a God-like figure who takes children and animals on a boat
ride on the sole condition that they refuse the core deep-rooted urge of their species. The bunny
may join, for example, so long as he doesn't hop about. The ride goes smoothly, as everyone in the
boat has suppressed their urges into a tiny ball of white hot fire, until, in a moment's notice, the
goat kicks, the calf tramples, the chickens flap, the children squabble, and the boat goes arse over
teakettle into the drink, the moment of death. Afterward, they travel through
the blazing sun, are forgiven for their sins, and invited with open arms into the House of Gumpy. An
uplifting lesson to us all.
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Aimee's cravings |
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This week, Aimee is craving food. She's not picky, so long as there is lots of it and it keeps on coming.
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Everyone into the poll! |
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Boy babes are blue
Girl babes are pink
Our scan's in two weeks
So what do you think?
Some more answers from the suggestion box:
It's gonna be a girl because...
"Aim's girliness overpowers Kev's boyness."
It's gonna be a boy because...
"I have trouble picturing a girly little Kevin."
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