I had my ultrasound yesterday, and something occured that has left me in shock; that’s why it took me a day to blog about it…

My doctor is a female who has 3 sons.  Actually, 2 of her sons are the exact same age as 2 of my daughters, because our dr. was 9 months pregnant when she delivered my 4-year-old, and she was on maternity leave when her replacement doctor delivered my 19-month-old.  But anyway, during my ultrasound yesterday, she was talking about how her other dr. friend came to visit over the weekend, and he has 4 daughters.  He was wistfully throwing around a football with her sons and she was talking about how into sports girls are in this area, trying to console her friend because he didn’t have boys.  She was telling this story because we have 3 daughters and one on the way, and my husband is starting to feel like the character Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof who is famous for having 5 daughters.  So anyway, the dr. gets to the point in the story where she’s talking about lots of girls in our area being active in sports.  All of a sudden, she kind of pauses, then she goes, “wait a minute…  what’s this?”  Seems the ultrasound had picked up a certain little “bleep” on the radar that hadn’t appeared on the February ultrasound…  Seems our little Lyndsey or Evangeline is going to be Christopher Vincent instead!!!

It’s especially funny because my dr. has a reputation in the area for being wrong about these kinds of things.  I’ve heard stories of at least 5  of her patients’ babies whose gender was predicted wrong; inlcuding one from the delivery room nurse I had when I delivered my second daughter.  I am glad this “misdiagnosis” happened now rather than at birth, otherwise our firstborn son would be going home in pink – after 3 girls, pink and purple onsies are all I have!  And in the past 24 hours since I found out, I’ve been looking around the house, noting how easily and unnoticeably we’ve emersed ourselves in pinks and purples over the years.  We have pink blankies, bedsheets, clothes, stuffed animals, doll’s clothes, furniture, carpet, curtains, pillows…  the list goes on and on and on.

We are ecstatic; we’ve never had a little boy in our house, so it should be interesting to say the least.  And my greatest wish of course is for a healthy baby anyway, gender is not a concern.  But now that we know he’s a boy, I do feel kind of lost.  I’ve never had a boy baby before, and I had gotten into a sort-of comfort zone with my girls…  I even had a nice system worked out with their clothes.  The clothes that my 19-month-old was growing out of weren’t even getting packed away in the basement – I was just keeping them around for the new baby to use!  My girls are close enough in age where I was just putting all their clothes in one closet, and they would make the transition to the next size seamlessly – I thought I had it all figured out!  The good news about the clothes is that my sister has gratiously offered us the use of her boys’ clothes.  She has a baby who will be 2½ months older than baby Christopher, so if we can keep the transportation line open between her home in Illinois and mine in Ohio, we shouldn’t have to put our baby boy into any pinks or purples.

And that reminds me…  I got my husband to promise me (somehow, we have both forgotten how!) somewhere between the last 2 baby girls that if we were to ever have a baby boy, I would get to name him Christopher after my husband.  Now that it’s a reality, he is getting cold feet about the name, but I am not letting him out of this one!  People have suggested using Christopher as a middle name, but Vincent was decided upon way back in 1999 when my husband’s father fell ill and passed away – I was pregnant with our first child when he was diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease), and we agreed that when we had a boy, he’d have the name Vincent…  little did we know it would be 9 years later!

So anyway, I just wanted to share our happy news with everybody…  Doctors can be wrong, and it seems our family is the latest victim of our doctor’s reputable gender inconsistencies.  And here is the poll we took way back when in February (before our first “gender revealing” ultrasound – or so we thought!) of some of our family and friends’ predictions.  It was just for fun, no prizes or anything, but the people who thought they were right really were not (including our whole family except Taylor – good job, T!), and vice versa!

 Gender Prediction – Feb. 2008

GUESSES:
Mommy – g
Daddy – g
Taylor – b
Sammie – g
Mary Beth – b
Great Grandma and Great Pa – b
Shirley – g
Keith and Trudy – g
Linda – b
Jamy – b
John – b
Elizabeth – b
Jenny – g
Tracy – g
Gerry – g
Tim and Kim – g
Austin – b
Sharon – b
Lilly – b
Vickie – g
Kristen – g
Sue – b
Megan – b
Carol – b
Grandma B – g
Cathy – b

12 guesses for girl – 14 guesses for boy

FEB 11, 2008 – ULTRASOUND / DR. says IT’S A GIRL!!!
JUNE 3, 2008 – ULTRASOUND / DR. says IT’S A BOY!!!

I had accepted a grade 1/2 assignment for today due to the trouble I had earlier in the week getting jobs. It’s slightly below my comfort zone because of the 1st grade students. However, had I not taken it I wouldn’t have this to write about! Well, it’s not much of a topic, but it is a little different. Not much really goes into naming kids these days in Western culture. We choose a name usually because we had a relative with that name, there was a role model with that name (such as in the Bible) or we just like the sound of it. Once upon a time, and still in some cultures names carry meaning. But that’s not what this post is about. It’s also not about people who try to change names for special recognition.

What it’s about is why some parents choose to give their kids names that, well, just don’t fit… I once read a story about new guardians who would go to court to get kids’ names changed because their parents cursed them with ridiculous names, like the drug-shot parents who named their daughter Cocaina (guess which was their drug of choice?) or the parents who tried to name their child Friday. The name itself may not be ridiculous, but rather given to the wrong gender. I mean, do such parents regret having the “wrong sex” and give them the name they picked out anyway- like the parents who really wanted a boy so when they had a girl they dressed her up like a boy until she was to start school (and were mystified when she refused to put on a dress for her first day of school)? Of course there are some names that go both ways, at least the shortened version like Chris, Alex, Terry, etc. And I am still getting used to Leslie and Cameron being both male and female names. However, some just don’t work. Can you imagine a girl named Matt or Mike? Or a boy named Elizabeth or Jessica? Well, you may have to have some Hispanic blood to understand this one, but a boy in the class I was in today was named Guadalupe. That’s right. Named after Mary in the Bible as Our Lady of Guadalupe (well, an apparition of Mary, but I won’t split hairs). Apparently a very popular name for girls (click the name for more information). Why?? This is just setting up this boy for future problems with schoolmates. I predict that by the time he is in Junior High he will be going by his middle name, whatever it is, assuming that it too isn’t a girl’s name. I really hope it isn’t for his sake.

Not enough links for you in the above post? Try out these unusual names on Wikipedia. I had forgotten that Nicholas Cage had named his son Kal-El (you know, Superman)!