The Great Gender Revelation

So...today was the great Gender Revelation - VERY eagerly anticipated in our household.

I had heard of this great idea of how to tell your family about the gender of the baby: make a cake - blue if it's a boy, pink if a girl - and frost it white. When the cake is cut, all is made known in the twinkling of an eye.

So I bought two cakes today - a white one to mix with blue food coloring, if required, and a strawberry cake mix.

Brad had today off and so he got to accompany us to the ultrasound. HURRAY! When we went in to the doctor's office, the nurse welcomed us and said to Aiden, "So...! A boy or a girl... Which do you want?" Aiden said with a big smile, "I want a lollipop!" He has always gotten lollipops there before, so it was perfectly logical to expect one today. The nurse was quite amused...and Aiden got his desired lollipop.

At one point in the ultrasound before the gender had been revealed, I squinted at the screen and said, " Oh... are they ( I don't know why I used THAT pronoun because it was clearly ONE person there) sucking their thumb?" And she said, "No... that shows...that you're having a girl." Okay! Talk about getting the WRONG end of things! I guess I will not try to take up being an ultrasound technician anytime soon! I really don't know how I got THAT from THAT. But you know ultrasounds - to the layperson, it's kind of anybody's guess most of the time.

It didn't seem like a great big deal to Aiden - whenever we've asked him in the past, he has always said, "A gol." ( Translation: a girl.) So he was very matter of fact about the news - it wasn't news to him.

So we came home and I mixed up the strawberry cake, feeling very, very happy.

Now comes the fun part of deciding on a name. We had decided on a boy's name but in the girl department, we are far from decided.

This evening when some of our family assembled for the cutting of the cake, we were joined via the miracle of video Skype by Liane and her kids...who had assembled with great big signs, voting for the gender of their choice; the majority leaned towards the male persuasion. Sorry, nephews - girls are making a comeback in the family!

So - there's our big news! Thanks for sharing our joy!

Lessons my Son Taught Me (about how wrong I can be)

Sometimes I think I have amnesia. Like the time I awoke about one o'clock in the morning and heard sounds of crashing and running coming from downstairs. Brad was beside me, asleep. I instantly concluded it was ROBBERS. Of course! And then the robber started running upstairs...and in my half-wakeful, fully terrified, totally illogical state, I suddenly knew it was a dog. Yes, a dog had somehow broken in to our house. This was not my finest hour in the reasoning department. And then, I heard the dog open Aiden's door. So I went back to thinking it was a robber. Only it was about to become a kidnapper! All this happened in the space of about three seconds, it seemed, and I was shaking Brad's arm, trying to wake him up. He knew instantly that it was just Aiden. Why couldn't I have thought of that? Seriously, the thought had hardly even entered my head. Oh yeah. I have a child. Children do these things. The only thing is, when heard in the dead of night, the pitter-patter of little feet tend to transmogrify into the clump-clump of burglars.

Aiden came in all distressed and disoriented and I was still sort of in terrified/angry at the kidnapper/fight or flight mode...which weirdly and instantly turned into comforting, motherly mode as soon as I heard his voice. A wrenching and disconcerting transition for one o'clock a.m.

It turns out that Aiden had woken up, was thirsty, didn't have his drink beside his bed ( my fault), and so got up, opened his door, closed his door ( both of which should have woken me up), and went downstairs to forage. It's not quite been two months since he graduated from a crib to a big boy bed, and even though he has gotten up out of bed several times, this was the first time he had done it after I was asleep. That is all to say, in my defense, I'm still getting used to another person around the house who is potentially nocturnally mobile.

And then there was the time I found a small piece of plum sitting on a kitchen chair. I looked in the fruit bowl and lo and behold, there was a plum with a small bite missing. For some reason, my brain instantly condemned Brad. I formed this mental picture of him taking a bite and deciding it wasn't ripe enough and spitting it out. I don't know why I had this rush to judgment - it's not like he does this kind of thing often! And as I held the plum in my hand, I shook my head and said in a quiet, slightly exasperated tone, "Brad...!" Aiden looked up at me and said quite penitently, "I bite it, Mama." It reduced me to hysterical laughter on the spot. I just love that he owned up to it immediately, when he could have gotten away with it. When I told Brad, he thanked Aiden for not throwing him under the bus. ( Hmmm- a violent idiom for a two year old to puzzle over.)

I just felt like clonking myself over the head - DUH, CLAIRE! You have a two year old boy! Those are the kind of creatures who climb up on kitchen chairs and take big bites out of plums and spit them out. That's practically in their job description!

It's just funny how our brains are constantly trying to solve mini-mysteries, struggling to instantly make sense out of what we see, or hear ( as in the case of the midnight marauder who turned out to be my son), and in my case anyway, the conclusions are not always correct.

And on a totally unrelated note - we were reading a Dora the Explorer book tonight before bedtime. ( For the lucky few who are uninitiated in the ways of this fictional wunderkind, I will explain. Dora is a bilingual cartoon child who leads a shrill crusade to teach the Spanish language to young Anglo urchins everywhere.)(No un-politically correct comments from the peanut gallery, please. Yes, I agree, we shouldn't have to press 1 to hear something in English... but on the other hand, it really doesn't send our beloved country to the dogs to learn a little Spanish. Trust me. ) I was reading a Dora story to Aiden about how Dora says goodnight to a host of animals, bilingually, of course. "Goodnight snakes! Buenos Noches, culebras!"( What normal little girl says Goodnight to snakes? Well, at least now I will never forget the Spanish word for snakes. Oh goodie - another useless brain wrinkle.) Anyway- with each "goodnight" I would prompt Aiden to say, "Buenos noches!" And his utterance of the phrase was so cute, that I knew if I could bottle that cuteness and sell it, I would be an instant millionaire. As I wrote on my Facebook status: " I think the sound of Aiden saying "Buenos Noches" as I turn out the light is sweet enough to melt the stony heart of the cruelest despot."

Seven years with Brad

Tomorrow ( July 26) we celebrate our seventh anniversary. Seven sounds like a big number to me, for some reason. I was looking at our wedding pictures this morning and shaking my head at the different world we were in back then...Serious and silly differences: in 2003 there were a few less pounds on both our frames, more hair on his head, fewer nieces and nephews, and a brother... to name but a few of the most glaring items. But, together we have weathered the changes that have come, have grown and changed together, and I am so grateful to have Brad with me. He is truly my best friend and understands me in a way that no one else does. And I don't think it's just because he's learned my quirks over seven years of tribulation; sometimes I believe he was born with an innate ability to "get me." I'm so lucky and thankful for that - it has saved so much wasted time. I have been spoiled.

It's not just that he understands me - although that is a huge virtue. He's a thoroughly good man - good in a way that I believe is rare. Funny, hardworking, considerate, having a decided opinion yet diplomatic, people skills coming out his ears, responsible with money, an encourager, unpretentious, honoring to my parents as well as his, gives grace and space to others to be different and yet still accepts them, a wonderful father who loves and has fun with his son and also is attentive to his child's behavior and consistently follows through with discipline and training, appreciates beauty, is not loud, annoying or smarmy, is faithful to the things he believes, has good boundaries with others, doesn't run with scissors...the list goes on and on. Yeah, I got a good one.

And it's funny because I used to think choleric people were borderline evil... and then I married one. I actually didn't even know he was choleric until I had already fallen in love with him. So the joke's on me, I guess.