In Which We Talk About Sex (of the Baby)

So I have all these thoughts rattling around inside my head today. Some of them actually make sense and could be written up in a real post with transitions and cohesive reason and everything.

But alas, I can't focus on a blessed thing right now. Because TOMORROW IS MY ULTRASOUND, and if all goes well, WE WILL BE FINDING OUT THE SEX OF THE BABY.

The date has snuck up on me, which is only possible during the holidays. I've been so busy baking and wrapping and exuding holiday cheer, that I haven't been nearly as obsessed with finding out the sex of this baby as I was last time. Christmas is nothing if not distracting.

But as we all know, life goes on, even during the holidays, even during Christmas break when my children are home, amazingly enough. Today, I hired one of our favorite babysitters to take my kids so I could focus on the task right in front of me and clean my whole house. Otherwise, I knew I'd be too flighty to ever finish such a mind-numbing job, not when I have baby plans to daydream about and baby names to dismiss and baby bedding to browse on Pottery Barn Kids.

Plus, it's hard to clean when kids are around. Normally, I do it on a day when only Teyla is home and the older two kids are in school. But with all three of them home and inside (since none of the neighbor kids are off school yet and my kids don't like to play in the snow without friends who don't share DNA)? Fuggedaboutit.

Sidebar alert, but today is not the day to keep me on task: I really like a clean house, but I don't really like to clean my house. Jo @ Mylestones asked on Twitter if it was cheaper to hire a babysitter than a team of cleaners, and I responded that it wasn't, really, but I've never met a cleaning company who really cleans stuff and doesn't just wipe off surfaces. So I bite the bullet and do it myself and farm my kids out to an indoor playground and McDonald's so I can just get it done without having to simultaneously break up fights, cut up apples, make lunch and clean up after the toddler. ("At least I finished this room. Hey! Look! The room I just finished is already destroyed!)

So back to the point: Do you have an opinion on the gender of this baby? Because 95% of the people in my real life think it's a boy, based solely on the fact that we have a pattern thing going (girl-boy-girl-xx). Also, my family of origin has the same pattern -- we are girl-boy-girl-boy.

I don't have a feeling one way or the other (although my back hurts all the time lately, do you think that says something?). But I don't think nature necessarily works in patterns and/or believes in symmetry when it comes to this kind of thing.

Part of me hopes it's a boy, because then Connor will have a brother. But part of me would like it to be a girl, because then Teyla will have a sister close in age, and I've never seen a close-in-age sister relationship. (My sister and I are super close now, but she is six years younger than me -- just like Teyla and Natalie -- so we weren't close growing up. We had too many years between us.)

OK. I'm turning over the mic. What say you?