Jed W.’s term as a guest blogger has come to a close, and I am sure that I speak for all us in thanking him for his insightful and provocative posts. I learned in Church today that Jed and his wife Shauna are expecting their first child next summer. The current debate in the W. household is whether to discover their child’s gender before the birth. I am quite certain that Jed and Shauna would appreciate your insights on this issue. In the meantime, best of luck to Jed. We hope that you will not be a stranger.
I wonder what percentage of people out there decide to wait until the actual birth of the child to find out the child’s gender. I used to hear more people say they were going to wait than I do nowadays.
Take a peek, and find out! It will help your wife’s nesting urge, since you’ll know whether to buy pink or blue (provided you plan to begin socially constructing your baby’s gender early, that is.)
As far as people who don’t peek, I think that tradition is alive and well. My brother has 7 kids (that may not seem like a lot to you Utah folks, but it’s a lot for the east coast), and he only found out the sex of the last one, and only then because developments late in the pregnancy required an ultrasound just weeks before the birth.
Anyway, congratulations on your first child! And good work guest blogging.
We decided to wait to find out on the first … genuinely exciting to discover at the moment!! We even had an ultrasound but they did a good job of not revealing whether it was boy or girl. Was worth it I would say.
On our second and third, we decided to find out. My wife really wanted to know that time and it was more practical … did we need to invest now and look for deals on different sorts of clothes and what not?
So in the end, we had two girls and then a boy. I kind of needed to know on the third one myself … I may have needed counselling and would definitely have needed time to prepare if it was another girl. Don’t get me wrong … I love my girls, but also think I/we needed a son.
Matt Evans is in the fetal imaging business. Maybe he can tell us something about how many people want to know the gender of the baby as opposed to those who want to wait. Has the desire to wait to find out declined in recent years? I’d guess it has as the technology has gotten better and better and is more readily available to the masses.
By the way Jed, congrats.
Thanks Jed! I enjoyed your posts.
Thanks, Frank. We’ll have to get together with Nate (and others) sometime for a Siebach/Faulconer reunion.
I enjoyed your posts Jed. It’s also been interesting to read people’s ideas for higher education.
And I vote that you find out. It doesn’t eliminate the surprise, since they can be wrong. It just makes the surprise bigger if they didn’t get it right. :)
People always say: “We want to wait because we want to be surprised.” But you will be surprised no matter when you find out, whether that be at 20 weeks or after delivery! And finding out at 20 weeks has added economic benefits. For each child so far, my wife and I have been too poor to afford tons of baby clothes when the baby is born and we finally find out the sex then. Since the technology exists to do so, we find out so that Andrea can spend several months shopping at garage sales, etc. (she LOVES garage-saling) so that we can have enough clothes to last a few months when the baby was born. It would not do to be buying pink clothes for a baby boy. I personally don’t care, I mean, clothes are clothes- they keep our baby warm no matter what the color, but my wife cares what colors our babies, be they male or female, wear.
Thus, in our home, the debate was never over whether or not to find out the sex of the baby at the ultrasound. We found out the sex at 20 weeks to prepare appropriately. Rather, our biggest debate (at least with our first baby) was whether or not to have natural childbirth or use a doctor. Andrea really wanted to try it au naturelle and use a midwife, and for some reason I was really against it. I figured it was her body, but I hated to have to watch her be in pain. And midwives were so… medieval! In the end, she got her way and my support, and she is glad she had the experience, now more than once! And I am totally sold on midwives as opposed to doctors. Perhaps I will post about why on my blog sometime.
Thanks for your posts, Jed.
As for finding out — we just found out today that #4 is a boy. I’m with Jordan — If money is at all an issue, go ahead and find out, so you can plan.
Plus, you can go ahead and pick a name and use it for a while before the baby is born. At the very least, you can refer to the baby as “he” or “she” instead of “it.”
Of course, there’s always the possibility–small, but existent–that they’ll tell you the wrong thing. It happened 2 years ago to a woman I worked with at the time. I think my sister and I, being the ultra-feminists that we are, were the only ones at the shower not to give a gift involving pink or ruffles. Heh. There were a lot of shocked faces when the “it’s a boy” news reached us.