To know or not to know....

When we found out that V was pregnant with our third child I was thrilled and over the moon and all the things you feel when you see that little piece of plastic turn pink or blue or get a line or the line disappear (will someone PLEASE come up with a standard for that ordeal!!). But what I decided almost instantly was that I wanted to know the sex of the baby this time round. To me it made perfect sense to as we have a boy and a girl already it would help us prepare ourselves for what we were going to get. Obviously we have boys and girls clothes stashed in the loft so we could begin to prepare the appropriate lot and consign the rest to the charity shop. That's the practical side, the other HUGE benefit as far as I saw it was to help us narrow down the search for names.

This is already a mind warp job, not only does the name have to fit with the surname, it has to not clash with its siblings, not sound silly shortened, not lead to unfortunate initials and, to compound all of the above, we've given our kids two middle names which means we need to come up with another three names (that meet the above criteria). So if you multiply this by the two sexes we need to come up with 6 (six) suitable, not too normal, not too quirky, well matching, nice sounding, non-clashing monikers. Nightmare.

It seemed to me like a no brainer, find out the sex, half the effort. However, having gone through this well formed, well constructed argument with V she categorically refused to find out the sex and therefore that was that. I can see her point to a certain extent and if it wasn't our third I wouldn't even entertain the idea but surely the practical advantages out weigh the lack of a surprise after 9 months. In fact whenever you find out it is always going to be a surprise, just if you do it in advance you are spared the blood and screaming. There is also the possibility of them sonographer getting it wrong and poor baby Johnny coming out as a baby Jane to a nice blue nursery and a wardrobe full of blue sleep suits. Not the end of the world but not the perfect start either.

I don't know, perhaps it is best left until nature decides its time to know. As this will be the last time I go through this I will never know the flip side of the coin.