I really, really, really intended to wait and blog about this later, like tomorrow, or maybe even later than that.

But when I have something on my mind, I’m incredibly bad at keeping it inside. Which is probably what makes blogging so much fun in the first place.

So…drumroll please!

The ultrasound this morning reveals that Lil Smudge is

a

baby

BOY!

Since we harbor the dream that he will still speak to us when he is a teenager, we will not be scanning in and posting the still picture from the ultrasound that makes this fact utterly clear. Especially since the ultrasound tech added an arrow and the word "boy" — just in case we had trouble telling that those were definitely, absolutely, unambiguously boy parts.

We’ve been suspecting that Lil Smudge was a boy since he was just a lil smudge on a much earlier ultrasound. My first thought that way was because I was so insanely hungry during the first trimester. I read somewhere that women pregnant with boys eat 10% more calories over their pregnancies than women who are pregnant with girls. But I was also clear that we had a 50-50 chance of being right.

I’m a little bit scared, or maybe intimidated is closer.

After all, I’ve never spent a lot of time with little boys. I have a younger sister, my best friends were always girls, and my boy cousins all lived far away when we were growing up. The closest boys were neighbors and the children of my parents’ friends — and while proximity did force some relationships, I couldn’t call them close.

Jill has a different perspective. She was an only child, with no cousins, and she played a lot of Little League. In fact, through most of her Little League career, she was the only girl playing at her skill level. Is it any wonder that she grew up to work in a male-dominated environment like the Washington Redskins?

Back when we lived on 3rd Street NW, she was practically the Pied Piper to the little boys in our neighborhood. They would be polite when they saw me, but they LOVED her. It usually went something like this:

Liza gets out of her car and walks towards her house.

A little boy, maybe 7 years old, appears out of nowhere, and says, "Hi Miss Liza. Is Jill home? Can she come out to play???"

I mean, I know I can do this. How we are with him is going to depend a lot on what kind of personality he has. If Lil Smudge turns out to be an artist or a geekboy, there is going to be very little in the way of Little League — just like if he’d turned out to be a girl, there might have been as much in her life as there was in Jill’s.

AND, whether he was a boy or a girl, Lil Smudge was always going to have to learn useful human being skills like cooking.

Years and years ago, I read an essay, I think by Barbara Ehrenreich, where she talked about  having promised her radical feminist friends that she would raise her son exactly as she would have if he were a girl, and being proud, now that he was a young adult, that she did so.

So maybe there is a good model for this "raising a son" thing.