The Mister and I were at Target yesterday, determining whether or not we were going to register there for our baby* (well, really, we were there to buy a new coffee pot, but I made him swing by baby stuff so we could gasp at the cost of convertible car seats). "Selected Boy's Toys" were on sale and the Mister asked, "What makes legos boys' toys?" and added, "Our daughter will get a nerf blaster." I love him pretty much all the time, but I
so loved him at that moment.
The alien monkey's gender, you see, is becoming an issue. It's not an issue for the Mister and me. We have long lists of horrible names for Mervivan or Alloicious, Garbonzetta or Phaseolus and much much shorter lists of things we might actually call the kid. The Mister will teach him or her calculus as a six year old (not the algebraic part, just the concepts of instantaneous rates and areas under a curve), and our expectations of hiking, reading, attempting an instrument, learning to cook, hammer, screw, kick, throw and do laundry are generally gender neutral. The alien monkey's gender is somehow an issue for other people. Not our parents, not any of my close friends, but random people: my students, my OB nurse, the custodian . . . Apparently, for many people, it is just too weird not to want to know sex in advance, others worry that they cannot properly prepare, and others are somehow concerned that the Mister and I cannot properly prepare.
Initially I thought I would likely find out the alien monkey's sex at the big ultrasound. I just started telling people earlier that I didn't know it's gender and didn't have a preference because that was true. It was when they started asking, "When are you going to find out what it is?" or "What is it?" that my latent feminist ire started rising. I thought, "We're pretty sure it's a human, but alien monkey is a real possibility" was a fine answer, but when questioners persisted, I realized that for many, our baby is not human until it has a gender. I also read (in a book for expectant fathers) about gender desires for children that, if true, offers some frightening statistics (i.e. among married couples with children in the U.S., the divorce rate is the highest among those with only daughters and lowest among those with only sons; families with only daughters are more likely to keep reproducing . . .) and various assumptions about "what" the Mister and I were hoping for disturbed me. So we opted just not to find out until it pops** out.
One of my colleagues thought I was taking this gender thing a bit too seriously until our students and other colleagues started pestering her about how problematic it is for them that I don't know if it is a Mervivian or an Alloicious. She was really and truly baffled as to why it is any of their business but suddenly is very supportive of my not knowing or telling anyone. "It's coming in August. It will wear onesies for the early part of its life. It's not like they were going to come over and help you put up pink ruffles anyway."
If anyone out there would have started a hand embroidered dress with lots of smocking had I only told you the gender, I'm sorry. For the rest of you, well, the "nursery" will be either white with primary colors or sunny yellow (depending when I clean out our boxes of other stuff). The alien monkey will like animals, plants, space, graphic patterns, mud, different colors depending on mood once old enough to distinguish them, music some days, books some days, nobody but mom some days, everybody but mom some days, calculus some days, blocks some days and balls on some others. The alien monkey will like legos and nerf blasters. Just like a human.
*We are going to someday, which makes me feel horribly materialistic and practical at the same time.
**It's still over 3 months until the baby should emerge; let me believe it will "pop out" a while longer.
The baptisia (a.k.a. blue false indigo, left) in our yard is growing inches daily. The peas (right) are slowly reaching for the second string. 
Three of my friends gave birth within the last three weeks. Welcome to the world little Aries babies!
I missed my chance 2 weeks ago when, for a brief moment in time, the Rockies, the Royals and the Cubs were all alone at the top of their respective divisions (at 2-1, I believe). At the time the tulips were just about to open, the peas were two inches out of the ground and the indoor seedlings were like to outgrow their little pots before the last chance of frost was past.
ves on a dragon refuge. The narrator, who is an18 year-old boy, writes like a believable 18 year-old and the italics, caps and "duhs" become annoying; the climax drags on and and there are almost 100 pages (out of 338) beyond it; and the romance was awkward and forced. My biggest issue was though, was that Dragonhaven is no The Blue Sword and I had purchased it largely to recapture the magic of my favorite* book. Despite the issues, I found Dragonhaven absorbing. At one point the narrator mentions that we (the readers) know about an incident because it was all over the news and I thought, "I missed that one, must have been during the dissertation," before I thought, "Oh yeah, this is a novel about dragons. That incident was not actually in the news in this world," so McKinley must be doing something right forcing the suspension of disbelief. The narrator's storytelling quirks made me upset with him rather than with McKinley, and I fully bought that he understood having parenthood thrust upon him, even if it were a dragon he was raising. Altogether, I'd recommend The Blue Sword and McKinley's re-written fairy tales (Beauty and Spindle's End, both of which I recently re-read and still love) before Dragonhaven, but Sunflower Spinner, Beth, Abby, Irene and all would find Dragonhaven enjoyable. Of course, many of them would read it just for the science geekiness: the full phylogeny of dragons is discussed, and I believe the word phylogeny is used in the conversation
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