Pause & Rewind: Jungle Yellow

At some point during the first trimester of my wife’s pregnancy, someone must have told us that there are few suprises left in life (my mother I suspect for whom the statement does hold true). Therefore it was worth not finding out the sex of your child until it was born. After all, we don’t care as to whether it is a boy or a girl so why overthink things, and then build up expectations even before the baby is born? If it is a boy I will already have to work out which football team he must support, which field sport and which summer sport to have him specialize in, what his first bicycle will be… wait a minute, I can do all that if it is a girl too.

Not everyone sees it in the same manner, mostly because they are frustrated that they aren’t able to purchase gender-specific baby clothes.

Reportedly, a burlap sack is all a baby will get if its
parents don't find out  the sex (according to Barney Stinson)

My mother-in-law was the first to crack, having visited a designer baby shop in which she was limited to buying a jungle gigoteuse (google translate it, seriously) because the other items were either specifically for boys and girls.

The mother’s at my wife’s yoga class all know what sex they are having. The woman who is giving birth the same week as we are in Bangkok with the same OB/GYN already knows she is having a boy (Gustavo Jose). All this generates a feeling of immaturity on my behalf, as these couples are planning their lives with a level of detail that leaves me doubting as to whether we are starting our child off at a disadvantage when they are born? We've already gone ahead and decorated the room, going for the standard non-blue-non-pink yellow on the walls, and the gender safe theme of "jungle".

My wife did most of this. I  painted the green bits.

The most amusing part of this story so far was at the 20 week scan: whilst the doctor was deploying the sonar scan across my wife’s belly he ceremoniously asked us to close our eyes whilst he checked for the development of the baby’s genitals. We told this to the OB/GYN afterwards, who scolded us with “because you think you would be able to distinguish what sex the baby was yourselves from the scan?”