Oh, boy

Yesterday, a pregnant friend of mine found out that she is having a daughter. We were discussing it and both saying that while we would have been happy to have a boy too, we were really glad for some reason to be having a little girl.

I spent the first few months of my pregnancy convinced that we were having a boy. Up until the moment of the ultrasound, I would have bet you a pair of Manolos that the child kicking me square in the kidney had a Y chromosome.

I was wrong. It was the first of many times in motherhood I would be.

I'm not a big crier but finding out that Lea was a girl was the first time in my life I had ever cried tears of joy.

And as I was talking to my friend yesterday, I finally figured out why: I was just so damn relieved.

Don't get me wrong: I want a son. I hope one of our kids is a boy. We even have his name picked out - Nathaniel. The husband picked that name for his older brother who died while serving in the military in the mid-90s and of course I agreed because:

a) I think it's sweet and these things are the kinds of things that made me fall in love with this man.

b) I like the name.

And last but not least,

c) How the hell do you say no to that without ending up looking like the biggest bitch ever to walk into divorce court?

I mean, I tore the divorce lawyer pages out of our phone books the day I told the husband I thought Pretty Little Liars would be a fantastic theme for our daughter's second birthday and that was a reasonably good plan because I told him at like midnight and I knew he'd be too tired to keep looking after he found out I'd already removed the pages. But if I were to refuse this particular request on say, the excuses I used for most of the names he suggested for our daughter (most commonly "Nope, a girl with that name stole my boyfriend senior year" or "Aaron, why do you want our daughter to be a stripper?"), I'm pretty sure he'd be pissed off enough to remember that divorce lawyers could be easily found on Google.

But the truth is, even though I want a son someday, and I know that I would have been happy to have a son for our first child, I was relieved. Why?

Because I know jack-shit about boys.

Becoming a parent for the first time was daunting and for me, it came with a steep learning curve. I had to look up how to play with a newborn because I was certain I was supposed to be doing something but had no clue what that something was. The day the shrubbed up little piece of grossness that was her umbilical cord fell off, it was just gone, never to be found again and likely digested by one of our dogs. In the first month of our daughter's life, I watched every single video on burping a baby on youtube (including a few misleadingly labeled videos from enterprising young men on how to learn to teach yourself to burp louder, grosser and in haiku form) and there are a lot of them.

Throw a penis in the mix and I'm hopeless.

About 88 percent of my ability to communicate with the males of our species relies heavily on flirting and all that will do is bring those busybodies from Children's Services (or maybe the worst cops in America) around. I've heard the stories from my friends about a stream of pee flying at your face when you remove a diaper. One of the very first decisions you have to make if you have a boy is what to do with a piece of skin wrapped around a body part you don't even have.

At least I'll know how to teach him to burp like a pro.