Specialists

It's no great insight that in today's market, most people tend to become specialists. Dermatologists or endocrinologists rather than general practitioners. Intellectual property or anti-trust lawyers rather than general purpose attorneys. Historians of early twentieth-century American religious and cultural history in a transnational context rather than scholars of human history through the ages. Tom is something of an oddity, having become an all-purpose minister.

But in one thing he's planning to specialize. Back when Tom and I were born, our parents were well-trained and capable enough to handle both sons and daughters. Tom's siblings are similarly talented. But times are changing. We have 20 friends adding children to their families in the 2008 calendar year, and so far they are all specializing in one sex or the other. It looks like we'll be doing the same.

So we'll be joining Alicia and Michael, Laura and Brian, and Leah and Mike in raising the world's girls. And we'll leave expertise in boys to Meredith and Mike, Kinnari and Chris, Lina and Dan, and Leigh and Dave. (Hmmm, determining this baby's sex has evidently set me on a name binge. Incidentally, I've left friends off the list who are having first babies--we'll give them some more time to decide on their strategy.)

We see some advantages to this approach:

-We already have the clothes.
-If necessary, the kids can share a room in perpetuity.
-Edith has an immediate new recruit for her women's rights campaign. (Of course, her brother could have been a recruit, too, but he may have required more convincing.)
-There's no circumcision decision to be made.
-I won't have to learn about splashguards, aim, when to start standing up, or any of the other mysteries of potty training boys.
-We're dubious about the old line that girls are more expensive than boys because they cost you a wedding. While this may wind up being true in the end, it seems to me to depend on an awful lot of ifs: -If your daughters choose to marry; -If they choose to have a wedding; -If they marry men, and they and their partners both feel that the parents of the bride are, indeed, still the ones who ought to pay for a wedding.
-What seems to me a surer bet is that the combustion engine will still be around in 16 years, and we therefore will be paying the cheaper car insurance rates for girls than for boys.

My favorite benefit is one my dad mentioned, though: With two girls we're controlling for a key variable in the nature v. nurture experiment. Better science.

Of course, there are some downsides. Friends may remember we had a much harder time with girls' names than with boys' names four years ago. My family may start lobbying again for Hepzibah. I may also never learn who the really neat heroes of boy books are.

On the other hand, I find girls' names generally more evocative than boys' names and therefore more interesting to muse about, Hepzibah notwithstanding. And this way Harriet Tubman is still a possibility.

In the meantime, the take-home message is that you shouldn't trust anything important to Tom's intuition. Or Edith's. Or any of the staff at Edith's daycare, who were taking bets yesterday. Or me, to be honest. Wait for the hard evidence.

P.S. New data point on Grindy: She's flexible. In one image she was kicking herself in the forehead with both feet. Edith trotted off to daycare this morning with her own special photo of little alien-sister. It was a full face shot, the baby floating upside-down like an astronaut. She had one hand to her cheek, the other to her chin, and she looked like she was staring straight out at the camera. On the image the doctor had printed "HI EDITH." This sisters thing could be sweet.