Girl or Boy?

So between my boobs growing to the size of melons and my stomach expanding STRAIGHT out in front of me, my lower back was starting to bend under the pressure. There have been mornings I wake up and literally can't stand up straight for several minutes while I whine and bump into walls trying to get to the bathroom.

I'm lucky enough to have a wonderful friend who is a chiropractor and works frequently with pregnant women. I don't know if she has magic hands, but my back is always better after she works on me. She has that perfect combination of technical know-how and spiritual connection to the body that leaves me feeling so relaxed, I sleep on her couch for an hour after every session. During our last session, she asked me if I found out whether or not I was having a boy or a girl. I told her I didn't know yet, so she told me her premonition: girl. This made me giggle. The thought of the shoes and hair accessories alone...OH SO FUN!

Which reminds me, gender prediction tests. Have you seen these? They're ridiculous. You can't possibly think their real. A small cup with "magic crystals" inside that change color when combined with urine to determine the sex of your baby. DUMB.  And certainly not accurate enough to spend $40 on one at CVS. I mean, it's literally a pee-in-a-cup test to determine the genetic make-up of your BABY. PAH-LEASE.

So I bought one. I rolled out of bed and went straight to the bathroom to deposit my urine onto the magical crystals. I got the camera ready and told David to stand-by as I was about to inform him as to whether he was having a son or a daughter. The crystals IMMEDIATELY made the urine change color.  I took a picture. I mean, it was pretty clear:

Girl, right? That's what I thought, too. We danced around and giggled and shouted, "BABY GIRL!" David took about 20 pictures. We went into the kitchen to grab cups of coffee (yes, mine was decaf, relax), and returned to the bathroom a few minutes later to giggle some more. That's when we saw this:

No longer so clear is it? Now it looks a little more green than orange in spots. It was then I decided to read the directions, because that's how I roll. "Wait 10 minutes before you read the results." It had been approximately 10 minutes by this point, and the results were much less clear than when I first peed in the cup. Now it was sort of half boy, half girl. 

HOLY SHIT. HALF BOY/HALF GIRL?! That's like a mother's worst nightmare! Will I have to be one of those women who is forced to CHOOSE the sex of their baby because they came out with both sets and inevitably I'll choose the wrong gender and my child will grow up resenting me AND him/herself and want to be the other sex and will end up in a drag show in San Francisco with a name like Mango Scrumptious? Not that there's anything wrong with that...BUT IT'S CERTAINLY NOT A MOTHER'S DREAM.

Ok, deep breaths. Maybe the test malfunctioned. Maybe I got bad crystals. Or maybe it was right in the first place, girl, and then slowly changed color because of an environmental change like the AC kicking on. 

The moral: Do not buy the gender predictor tests. As if listeria, genetic mutations, and anemia weren't enough, I now fear my child is a hermaphrodite and I'm completely flustered trying to figure out how we'll afford round trip airfare to San Francisco twice a year.