Desire VS Expectation

With this pregnancy we are most commonly asked 2 questions.

1) Was this planned?
2) Are you trying for a girl?

The first one is easy and actually kinda fun to answer. My gut reaction is to say, "Oh no not really. It was a night of hot passion. We just couldn't keep our hands off each other." The idea being, you ask a question that's none of your business and I'll give you an answer that's none of your business. But the truth be told yes we planned this baby and we're thrilled.

The second is complicated. With 4 little boys we would love to experience a daughter but that desire was not what drove our decision to add to our family. I have had a lot of fun researching on the internet all the old myths that predict gender and they all say GIRL but I'm a practical kinda girl. I want statistics. I have a gut feeling that it's a girl and it's different this time. With Brennan I didn't really care either way. With Tanner I assumed he was a girl since I had a boy. It wasn't a feeling or desire just an assumption. With Elijah it was a strong desire and I was devastated when I found out he was a boy. Those feelings lead to severe guilt and more devastation when he was born and was so sick. I knew Graham was a boy. It was a gut feeling and I wasn't disappointed at all to find out he was a boy. This time I just feel like it's a girl. It's not a desire or an assumption just a feeling.

I decided to look up what the odds are of having 5 of the same gender in a family with the original parents (a family with divorce and extra parents is a whole different ball of wax). There are all kinds of old wives tales and myths about how once you've had multiples of one sex your likelihood of having the opposite sex is much lower than with your first pregnancy. This article is super interesting and debunks some of those myths.

"What about the odds of having all boys or all girls?

So if virtually all men possess equal amounts of X and Y sperm, and each birth has nearly even odds of being a boy or a girl, how do we explain large families of all boys or all girls? Let’s take a look at the odds of having an all-boy or all-girl family, compared to the odds of having a family with both genders, under the simple assumption that each birth has a 50/50 chance of being a boy or a girl:

Family Size % Families with
Both Boys/Girls % Families with
All Boys/Girls Number of
Same-Gendered Families
2 Children 50% 50% 1 in 2
3 Children 75% 25% 1 in 4
4 Children 88% 12% 1 in 8
5 Children 94% 6% 1 in 17
6 Children 97% 3% 1 in 33
7 Children 98.4% 1.6% 1 in 63
8 Children 99.2% 0.8% 1 in 125
The more children in the family, the more unlikely it becomes to have all boys or all girls. But while statistics tell us it is less likely to have 5 boys, for example, it also tells us that in a large enough population it is not only possible, but expected that a 5-boy family will occur; in fact, we should see a same-gender family in one out of every 17 families of 5 children."

Even though it seems as if some force must be at work to cause the birth of many boys or girls in a row, the explanation is simply the near equal odds of having a boy or a girl at each birth, which is not influenced by the gender of previous children.

Whatever genders make up your unique and special family, now you know what biological and statistical factors may have played a role in making them boys, girls, or both."

I thought that was super interesting. So here's the deal. If we have a son we have a super cool family that only occurs about 6% of the time! How neat is that?! If we have a daughter then we finally get to see what all this pink stuff is about. It looks like a win win to me!