*Thank you all SO MUCH for the overwhelming response to my last post. I am slowly going through, making notes, and I will get back to everyone that emailed or left a comment. If you have any more suggestions, keep ’em coming – the symposium isn’t until November. You all are AMAZING and I couldn’t do this without you!*

After failing to get a completely decisive gender shot last week, Mike and I were resigned to waiting until Binky’s next ultrasound. I am really looking forward to knowing for sure who is growing inside me. But I’ll take a dozen more inconclusive gender ultrasounds if it means everything else is showing up perfectly.

So I told myself I was going to be patient about the whole thing, even though patience isn’t one of the skills I list on my resume. And then someone who totally does not read celebritybabyblog.com sent me a link to a home gender prediction kit. We looked at the website for five seconds before Mike said, “I’m going to go buy one of those!”

Once he was back with the kit, we poured over the directions. There, in bold letters, it said, “Use ONLY first morning urine.” It was noon. That was going to be a long time to wait. Then Mike said, “too bad you could never go eight hours without peeing.”

It was a throw down. Challenge? Accepted!!

And so it began, the Great Pee Abstention of 2009. Mike honestly didn’t think I could go eight hours without urinating, but I knew I could. The thing is, I have an iron bladder and a steel will. Pregnancy has done nothing to change this. So despite his best efforts to trick me into peeing by shaking water bottles and talking about waterfalls, I ate and drank like normal and went eight hours without breaking a sweat. Hurray!

I cracked open the test kit, and was presented with a cup to “catch my sample” with, a syringe, and a test tube with crystals on the bottom

inside the test kit

the crystals that interact with the urine
flavor crystals!

The test tube had two sides, the boy side and the girl side. To provide samples of color variation, I guess.

girl side, with example of girl color Boy side, with example of boy color

After gathering my sample, I pulled 20 mL into the syringe and put it in the test tube. I then swirled the contents for ten seconds, put it down, and waited. After ten minutes, the mixture would either become green, indicating boy, or orange, indicating girl. You know, the typical colors of boys and girls (not).

Ten minutes passed to find Mike and I in the bathroom, looking closely at our results.

Orange, the color of girls...

So according to the test kit, we’re having a girl. It only claims to be 80% effective, so we’re obviously not running out to buy girl stuff, but in conjunction with what Dr. Risky says, we’re feeling a little more like we’re having another daughter. And it feels pretty good.