it's a... !

Just kidding.

Not sure yet. Of the sex (not to be confused, of course, with gender — that mutable continuum of self-awareness and self-acualizing-ment-ness-ity, or something), or even of the number, although d.w.'s pretty sure it's only one.

And I didn't realize it, but apparently a mother's intuition has been shown to be the single most accurate predictor of the baby's sex. I'd find out the citation on that, but d.w.'s asleep and she has to get up early to to put those three years of grad school to good use, slaving away for $7.50 an hour looking for bugs in the prairie.

But of course, such is the life of the field technician. The person I hired for my own research last year, a frighteningly brilliant woman already in possession of a master's degree, who had graduated Phi Beta Kappa at Columbia, got paid eight bucks an hour to muck around mosquito-filled, trash-ridden urban cesspools wetlands in the middle of the night.

And did I really just offer you a citation? I've definitely been writing my thesis for too damn long. It has felt like the worst finals week EVER for six months solid. Good thing it'll be over soon.

Speaking of which, sometimes the Onion gets it absolutely dead on...

Comments

[posthipchick]

I guess my mother's intuition was off for those 9.5 months because I was SURE she was a boy. Made for a nice surprise, though.

[Danielle in Iowa]

My procrastination this morning has yielded two more fitting articles :-)

http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2006/06/2006060501c/careers.html
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/49180

[Papa Bradstein]

Yes, you did offer a citation. Was that going to be in APA format? And thanks for holding back. My least favorite items to edit are citations and references.

As for the sex of the kid, there's an exception to every rule, I suppose. Mama, her mama, and Mama's grandmama were all sure 3B was going to be a girl until the ultrasound. With that in mind, we didn't even consider boys' names until he flashed us at week 20.

How sure are you that the zygote is solo?

[zygote daddy]

Well, PB, I just go by what the good lady tells me. :)

I figure that at this point, if anyone would have an idea she would...

But we'll find out for sure in a few weeks.

[andrea]

I was sure my first was a girl (I was right).And oh-so sure my 2nd was a boy. (I was quite wrong.) And, at one point, I was measuring big and they checked to make sure the babe was flying solo in there. She was. She did come 31/2 weeks early and was almost 7 pounds. (I'm a scant 5 feet tall, so that was plenty big.) So what am I saying? Be ready earlier than your due date.
Oh, and my dad specialized in entomology at ISU- he didn't get paid $7.50/hour to look for prairie bugs, though. It's one of those situations where you've got to ask yourself, "is this better than a job where you have to ask "do you want fries with that?"