Many dedicated blog and ‘net surfers have probably already dug up photos of Halle Berry’s little bundle, but can we ever get enough of a cutie? Naaaah. Here she is, Nahla Ariela Aubry.  She really is cute, and I can understand why her parents decided to keep her under wraps ever since she was born in March. If you lived a very public life, wouldn’t you want to have your hard-won child all to yourself for a few months before showing her off to the world?  

No need to auction of first photos of the baby, like the Jolie-Pitts have decided to do, even if the money is forked over to a children’s charity. I think the amount of attention paid to ‘celebrity news’ and ‘celebrity gossip’ is really excessive. Anyway, doesn’t it get awfully boring and predictable after a while? Someone is always breaking up, divorcing, having someone else’s baby, spiraling to the bottom of a whiskey glass, snorting heroine or something else equally tawdry. 

But I guess that’s human nature for you. Eventually, magazines engage in to silly practices like publicly auctioning off baby pictures, on the argument that demand from us, presumably sane people drive demand for it and they need to stay competitive.   

Anyway, that’s the world in which we live. We can either jump in and improve it, or stop pretending to be shocked (!) when magazines like ‘OK!’ depravedly pursue fallen pop stars like Britney Spears, in their lowest moments of mental illness. The editors of those magazines are depraved people and that series of photos and stories turned me off of celebrity magazines permanently.

Whew. That last post had me fired up. I won’t blame the pregnancy hormones, though. This sort of thing happens with me A LOT. Hence, the blog. 

I need to shift gears a bit and talk about baby genders, you know … am I having a boy or girl. Before I let the cat out of the bag, I’ll let you all in on a funny story line. When Hubby and I jumped the broom, it did not escape my notice that no women had been born into his family in three generations. I’ll stand corrected if there was a still birth or some other tragic occurrence that befell a female relative, but as far as he knew, no one — not his grandfather, father and certainly not he had any sisters. Coming from a family well represented by girls, I thought this was crazy stuff. What could these men possibly have been thinking? To this day (and the best of our knowledge, because there are a couple of cousins who fell out of contact) only one of Hubby’s brothers and cousins has had a girl. Still, that’s only one female in four generations. 

So you can imagine that I laid down some hearty threats on Hubby to give his wife a girl. But not to be a total nag about, I thought I’d sweeten the pot. I left all kinds of prompts around the house to encourage Hubby’s swimmers to move the girls in front and tell the boys to back off at least until their sister got first dibs for mommy’s cuddles. There were pink cotton outfits with frilly bloomers, pink Ralph Lauren dresses with matching undies and melt-you-down adorable accessories like mittens and hats and all. If we were ever out walking or whatever and I saw a cutie of a girl, I pulled Hubby aside and told him to ‘focus and concentrate’. 

Now, this is all very unscientific, but we had fun while it lasted. Plus, I tried to convince Hubby that a lot of interracial couples produce girls. I don’t know why it is, but of all my cousins who intermarried, they’ve all had mostly girls. Plus Halle & Gabriel had a girl, and we could go down a whole list of female biracial celebrities and debutantes, right?

Hubby wasn’t buying it. Not when I left cute outfits on his desk, his side of the bed, on his mirror in the bathroom or when I commandeered his computer and set his wallpaper to pictures of cute little girls I found in magazine ads for Gap or Polo Ralph Lauren.  He just chuckled or shook his head at me like I was Lucy and he was Ricky and went on reading The Wall Street Journal or some other brain food.  

Well it worked!  I’m having a girl and I couldn’t be more atwitter about it. She’s a mover, too. There are some days when I can’t concentrate at work, for all her hiccuping, fluttering and full on Judo demonstrations. I have to rub my belly down with a tennis ball or ice to get her to settle. You know those videos that show babies distorting their mommies tummies with kicks, punches and all sorts of rolling around? That’s my life most days of the week. This kid is an active baby. Watch out Janet Evans. This little swimmer is going for gold! 

Now, that I’ve got my girl, I’ll take whatever comes next. Hubby can even go back to his family family tradition of handing out all boys, if he likes. 

One last thing, and let me be clear on this: I got what I asked for, and I’m thrilled. No complaints. But I do need suggestions. How do I settle a developing baby that insists on waking me up at night to use the bathroom and then play for 30 minutes?