It's a boy!

(This column was originally printed Nov. 19, 2012, in the Herald-Citizen, minus the images).

It's a boy!

I admit, as I was sitting there in the doctor's office and heard the nurse say those words, I was a little disappointed. I'd been hoping for a little girl I could dress in my old baby clothes, give my old toys to (I still have a lot of Barbies stashed away), and play dress-up and have tea parties with. The bedroom was going to have a lot of pink.

Now, I'm sort of at a loss. I have zero experience with little boys.I helped take care of my little sister when we were kids and all of my cousins who lived nearby and were around my age were all girls. My older boy cousins mostly left us to ourselves. They were usually off trading baseball cards or being loud somewhere.

I'm not sure what to do with a boy. I'm very sports-impaired. There is not a single sport I've been able to play well, and watching any kind of sport usually bores me to tears. (Sorry, football fans!) If my little boy wants to get into baseball or basketball or something similar, I won't know where to start. And I'd be afraid he'd catch me playing on my phone or trying to read a book during his games. I'd be an awful soccer mom.

I'm also still pretty nervous about this whole parenting thing. I keep hearing that little boys are a lot tougher to deal with than little girls. I was sort of hoping I could start this first-time parenting thing on Level 1 difficulty instead of Level 10. I wanted to build up my endurance a little. Get some experience before I tacked raising a boy.

But after I got home from my doctor's appointment, I started thinking about the things I might have in common with a little boy. There's dinosaurs. I loved dinosaurs as a child. Dinosaurs are something boys usually love. I can do dinosaurs.

I was also a big science geek. (This was before I grew up and learned that you had to be pretty good at math to get anywhere in a job that involved science.) I had tons of illustrated kids books on everything from how black holes are made to how photosynthesis works. I also had my own microscope kit as a kid and always liked looking at things with it. My dad had a telescope and helped me be able to aim it at the moon, stars or any birds we were trying to observe at our Florida home. Boys usually like those kinds of things too.

And though a little boy probably won't want to play dress-up, they still do like to play make-believe. I have some experience periodically helping to babysit a pack of little boys at my church. We spent Sunday mornings pretending to be superheros, running around the small playroom, firing lasers at evil monsters and trying to figure out ways to get out of the bad buy's traps. (Parents coming to pick up the kids would sometimes look at me funny when they spotted me in a corner with my hair a mess and my Sunday dress all in wrinkles after an hour of our adventures.)

And who's to say my little boy won't be artistic like my side of the family? Maybe he'll want to draw and paint like his aunt, write like me or craft things from wood like his late grandpa and great-grandpa.

So maybe I'll have more in common with a boy than I first though. Just as long as he doesn't expect me to throw a soccer ball around with him.

Oh wait. Soccer is the one where you kick the ball, right?

(I may be in trouble.)