What a Girl Wants

When you're expecting, you can either have a strong preference for a specific gender of the baby, a mild preference, or no preference. I find myself in that 2nd category. If we have a boy, great! After all, most men would want a boy in their family to carry out the family name and do manly stuff with (like hammer up dry wall and drink beer...only 1 of which I've ever done). But if we have another girl, then I'm perfectly happy with that too. Truth be told, I'm probably more of a girl dad anyways (which goes back to that hammering up dry wall thing probably). And I've always felt this way...but apparently Kaylani thinks otherwise.

The other day, Mommy and Kaylani were at Little Gym class, which they've been going to forever. The teacher, Miss Tiffany, and Kaylani are close with Kaylani following her all around class most days. And of course they talk, but I guess we weren't expecting this conversation:

Kaylani: Mama has a baby in her belly
Tiffany: Oh yeah? Kaylani's gonna be a big sister right?
Kaylani: Papa wants a brother but Kaylani wants a baby sister.

Miss Tiffany reacted like normal, saying things like "yeah, most Dads want a boy" and some of the Dads in the area were chuckling to themselves because it was probably true for them. The funny thing is that it's not true for me, and the odd part is we have no idea where that came from!

Since we found out Mommy was pregnant with #2, we've asked Kaylani what she wants and she's always consistent. Boy or girl? Girl. Brother or sister? Sister. Like Alisha or Rohan? Alisha. Like Connor or Zoe? Zoe. Girl like Mama or boy like Papa? Like Mama. So its not like she doesn't know the difference, its just that she is the one with a strong preference!

We've tried to steer clear of the conversation for awhile now since she use11d to get animated about it when we'd ask ("no boy Papa, Kaylani wants a sister!! No boyyyy"). In fact, sometimes we'd go to pick her up from her crib in the morning or after nap and she would just randomly say "I want sister."

The only thing we can think of is that she takes our question asking ("Kaylani, what if its a boy") as our/my preference. Its either that or she reads my blog and thought that by me saying I thought it was going to be a boy meant I wanted a boy. Not sure which one of those is more probable, but either way, if its a boy, we may be in a lot of trouble. After all, what a girl wants, a girl gets... especially if she's our daughter.

Girls talk a lot

Girls talk a lot. There's no other way to say that. Wait, that might be seen as offensive. Let me try and start over and clarify. Girls talk a lot. Nope, no way around it. Stereotypes all exist for a reason right? I'm Asian, so I'm good at math. Mommy is Puerto Rican, so she steals things. Well one of the stereotypes on girls is that they talk a lot, and Kaylani falls right into that.

Kaylani started babbling to us about 2-3 weeks ago, but it's become much more frequent now. Now there's no problem with baby babble, and in fact, most people will find it adorable, and you can put me right there in that category. But, when the babbling comes at 4:30am and goes on for an hour, it's not exactly cute. Okay, it's still damn cute, but it's a different kind of cute. More like the "I know you're being cute sweetheart but will you just close your eyes and go to bed since it's 4 o'freaking clock in the morning?" type of cute.

Last night started off great. Mommy read her 3 books (Don't Let The Pigeon Stay Up Late, The Giving Tree, and of course Buenas Noches Luna) until she was done nursing, and then Kaylani went to sleep (or was "fast asleep" as Cousin Connor likes to say) at 9pm. Daddy tried to stay up and watch the football game (fell asleep as overtime started), and didn't even hear Mommy get out of bed at midnight or at 2am. But at 4:30am, when Mommy was done nursing, Daddy thought he would help out and put Kaylani to sleep after she was done.

By this point, I was kind of awake already, but definitely had one eye on the clock as I normal do for mid-morning events. Kaylani didn't want to be glided, or bounced, or swaddled. All she wanted to do was lay in her crib and talk. I sat in the glider and listened to her "coo" and "cah" about everything and nothing all at the same time. I was actually quite curious to know what she was babbling about, but there was nothing I could do about that. It was a good 45 minutes before I decided everyone was tired of listening (which includes her army of stuffed animals) and swaddled her up tightly and bounced and swayed her to sleep (which was no easy feat).

So the bottom line is that girls like to talk, and there's nothing wrong with that. After all, I like to listen, and I like girls, so it works out pretty well. And, when it's my baby girl doing the talking, you know Daddy's the sucker who loves it all. He's also the type of sucker who would run downstairs to get his video camera and record it at 5am (check out some video of her talking, although it had turned into slight crying by the time I got back, here). I'll accept the fact that Kaylani is a talker, but at the same time, I'm hopeful that phones (or whatever the means of conversation happen to be) are free in the future. All my engineer readers, you hear me? Or more appropriately, can you hear Kaylani?

I have no idea what I'm doing...

This morning I was coming back from Princeton where I got my haircut finally. During the drive I did some more thinking as usual, and I was thinking how glad I was to get my haircut, and how we need to find time for Mommy to go get her hair cut too. She just wants to cut the tips a little bit, and maybe put in a color or two, or highlights, or something like that. And that's when it hit me...I have no idea what I'm doing.

For the past 6 weeks, I've been winging it as the Dad of a little baby girl, but this is the easy part. What am I going to do when it's time for her first haircut, or her 10th haircut? She's going to say she wants to cut the split ends off, or ask me to take a quarter inch off, and add a mix of two colors to highlight her hair, and I'm going to say something like "What? Come again?"

I don't know anything about girls. Wait, let me rephrase. I have no idea how to RAISE a girl. I started hanging out with girls when I was 14. Prior to that, they ignored me, and I hounded over them, but from that point on, a good majority of my friends were girls. I know exactly how to raise a teenage girl. I'm going to lock her in her room so that no teenage (or older) boys can get to her. But what do I do up until then?

About a year ago, I was playing with my niece and she just got a new dress up doll toy. It was a picture of a doll on a board, and she had a ton of different outfits (pants, shirts, blouses, shoes all separate) that you could magnetically put on her. We spent 20 minutes just switching outfits back and forth. "Tio, I think this shirt would look good. And then these pants. And now this shirt. And these pants. Oh, and these shoes. With these pants. But this shirt. Now these pants again." Seriously, 20 minutes, during which the only thing I said was "okay" or "cute." Whenever I made a suggestion, she said "Tio, that's silly" and went back to changing more outfits.

Dolls, hair, shoes, makeup...oh man, the makeup. What the heck do I know about makeup? Does this lipstick go with this blush? What about the mascara? Or the foundation? What color foundation goes with this? Forget that, what's foundation??

Depsite my gentle personality, and my love of cheesy romantic comedies, I am less of a girl then people think I am. And when it's time for me to do little girl things with my little girl, it's going to be overly apparent to everyone around. For once in my life, feeling like a "manly man" isnt' going to feel so good.

Alright, well it's time to call it a night and get ready for the festivities. Tomorrow, my whole family comes into town, as do Mommy's parents, so we're going to have a full house and get Christmas started! Check out these pictures from the last 2 days, and check back soon for pictures of our first Christmases (yes, that's plural).