Kids emulate the adults in their lives. So why wouldn't your son imitate you babywearing his younger sibling? Why not foster nurturing behavior in our boys? Some boys like baby dolls! Big deal!

Etsy seller Squarepear has the right idea with this blue camo ring sling for boys. What a great way to prepare your sons for a new baby in the house, or to illustrate gentleness to a smaller sibling or friend.

Squarepear makes girly baby doll slings too, and even some for dads!

The most frequent question I get about my pregnancy is whether I want a boy a girl. The second question is whether I want to know.

The only reason I would like to know is for practical reasons, the baby shower. My husband says he wants a boy because of the “boyfriend issue” if we had a girl. I’ve noticed that’s something that freaks many men out about having a daughter.

It makes no difference to me whether it’s a boy or a girl, whether he has brown skin like me or she has light skin like my husband. I was born in Mexico City and my husband is from California, he is half Mexican and half Guatemalan with British ancestry (we think, sometimes he seems more Scottish to me) that makes him look white.

People are always shocked when he starts talking Spanish and he’s even had to face reverse racism from more brown looking Mexicans he has met. Racism has also shown its ugly face in comments that our baby will be a beautiful light skinned baby.

I know it’s so ingrained in our society to look at white babies as more beautiful than those of color, but it angers me. At this point in our so-called evolved society, shouldn’t we have grown out of that? Sadly we are nowhere close to seeing people from the inside out.

I doesn’t matter to me whether our baby is a boy or a girl or brown or white.

Continue reading "White or brown, girl or boy. It doesn't matter." →

“That is a girl’s name.”

This is what my stepmother, Dora, replied when I told her I would be naming my son Jonah. I was five months pregnant, and had just seen the grainy boy-parts on a sonogram. Dora, recently emigrated from Columbia and suffering hearing loss, may not have understood me, so I repeated, slowly- Jonah, from the Bible, whale, prophet, male. Dora shook her head, clearly upset. “That is a girl name. You are having a boy.”

We argued over whether Jonah was a boy’s name for days. Proof piled up, and Dora conceded that Jonah was traditionally male, but “sounds too feminino.”

It was the first time I encountered a wave of emotion in response to the gendering of Jonah, who at the time had just grown sex organs visible by sonogram. The threat in Dora’s mind was clear: my son would be intimately linked with something feminine, and it would devastate his male identity. It was the same concern expressed by my mother-in-law, proclaiming “boys learn to pretend with guns,” when I showed her Jonah’s toy kitcen; it was the worry of an uncle who demanded we cut toddler-Jonah’s shoulder-length hair, “before its too late, before he’s confused.”

Continue reading "I feel neutral about gender-neutral parenting" →

Not sure if any of y'all saw this article in the New York Times this weekend: What’s Good for the Kids, which I found via Mombian.

The article gives a quick look at the early data that's starting to come in about what the measurable psychological differences exist in the children of gay parents.

The results aren't exactly shocking, but maybe I just say that because I'm married to the adult child of gay parents. For instance:

These children tend to be less conventional and more flexible when it comes to gender roles and assumptions than those raised in more traditional families … Same-sex couples, it seems, are less likely to impose certain gender-based expectations on their children …

It feels like common sense, but it's awesome to see the cold, hard data to back it up. I'd definitely recommend reading the whole article, which has some great advice for how het parents can learn from the lessons of their gay parenting peers.

This nursery is so dreamy. It's so tranquil, but with a touch of whimsy that makes me want to scour each picture looking for one more thing to love because I know I'll find it.

Taylor and Leah (some of you may remember Leah from over here) spent a lot of time designing a nursery that was warm and perfect for either sex. As Leah said, "Neither of us have ever been under the impression that girl means pink and boy means blue."

Continue reading "Tree and Royal Tenenbaums-inspired nursery" →

Have you thought about circumcision? This is a question that I have heard more in the past 3 weeks then I have ever expected to hear in my entire life and it all started when we found out my wife was growing a penis.

When we first discovered we were having a boy, we were thrilled. Not that a little girl wouldn’t have been great, but the thought of it made all of those horrible Disney movies where the father puts his daughter up in a tower until an appropriate guy comes along make a lot more sense.

Boys are tiring, but girls are tiiiiiiiiiirrrrrrrrrrrring, people kept saying. We walked around with our heads in the clouds for the next day, until the very question snuck into my brain — what do I think about circumcision?

Continue reading "Hoodwinked, one father's take on the circumcision debate" →