It's a Boy!

On another Easter weekend, twenty-five years ago, we found ourselves in Wisconsin. It was the end of a two week road trip that had included the states of North Carolina and the cities of Washington, DC and Atlanta, Georgia and many points in between. I know it was twenty-five years ago. I was pregnant. It was the dark days, boys and girls, we knew not the sex of our nascent child. Luckily for us, our then 8yo niece Megan had devised her own method of divining this information. She approached me with a grin on her face, an impish gleam in her eyes and her hands behind her back. Stopping just in front of my enormous belly she extended her closed hands toward me and instructed me to choose. So I did. Megan rotated her fist and her fingers opened like a flower, revealing a Hershey's chocolate kiss wrapped in blue foil. That means your baby is a boy, she announced with fervent authority. In her other hand was a pink foil wrapped kiss, that had I chosen it would have indicated I was carrying a girl in my womb. Three months later Michael was born. I still have the blue kiss. Megan recently became a mother herself for the first time. Earlier this month Miriam Catherine was born. I really should send a pink kiss in honor of her arrival. It only seems fitting.