Musing

Tomorrow we have the next ultrasound.  At this one, in addition to whatever else they're going to look at, we get to learn EM's sex.  In preparation for this, amongst other things, we've arrived at a color for the room.  We have two colors on the wall that, to me, look entirely the same.
Kate says that one of them is warm, and one of them is cool.
I have no idea of what she's talking about, they both look sort of cafe latte color to me, but we're going to paint the room the warm one instead of the cool one.
We also got a crib.  Well, we ordered one.  We looked at one that we found on Craigslist, that was listed for a hundred bucks.  It was okay, but absolutely used, we would have had to refinish it, sand it, clean the mold off it.  Also, it had a recall on one of the parts.  We talked about it and looked in our book of customer rated baby stuff, and ended up buying a crib that was highly rated, new, from Target for twenty-seven dollars more than the used one on Craigslist.
And Kate scored a bunch of used maternity clothes at the mommy store on the east side.  We got like three pair of pants and four tops (including this very hot lacy thing) for under fifty bucks.
Anyhow, musings...
Kate and I talked this week about the fact that the baby is still pretty abstract to both of us.  We're looking forward to EM showing up, but are still occasionally wondering if we haven't fucked up tremendously and made the biggest mistake ever.
I don't think that we have, but I guess that's something that we won't know for sure for a couple of decades.
Kate keeps asking me what if the baby is funny looking?
Generally this comes up when we're in close proximity to a funny looking baby.
I haven't actually told Kate this, but it's not so much of an "if" kind of question.  I'm pretty certain the baby is going to be funny looking.  At least objectively.
Nobody that's ever seen a photo of me from infancy through the age of twenty should find that surprising.
Just to be clear, I'm not insecure about my appearance, and don't think I ever have been, but the fact is that I was pretty funny looking for a long time.  I was skinny, had frizzy bright red hair, and my nose has been the size it is now since I was about seven.  A college friend looked at a middle school or early high school photo of me that was (and might still be) on the wall at my parent's house and made the [entirely accurate] observation that it looked like a "nose on a stick".  And at that point my nose had only been broken twice (nine times now and counting, it's a pretty damn big target).  So, yeah, odds are excellent that it's going to be a pretty funny looking baby.
I've already discussed pasty.  I've never actually had a suntan in my entire life.  Kate gets "color".  Like when you've been outside in strong sunlight without paying attention, and that night there's a sharp line of contrast between the bright red of the skin that was exposed to the sun and the pasty white skin that wasn't.  Then some dumbass tells you that you look like you got some color right before pressing their finger into the sunburn.  This baby ain't going out in sunlight until it's eighteen.
I work on the campus of a Big 10 University.  I don't actually have a lot of contact with students, but they're all over the place.  Tan is definitely still in.  This kind of surprises me with everything that we know about melanoma, but it is.
Pasty is absolutely not in.
Maybe by the time that stuff like that matters to this kid all the tan folks will have died off from skin cancer, and pasty will be hip.  It took smoking an awful long time to fade out (to the extent that it has) after how bad it is for you became such unavoidable common knowledge.  Maybe suntan lotion should come with a surgeon general's warning sticker.  Maybe it does, I've never used the stuff.  SPF 45 pretty much is suntan lotion for me.
Anyhow, pasty is pretty much a given.  Hopefully the kid is a redhead.  Kate is, I was (when I had hair, that is).  I read recently that redheads are going away because the recessive gene is being bred or selected (I forget which) out of us as a species.  That's kind of depressing, because Kate's hair is amazing.  Mine was darker red in the winter, sort of cherry soda red, but then it got bright red like Kate's in the summer.
So, if it gets either my red hair or Kate's we'll be happy.  If it gets my dad's hair texture, even better.  Neither he nor my brothers have lost a single strand of their hair.  My brothers are in their early forties and my dad's in his seventies.  They have great hair.
I started balding in college.  My mom liked to say at the time that that was because I had long hair that I mostly wore in a ponytail, and the weight of it was pulling itself out and making me go bald faster.
I don't buy it.
My brothers also got my mom's side of the family's little goyishe nose, while I got the big ass target that runs on my dad's side.
Both my brothers and I got our dad's ears, which are rather large and stick out pretty much straight.  Which made them look like little monkeys when they were kids.
I looked more like an eagle.
I grew into all this stuff as an adult, so it worked out okay.  And I spend very very little on haircuts.  Also, I spent enough years making money in places where getting hit in the face was an occupational hazard that I don't have a lot of attachment to the whole physical appearance thing.  In hindsight, I'd trade being a funny looking kid for being a more normal looking adult.  Some folks I grew up with looked good as kids and are pretty goofy looking now.  I hope that, if our kid is goofy looking, at least it should be the goofy looking that they'll grow out of relatively quickly.
I guess what I'm getting at is that the elements are there for this kid to look okay, or to be pretty funny looking.  It's going to be a big role of the dice.
By the way, it's probably not escaped you that I'm not describing any of the family traits as far as appearance goes that this kid is likely to pick up from it's mom's side of the family.
I'm willing to risk pissing off my own family here, not so much willing to do that with Kate's.  It wouldn't be fair to Kate.  So I'm going to leave that one almost entirely alone.  I say almost because she got her looks (and let's be honest, her looks are pretty amazing) from somewhere.  So the kid should look as much like her as possible, far as I'm concerned.
But realistically, it will probably be pretty funny looking.
Objectively speaking, of course.