I figured if we didn't know, if we hid the facts from ourselves, then the surprise in the delivery room would be that much greater. We'd have months of speculation, a massive debate among family members and friends. But since Michelle wanted to know, there was no sense trying to hide it from myself.

Truth be told, when you've got the pictures up there on the ultrasound monitor, it's kinda hard to miss when they roll past the genitalia. Even if we didn't want to know, and I'm sure the operator would have told us to look away, even the slightest peak towards the monitor would have given it all away.

One of my friends actually found out the sex of his child that way. He and his wife didn't want to know, but during the comprehensive second level ultrasound he accidentally peeked while their operator was annotating the printouts and found everything out. When he told me the story later, I could tell he was a bit disappointed to have found out.

When you find out early, you miss that whole moment at birth when the baby emerges, everyone stares in wonder and the father gets to shout through tears of joy, "It's a..." I suppose I can still excitedly inform everyone the sex of our newborn, but it loses a bit of the impact when everyone already knows.

And of course, we found out today and quickly spread the word among both of our families. There had been a hot debate rolling between our parents and siblings and word of our findings quickly settled any dissention in the ranks.

The comprehensive ultrasound was a big success this afternoon. From head to toe, everything is developing fully and in scale. All the measurements are right where they should be and all the organs are functioning as they should. Assuming everything continues to progress as smoothly and perfectly as it has so far, come next January we should have a beautiful baby boy.