Brujerias!

Some people in the United States believe in the magic of crystals and pendulums, in Argentina it is a bit more simple. There is no need for shiny rocks and shaman blessed pendants. Any married woman in the room simply takes off her golden wedding band, strings it through a slim gold chain, certainly someone in the room has a gold chain on, and the magic begins.

The gold ring is threaded onto the gold chain are then placed in a pile of a woman's right hand. This woman does not need to be pregnant at the time...This method is said to be able to tell the future as well as confirm the past. When the time is right, the designated fortune teller lifts the chain, trying hard to be as steady as possible.

At which point the ring does one of three things at this point: either it swings in a slight circle, meaning your first child will be a girl, swings back and forth in what is some what of a straight line, predicting a boy, or it simply does nothing, meaning you will have no children.

Because I really want to have a boy and a girl, I made my niece try it several times with me, not just over my right hand, but over my left, over my stomach, laying down...and all 4 times the results were the same.

When I shared this with my mother today, we had a good laugh about my great grandmother Dorothy, who was quite the definition of a witch. She read the tarot and foretold the future, and drank a few too many vodka tonics before she passed out in her lazy boy each night. She was a wild trail blazer of a woman! When my mother was pregnant with my sister I remember my great grandmother using her pendulum to confirm the ultrasound that said my sister was going to be a boy and we all swore she was moving the pendulum on purpose. Silly grandma. Maybe it was the vodka.

Interestingly enough, I did some investigating and apparently in the US, it is visa versa! The circle is for the boy and swinging right to left it is a girl!

So, according to the golden ring in the southern hemisphere, I will have two children, both of them boys, and by northern hemisphere standards, I will mother two little ladies.

This being said, if any of you grandmas, grandpas, great grandparents, or aunts are thinking about buying cute little baby gifts, it is probably better to go with gender neutral colors, yellow, green, brown, cream, red, royal blue, etc.