5 am wake up call!

Everyone whom has experienced motherhood always talks about the most amazing part of pregnancy being the moment your baby first kicks. The emotion builds with each day, growing anxious for the baby's first signs of communication with the outside world...and you wait, and you wait and you wait anticipating the moment until one day, you fly out of bed at 5am to hear your cat screaming as though someone or something is torturing her to her death.
Saturday morning, my tomcat, who is really a tinacat, was loudly, and I mean earsplittingly, defending her territory from a male cat trespasser. This required her to scream and growl, yes growl, a consequence of having been raised by dogs, successfully pulling off her bad ass cat attitude, but secretely sending the crystal clear message of, "get me the Eff out of here!" I, woken from a dream that I will explain to you in just a minute, flew from my bed to open the door so that she might escape her trespasser, kindly gave her food as a reward for her bravery, and so she would let me go back to sleep, relieved my bladder, and tucked myself back into bed beside my cuddly lover, when suddenly I felt what can only be described as heavy gas bubbles. I laid there quietly assessing whether it was truly indomitable gas gurgles, or if my heart was still racing from having awoken with a start, and to my surprise it was neither. My baby was kicking! Kicking for the first time...or perhaps punching, one can never be too sure.
I laid there thinking I should wake Claudio so he too could be part of this very special moment, yet knowing that if I did, the baby would surely cease to communicate, (murphy's law) and then neither of us would be able to enjoy the full experience, so I laid there silently, presently, and ecstatically feeling my baby communicate for the first time!

Now, back to my dreams.

Everyone asks, "So do you know if it is a boy or a girl yet?" and we respond, "We want it to be a surprise so we are not going to find out." Yet, I secretly feel it is a little boy, and here is why:

I have had several dreams now, all of which are incredibly vivid and beautiful and all of which I am with my baby and Claudio in the coming years.
The most memorable one went like this. I was peering through a hole in the wall, a hole into the future while Claudio waited impatiently at my side, asking over and over again, "Do you see anything?"as if he were a child on a road trip asking, "are we there yet?" I pressed my face to the hole and saw myself and our son 5 years from now sitting a park, lush with vegetation. We sat chatting and laughing on a white park bench, though I could not hear our words. I began relating to Claudio what I was seeing, telling him, "I see myself with our son 5 years from now! We are in a park somewhere, smiling and laughing. Oh Claudio, he is beautiful, he has your curly hair and your big dark eyes. This when I turn my face from the whole and look at Claudio. Filled with emotion I threw my arms around him and said, "He looks just like you!"

That is when I woke up.

So from that point on, I am 70% convinced the baby is male in gender. However, each and every morning, Claudio awakes to kiss my belly then my mouth, to wish us a good morning, and each day he says, " I am more than sure it is a little girl."

En fin, it is 50-50, and we will be thrilled with whatever awaits us...but in the meantime, it is fun to hypothesize about one's intuition.