pregnancy: on "finding out."

When Mr. Epic or I tell someone that we're having a baby, 9 times out of 10 the first question we're asked is:

Are you planning to find out whether it's a boy or a girl?

Mr. Epic noted that to me the other day, and I hadn't thought too much about it, but...he was right. It is by far the most common first response to the news, after the customary congratulations.

It's funny, because we know several couples who are either currently expecting or recently had a baby, and nearly all of them have opted to remain surprised as to the sex of their baby until his/her birth. It seems to have become a growing trend lately to not find out. I totally understand, too--it seems like it could be fun to have such a surprise at the time of the baby's birth. I really do get why many people go this route.

But it's SO not for us.

We are absolutely, without a doubt, most definitely going to find out what our baby's sex is when the time comes in just a little over a month. It's not because of any kind of preference--in an ideal world, we'd love to have both a boy and a girl one day. Mr. Epic claims he'd feel more comfortable starting with a boy--that he'd be less worried about "messing up" with this first child if it were a boy--but that he will be equally thrilled either way. Personally, I feel completely neutral toward it and would love to have either. Regardless, we're not going to be pushy with conventional and traditional gender precepts, so our lives won't be too different one way or the other.

But. It's the idea of KNOWING, of going into birth and parenthood with the comfort of a known quantity in our back pockets, that is driving us to find out. For a long time, we didn't know when we would get pregnant. Then we didn't know how we would get pregnant, or even IF we would get pregnant. There were a lot of unknowns surrounding this thing we both wanted so badly. Now that I'm pregnant, we don't know a lot of things still. When the baby will come, who it will look like, what health issues it may or may not be born with, what it's personality will be like. But to at least know this one thing--to be able to stop calling the baby an "it" and start calling "it" a "he" or a "she," even to be able to refer to the baby by NAME--makes it that much more real, and will help us to feel a little more secure on the path to parenthood. There's really no logical reason for it, but who says logic and parenting go hand in hand that frequently, anyway?

So that's why we want to know.

Did you find out the gender of your baby, or are you planning to if you're still pregnant? What was your reasoning?