Our nine month wait is almost over. In just a few more days my wife and I, along with our son, will be meeting the new addition to our family. We don’t know if our baby will be a nervous one or a calm one, if our baby will enjoy being bounced on a knee or held tightly or if our baby will like mushed sweet potatoes or peas. Among the many things we don’t know about our new baby is the gender.

There’s a surprise in my diaper. Guess what it is…

My wife and I didn’t find out the gender of our last child, either. And while it drove our friends and families absolutely crazy and even sparked betting pools (90% said girl, the 10% minority won with the opposite guess) my wife and I remained resolute: we didn’t want to know until our baby could actually be held in our arms.

The people who “had” to know cited all the usual reasons and we shot down every argument:

Decorating The Nursery: This was one of the easier things to do. By avoiding the usual pitfalls of buying everything in pink or blue we were able to put together a nursery that didn’t immediately dictate what sort of person our baby would be. We initially had a lot of fun coming up with decorating ideas for a nursery and it helped us come up with a theme we both liked. We stuck with neutral colors like yellows and browns and greens. We picked bedding with little jungle animals in pastel colors that could easily be the nursery of a junior Tarzan of the Apes or a young Jane Goodall.

Clothing for the Baby: Again, we stuck with neutral colors that didn’t immediately indicate a boy or girl at first glance. Let’s face it: boy and girl babies pretty much look like little Cabbage Dolls that have been shriveled and melted in a microwave for the first month or two anyway. There’s plenty of time to move into high baby-fashion clothes before the little one even thinks about solid food.

Picking A Name: By not knowing the gender of our child before birth we’ve been forced to come up with not one but TWO names that we like, which has spurred a bit of creativity on both of our parts. Our 3 1/2 year-old son has even gotten in on the naming action. His top picks? If the baby is a girl he want to name her “Chair” and if the baby is a boy his top name choice is “Eyeball.”

“Don’t You Want To Know?”: Ahh, the obvious question. Yes, of course we want to know the gender of our baby. It would be extremely awkward trying to raise a child to the age of 18 without knowing if it was a boy or a girl. But we also want to know if our child is going to look like my wife or me, if it is going to like chocolate or vanilla and whether or not it will get into Harvard or Princeton. But just because we want these things doesn’t necessarily mean we can get them exactly when we want them, if at all. There is a time for everything, and the time for knowing if we’re having a son or a daughter is when the lower half of that kid comes out.

Baby Shower Troubles: Because so many baby toys, clothes and even diaper pails are all “gender specific” these days, it is a bit difficult for people to attend a baby shower without purchasing some overly pink or overly blue items. This drives a lot of people nuts, which amuses me to no end. The positive upshot of all this? The new parents-to-be end up with a LOT more gift cards, which are about a million times more useful than the 50 baby washcloths and 4 baby bathtubs most parents seem to be given.

And, of course, by not finding out the gender of our baby we are spared from the chance of actually being proven horribly wrong. We’ve all heard of stories people who have decorated the nursery in bright pink, invested a small fortune in pink and frilly and tiny clothing pieces all to be surprised when “Emma Isabella” popped out and turn out to be “Jacob Michael” instead.

In the end, I think my wife and I are of like mind on this: There are so few real and big surprises in the world anymore that it’s actually kind of nice to have something completely unknown and anticipated for nine full months. We desperately want to meet our new baby, but we don’t want to go into without preconceived notions of who that new little person is. It’s almost a liberating experience, being able to imagine our future with either a boy or a girl, at almost the same time.

Of course, all this is easy for me to write about now: our wait will be over in just a few more hours if all goes well… And then the real fun begins!

When you hear the phrase “The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Weather Service (NWS)” you have probably already stopped reading or fallen asleep before you even get to the first joke. In case you aren’t familiar with them, the good pocket-protector-wearing people at weather branch of the NOAA are responsible for some of the most accurate, most up-to-date and most mind-numbingly boring weather reports you’ll ever read.

I know most weather reports aren’t exactly spine-tingling fare, but the NOAA perfected the art of being succinct back when Twitter sounded like the name of some character in a Disney cartoon. Here’s the typical text for an NOAA weather forecast:

Wednesday: Sunny, with a high near 95. Calm wind becoming east southeast around 5 mph.

That’s it. No “brilliant sunshine” or “hot and humid” or even “very sunny.” A grand total of 86 characters. Adjectives are for the weak. Oh, and I added the italics myself. The NOAA would never try to stoop to that level.

The weather people at the NOAA aren’t robots, of course. They know that most people are too lazy to read actual words about the weather, so they also use the time-honored method of posting little weather symbols on their website, to let you know what the sky will look like over the next several days. Instead of a little sunshine with sunglasses or a cloud holding an umbrella the always literal National Weather Service sticks to the these realistic expectations of what you can expect to see if you ventured outside and looked upward.

So far, so good, right? They even have little icons which show what the sky will look like at night if, God forbid, there was nothing good on TV or all the power on the East Coast blew out. Of course, it wasn’t good enough to just have one little icon for the weather at night. They actually have different icons for “Mostly Clear” and “Partly Cloudy” evenings. The icons are so realistic that people have actually navigated lost ships back to port safely using just those little pictures.

WTF NOAA?

Based on all this information, you can surely understand my alarm when, in the midst of a heat wave here in my part of the United States I went to visit the website of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Weather Service and instead of the usual staid, boring, almost soothing scientific description of the weather, I found the symbol you see here on the right:

Exploding sun with blood-red sky! Armageddon is upon us! Repent as all human civilization melts and burns under the oppressive heat of the fires of Hell! This morning was partly sunny and warm, but the planet Earth become a roaring ball of flame and liquid magma This Afternoon!

It’s that hot outside. It’s so hot the sky and the seas are turning red and boiling away.

But surely the end of the planet couldn’t be so close! I hadn’t read about it on any community calendars or heard it talked about at any of my monthly staff meetings. Just to be sure I had to check around at some other weather sites. Most just mentioned that it was going to be extra hot for the next few days. Some told me “stay indoors” and to “get to a pool” or even “take frequent breaks during the day if working outside” but none of them mentioned red skies and melting mountains. That is, until, I read the weather report from the New York Times:

On Tuesday the sun will be slightly larger.

Yep, on really hot days the sun actually gets larger and even becomes a little less yellow. The forecast does not mention if Superman’s powers will be negatively affected by this strange weather.

It’s at times like this, when I’m spending a lot of time looking at various websites, that I’m reminded of an old seaman’s adage about the color of the sun at different times of the day. I think it goes something like this:

Or, as the NOAA’s National Weather Service likes to say: Tuesday: Sunny and hot, with a high near 100. Calm wind becoming south southeast around 5 mph.

94 characters.

My son gets a lot of things from me: his charming personality, his dashing good looks and his razor sharp intellect. Sure, he’s not yet four, but he can count up to 30 without leaving out more than one or two numbers and he has developed some stunning Candy Land strategies.

You Bastard!

Among the many other traits he’s inherited from me is the complete and total inability to stay asleep once the sun has risen.

This trait has served me well as an adult, almost serving a sort of internal alarm clock which jolts me out of bed on those days when I forget to set my real alarm clock or during times when I want to watch that hot chick who jogs past my house in that tight sports bra most mornings. I’ve usually accomplished a dozen things and had way too much coffee to drink each day before more people have even stumbled out of the shower.

But what first appears to be a superpower for adults could arguably be seen as as evil power when it is possessed by children, especially for the parents that have to live with kids that get up at the crack of dawn every day.

Understand where I’m coming from?

For the past three months my wife and I have been thrown off schedule by a three and a half year old kid who almost instantly jumps (literally) out of bed when the sun rises, clumps across his bedroom floor and then marches into our bedroom, demanding to know why we aren’t awake yet, too.

“Because it’s early…” is the only answer we can usually mumble.

“No it isn’t. It’s MORNINGTIME!” is the subtle answer he yells each day as he climbs up onto our bed to drive home his point by poking us, prodding us, hitting us with pillows, jumping on us or just sitting on our faces and humming a little tune. And though copious amounts of coffee during the day have taken the edge off the evening bedtime ritual, we regularly find ourselves peeking out the windows and trying decide if it’s “dark enough” for him to really feel as though it’s late enough to go to bed.

We’ve tried just about everything.

We’ve told him he can stay in his room and read his books quietly, but that only entertained him for a day. We tried three different “light blocking” blinds and even created our own clever solutions, but there are only so many times you can tape aluminum foil and trash bags up on the windows before it convinces the neighbors that you’re growing pot. We tried teaching him to “look for the 7 at the front of the digital clock” readout in his room, but he regularly found the 7 in the “5:47″ readout and exclaimed that it was my wife and I who couldn’t tell time. We tried explaining to him that daddy has a good memory and a penchant for vengeance and he would remember all these early risings and pay them back in double when he was in high school. No dice.

The only reprieve my wife and I have gotten from this daily ritual is when an especially dark and rainy morning delays any indication of the sun being in the sky or even existing. On those precious few days my wife and I have actually been able to sleep in until the near-afternoon hour of 6AM or, in some rare cases, actually wake up on our own.

But with the summer solstice now past the amount of sunlight we’re cursed with each day will slowly wane, so that the tide of sunlight can turn back in the direction from whence it came and go scurrying off to its burrow a little later every morning.

I know that didn’t make any sense. Give me a break. I was woken up at 5:30…