Did I Make That?

I’m not a vain man. I don’t expect my unborn child to be beautiful, but I also don’t think it’s unreasonable for me to hope our baby will look like something other than the spawn of Satan. Clearly I’m asking for too much. According to a recent ultrasound, my wife is just four and a half months away from giving birth to a demonic clown:


The woman doing the ultrasound assured us the baby will look more normal once he or she builds up fat stores by feasting on milk and the souls of the damned.

As the alleged father, I know I’m supposed to love my offspring no matter what they look like, but seriously that kid’s face will haunt your dreams. I’d like to claim that’s not my handiwork, but everyone knows the demonic clown gene is carried on the Y chromosome. That doesn’t mean I’ll soon be the dad of a healthy but evil baby boy. If I recall high school biology correctly, demonic clowns aren’t confined to specific human genders. For all I know, this thing could have two X’s, one Y, and half a Z. Even at this early stage the family resemblance is striking. Our demon baby has my vacant eyes and Lola’s bright orange skin. I guess the pigmentation doesn’t matter much since he or she will always be wearing creepy face paint. At least we’ll have something in common. Heaven knows I’ve done my share of unholy circus work.

Should the ultrasound be wrong – and it looks pretty conclusive to me – Lola and I have decided we don’t want to know what we’re having. This deliberate ignorance only applies to the baby’s gender. If my wife is going to pop out a stegosaurus or something I’d appreciate a heads up. Even a father’s love has its limits, and mine stops at the armored spines of a prehistoric beast. I have two friends who managed to knock up their female companions, and both of them are having boys. I can’t publicly say I want a boy more than I want a girl or a girl more than I want a demonic clown, but I can say it better be illegal for whatever I produce to procreate with whatever my friends produce. Other than that, I’ll be happy with whatever my wife and I get just as long as whatever that is doesn’t ride out of my wife’s uterus on the back of a dinosaur.

The demonic clown pictures in our possession are the result of 4D imaging technology. The fourth “D” of course refers to the serious dough expectant parents hemorrhage to admire that view. Most of the images we saw at our ultrasound appointment were of the traditional grainy black-and-white that-could-be-your-baby-or-the-Lock-Ness-Monster variety. That didn’t stop my wife from proudly taking them to work. The hospital could have given us pictures of someone else’s unborn kid and we wouldn’t have known the difference. If I were an ultrasound technician, I’d take proper ultrasound images exactly once and then hand out those same pictures to every other set of parents for the rest of my career. The ultrasound technician at our visit spent forty-five minutes pointing how this dark area was the heart and that dark area was a liver, but we couldn’t see any of it. She may has well have just poked my wife in the stomach, said she was pretty sure there was a baby in there, and then sent us on our way.


This video shows a healthy baby. Too bad it probably belongs to somebody else.

The biggest advantage to not knowing the gender of our baby is that it slows down Lola’s spending somewhat. Decorating for babies is a simple but expensive process: blue for boys, pink for girls, and green for dinosaurs. Demonic clowns don’t have a color, but they do come with their own scary theme music. Most people find out the sex of their offspring as early as they can, meaning they don’t have to shop for androgynous clothing for nine months. Unsurprisingly, the available selection of non-gender specific baby clothing is somewhat limited. For our baby’s wardrobe, Lola has settled on clothing displaying ducks and frogs as not being too masculine or feminine, but that doesn’t seem quite right. I’ve seen some pretty vicious ducks in my day, and frog DNA is what led to a very manly catastrophe in Jurassic Park. The only truly non-gender specific outfit you can buy for a baby is one of those white onesies that are basically the equivalent of a wife-beater for a baby. I think we own at least sixteen of those so far. If you’re going to raise a white trash baby, you might as well do it right.

Appropriate accessories for this outfit include NASCAR tattoos and Baby Miller Light.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned up to this point in the pregnancy, it’s that growing a baby takes forever. Boys, girls, and demonic clowns all have gestation periods lasting about forty weeks. Dinosaurs, however, don’t have live births, so I’m pretty sure if we were having a stegosaurus Lola would have laid an egg by now. I’ll be happy with whatever we get four of five months from now as long as it’s small enough to be confined by the picket fence we just finished building around our backyard. Then again if our child is able jump a five foot barrier as an infant I suppose we’ll make due. We’ll just have to make sure to call a talent agent – or an exorcist who doesn’t fear balloon animals.