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This is obviously one of those personal decisions that should be made by you and your partner together. Whatever you decide, the reasons should be yours and will probably be different to the reasons why everyone made their decisions. Some people think its spoiling the surprise, some people its getting the surprise early, some people just hate surprises.

 

In our case, we decided that at the 19 week scan, we'd find out. And find out we did. We had a beautiful little girl (albeit one resembling an alien at this stage) on the way. Our reasons were pretty simple, we had just started buying all the new baby stuff we'd need. When buying these things, we decided we wanted to go the pinks and blues, rather than the neutral colours like the yellows, whites and oranges. So obviously to get this right, knowing the gender helps.

 

So pink it was. We went nuts, pink sheets, pink clothes, pink changing tables, baths, highchairs, the lot. We've even already got a pink bike helmet, all thanks to our friends at the Land Of Nod. (These guys have everything, from furniture to organic moisturizers - You can even create a registry so everyone else knows what to buy your baby, we found this particularly useful as you can see below)

 

 

For us though, finding out gender turned into the beginning of a few other dilemmas. Firstly, now that we know we are having a girl, do we let everyone else know. Also, should we pick a name yet or wait. Aparently for some people, when their baby is born, the name they have picked just does not match the baby so its back to the drawing board. And once picked, do we then tell others the name. These are all interesting questions, questions which we debated at length.

 

In the end, we decided on a name, but also decided to only tell everyone the gender. We thought we would keep the name for just the two of us until our daughter was born. (Which is also why I haven't mentioned it here!) What we did I think was brilliant. We set up a gift registry at the Land Of Nod and told everyone our news. This for us was one of the better strategies we came up with. It basically took most of the financial strain out of our pre-birth preparation. We worked out what we needed, (in pink) then we worked out what we could afford and everything else we put on the registry. Most of the things we need have now been bought.

 

One other thing too, when it comes to names, we were actually quite lucky. We actually came to agree on a girls name quite easily, weeks before our scan. We were really struggling with boys names though. We are actually lucky it was a girl or else we could still be debating names. Anyway, we found the following resource really helpful. Its cheap and convenient too. Now we actually do have a boy's name, and I'm under pressure to provide the boy!