Ten-Second Rule

"Real blood turns brown after thirty minutes. Ten-second rule!"

Your mom and dad, on a scholastic grading scale, are capably intelligent people. And despite generally snooty and tasteful sensibilities when it comes to entertainment, they don't overthink things when they're in-the-moment. Certain individuals' clairvoyant pursuits allow them to procure a movie's twist ending by the second act. Or snark at a page-turner of a novel because they pen the full story arc in their head before they even break the spine in the middle. Or they have a downward smirk, knowing that edgy, experimental, hipster rock band is following the same four-four progression as every other track on the top forty. These people, these workaday Cleo the Psychics, live in the future, always receiving their well-earned pat on the back when the predictable becomes the present.

Your mom and dad are not those people.

"Look at the cuff of his sleeve. There's red on it. But it'll turn brown. It's real this time."

Your dad reads the last line of a novel before starting any story. But he doesn't commune with the divine to navigate those labyrinthine pages to the endpoint. He reads magazines back to front, like there's some errant gene flitting about his DNA, seeking out (with straining, whipping cilia) that path against the natural ebb and flow. And the music he listens to, whether baroque pop, laptronica, or backpacker rap, engages him fully, immersively, but plugs into him only in the moment, only in each individual count of that four-four measure. The depths he explores follow a line like a heart monitor: drilling down and resurfacing, spelunking and spiking, face blue from oxygen deprivation -- then lungs once again flush with air.

"See?" Your dad pauses the movie. "Main Guy wanted to get out of the con, but his brother wanted to be a con man until the day he died. Watch the blood." And, lo and behold, the blood on Main Guy's shirt sleeves turns brown. It's real this time. Main Guy's brother is dead. It's a con. Or rather, it isn't.

But your mom and dad never saw it coming. Well, they did, but only ten seconds before it was actually happening on the screen. That's your mom and dad's Ten-Second Rule.

Your dad raises his fists in the air, triumph smiling across his face at having a ten-second jump on the film's crime-caper twist. In your dad's in-the-moment world, he saw that one coming from a mile away.

Not finding out early whether you're a boy or a girl has indeed proven entertaining. But it's also training your mom and dad to fully experience every moment of your gestation period, discussing possible outcomes, contemplating possible differences, and examining all three-hundred sixty degrees of an otherwise binary outcome. And not telling others what your name is has proven entertaining as well. People leap headlong into guessing games, or visibily restrain themselves from wanting to know. And, on "labor day," once your name is spoken aloud to others for the very first time, they will not have the powers of prediction on their side.

With your sex finally revealed as well, no one will have any powers beyond a fifty-fifty guess as to what you are before then. Not even your mom and dad's ten-second rule will help them. And everyone will be in the moment, finding out who you are for the first time, together.

A girl name

Your mom found your girl name the other night. Her search pattern traversed cerebral longitudes and lattitudes never considered by Gallileo or Stephen Hawking. Her eyes scanned documents yellowed from archaic dust and those humming with a futuristic neon glow. Her methods, both expansive and focused, were applied and scrutinized from every conceivable direction -- she sighed restlessly, unsatisfied until she'd ticked the very last one of all 360 degrees outlined in her approach.

Refrains of vowel and consonant usage were counted and recounted, syllables were measured by some Shakespearean-era cubit, and a frighteningly subtle balance between poetry and prose was weighed to the nearest hundredth of an ounce. Your girl name is somehow both flowing and poignant at every utterance.

The final sieve your girl name sifted through was a Google search. Michael Jackson's dancing feet replaced the "oo" in "Google" that day. Your mom, considering every feasible angle, knew that your name might already exist in some capacity out there in the world, the Internet. If there were positive or negative associations already built into your name, your mom wanted to know about them. She typed your name in quotes into the search box, hit enter, and waited the 0.22 seconds for the 128 results to settle. The very first result -- to your mom and dad's astonishment -- pulled up a parallel universe.

They sat and watched a video following the birth of a baby girl already bearing your name, birthed by a woman that shared too many of your mom's facial features. Volume muted, your mom and dad gaped at what was apparently some Twilight Zone-fashioned future in which you are already an Internet sensation, born to a woman that could passably serve as your mom's sister or Hollywood stunt double. Unshaken, your mom kept the girl name she fashioned for you.

"The possibility of the baby being a girl is finally real," your mom said. Before then, your boy name was all your mom and dad could see, and you being a boy was all your mom and dad could picture. But now you have two fully-realized names, not to mention your codename used with friends and family during your gestation, a situation that will prove vexing to you for only five-and-a-half more months. But until then, rest assured knowing that your name, boy or girl, was shaped by masterful wordsmiths.

Not telling, and not telling

If you're a boy, your name's picked. If you're a girl, your mother and I haven't settled. We're keeping the names to ourselves, not revealing it to friends and family until you're born. Mainly because it seems like a bummer when everybody already knows whether you're going to be a boy or a girl, and everybody already knows what your name's going to be, so on the day that you're born there's nothing left to announce except your birth weight. Which isn't terribly exciting unless you're premature or tipping the scales over ten pounds. Barring those two scenarios, giving away your name to everyone before you're born feels positively anticlimactic to us. Aside from the whole we-made-a-baby thing happening that day.

We're also not going to learn about your sex until you're out. Instead of the doctor announcing whether you're a boy or a girl, I'd like to be the one to call it. I don't have a Ph.D., but I think I have an idea of what to look for. And since we're not interested in bombarding you with ultrasounds during your development, we won't have a million pictures of you where we can say, "Oh, uh, yep, it's got a penis," or whatever. We're also not sonically blasting you with ultrasounds because there's about a 95% chance that you're perfectly healthy and there are no problems to monitor whatsoever. Unless a viable medical reason crops up that requires us to outwardly scan and chart every step of your development (to include your mother's health too, of course) then we're not going to. We're keeping you, whatever happens.

It took us years to settle on a name. I'm still sad about some of the names that didn't make the cut, but the one we've picked so far -- if you're a boy -- is pretty sweet. It's not-even-kidding unique, but not unpronounceable to the human tongue, and not hit with a Hollywood stick either. You will not be a Prince Michael II or a Pilot Inspektor. You're welcome. But your first and middle name is poetically assembled, while further complementing the sounds coming from the name "Kalista." Word construction and soundsmithing really came to the forefront, and I'm quite sure it's my finest work to date.

My coworkers started playing name-guessing games the moment I told them we're not telling. Though, again, we still haven't withdrawn your name from the forge yet if you're a girl. But I gave them a couple hints, largely because they were thinking too conventionally. I said that if it's a name that would be in the top 150 names for boys and girls on the planet, then it didn't make the cut. One of them, thinking I dug too deep into my hobby, asked if it's a name from a videogame. No. You won't be a Gordon Freeman, a Legend of Zelda, or a Lara Croft Kalista.

I gave them a couple hints, though, by telling them two names we'd picked that didn't make the cut, but would give them an idea of the unique angles we're investigating for your name.

If you're a boy, you were almost named Atreyu. "Ohhh, good one," my coworkers said. And if you're a girl, you were almost named Alias. And by "almost," I mean that there's no way in heck your mother would ever allow her daughter to be named that. Ever. In my defense, it was a name that struck me long before Jennifer Garner made it to center stage. I tried pretty hard to name you Alias, gave it a real thoroughbred effort (there are more and more boys named Elias, so, while unique, I didn't think Alias originated from Klingon or anything crazy), but mom ain't hearin' that.

In emails between your mom and I, we codenamed you "Riceball." Which has nothing to do with your final name. But when a baby is developing in the womb, there are certain realworld comparisons doctors make to explain how large the little gamete is. "A grain of rice" was one of the earliest size descriptors. We loved it. Even though, at twelve weeks, you've progressed from something the size of a pea, to a raisin, to half a cherry tomato, and soon to that of a small lime. "Riceball" stuck, however. No doubt as a tribute to your one-quarter Filipino makeup.