A friend of mine and I were comparing notes recently on the joys of parenting. He has an eighteen-month-old son and his wife is about halfway through her pregnancy with another.

He told me about how he had, until recently, held out just a little smidgen of a nugget of hope that the second baby would be a girl. You know, for a matched set.

Of course he’s perfectly happy either way.

And then we did that what-a-relief-we-don’t-have-to-ever-worry-about-parenting-teenage-girls thing parents of boys do, which we do mostly because:

• It’s universally accepted that teenage girls can be the scariest, most dramatic, complicated and least understood creatures ever, and
• We’re trying to console ourselves that we’ll never get to exclaim over tulle or teensy, embroidered flowers on denim hems in the clothing section. Shopping for boy clothing being more about reinforced knees and stuff that won’t show grass stains, than it is about fashion.

I did, however, have to disabuse my friend of the notion that parenting boys is downright easy. That’s like calling Indiana Jones a wussy because he doesn’t like snakes.