All In Good Fun....(and a little bit crazy, too!)

So part of the fun of early pregnancy is dreaming about the gender(s) of your unknown child(ren).

When I was pregnant with Emersyn, we did every old wives tale in the book! The ring test, the cravings test, the leg hair test, the pencil test...many more I can't remember right now...and the Drano test.

My friend from high school clued me in on the Drano test, which she was passed on from her grandmother's generation and there was no member of her family that it had been wrong for. In fact, it was sort of a "viral" test in my small hometown community, and there was never a record of it being wrong for anyone. The "science" (ha!) behind it is that male hormones make your urine more acidic, and females keep it more alkaline, thus the different reactions. So I got the official color key from my friend and we tried the Drano test with Emersyn.

What's the Drano test? Well, yes, it's crazy. You mix pregnant woman's urine with crystal Drano and look at the color of the remaining liquid. It's reactive and smells horrible!! You have to do this outdoors and preferably you have someone other than Pregnant Lady do the mixing. There are all sorts of falsities on the internet about which is the color key, but the one I was taught and is sworn by is that any brownish yellowish murky/ugly/nasty color = girl, and aqua/blue/green/teal = boy.

I must of done this test 5 times when pregnant with Emersyn. Travis even acted as my control urine for one of them. HA! I wanted to see that if male hormones really did react differently with the Drano crystals. His glass of urine and Drano looked like water of the Caribbean. Very pretty! Just like the old wives tale said a boys' test result is supposed to look. All 5 tests that I took when pregnant with Emersyn showed murky, nasty, muddyish yellowish looking liquid.

Emersyn is all girl. The Drano test was right.

We realize that with twins the results probably aren't as accurate, but figured it's a fun thing to write in the baby book and what's it going to hurt?

Tonight was the night. I went down to Ace to get some crystal Drano.

I mixed some with an equal part of my preggo momma urine. Outside of course. In the dark so the neighbors wouldn't wonder what was up. I ran from the mixture because of the horrible fumes and let it do it's reacting. (Hopefully I ran quickly enough, or I may have an impending case of pulmonary edema soon!) I came back a couple minutes later and turned on the light.

It was as black as something yucky could be. Travis went out to look. He tried from every angle to see that Caribbean tinge but to no avail. Black, muddyish looking results.

I said to him--congrats it's 2 girls! (Just all in good fun, because I'm not dumb enough to believe this fully.) I'm totally okay with either gender, of course. Travis thinks it's 2 girls and he always has thought that. I sway between a boy/girl and a girl/girl duo. But I know he was trying so hard to see green or blue.

Now to really back up my craziness, I was recently introduced to the cabbage test. This is where you boil a red cabbage for 10 minutes, and then take the water from the boiling pot and mix it with your urine. Red cabbage water is used for pH testing and supposedly the differences in urine pH are swayed depending which gender you are carrying.

I found out that boiling a red cabbage for 10 minutes gives you very dark navy bluish water. When you add the pee, it either turns purple or reddish/pink.

Purple = girl
Red/pink = boy

Again, I have no clue what would happen if one of each gender, but we tried it anyways. All in good fun.

Here's what happened:


We couldn't decide if it was purple or a mix of purple and pink, but we both thought a little more purple.

For the sake of science, I added lemon juice (highly acidic) to some cabbage water to see if it was true that it would turn red/pink. I forgot to take a pic! But it was definitely red/pink water once the lemon juice was added.

We will find out in about 7 or 8 weeks which of these tests is true---or----what these tests look like with a child of each gender!

Now, I need to go find my inhaler to avoid my asthmatic arrest...

Hope you all have a GREAT Friday!