whats the concensus

[Indira]

So this is my theory ... I think some of us due to random factors (diet, body physiology, meds, lifestyles, exercise, etc) are on one end or the other of the boy girl spectrum and therefore end up with a lot of one gender. I think there are some people who are probably right smack dab in the middle and therefore they tend to fluctuate either way. If I believe that doing the diet, exercises, etc can have an effect for the extreme of swaying, then I'd had to think that someone who lives a lifestyle somewhere in the middle would be apt to have either. Right?!?!

I believe this is very true.

And about swish´s theory: I also know a lot of opposites (first boy then girl) and most of them clearly became more slim after having their first, because of running around after that boy lol or they got into sports to loose the pregnancy weight.

[zanacal]

Of course not hobber, you can hardly help what sex your babies are can you?! (Actually - I hope we can but ykwim!) I appreciate your input x

[gizmo77]

hobber, whats PP?

[Hobbermittens]

pigeon pair-- one of each gender. I had never heard the term until I found IG, but now I hear it all the time.

[gizmo77]

never heard of it..wonder why the pigeon? ;-)

[Hobbermittens]

I googled it and found this:

"Like all doves, pigeons lay two eggs at a time in their simple little nests, and thereby hangs the tale of "pigeon pair." Legend has it that pigeon broods always consist of one male chick and one female chick, which then grow up to mate and live together for life. Evidently whoever came up with that legend had never taken basic biology, since inbreeding on such a scale would be a genetic disaster for the species. But as a rather hokey invocation of symmetry and balance in nature, "pigeon pair" has been applied to human babies since the mid-19th century. The primary meaning of "pigeon pair" is a boy and a girl who are twins, but an extended sense encompasses your situation, a boy and girl born a bit apart but constituting (at least for the moment) the only children in the family."

Interesting!

[gizmo77]

interesting it is!

[atomic sagebrush]

Lucky b****rds?

Ya know, I do think this is actually kinda true!

I have thought on this A LOT and I think it's a combo of two things.

First of all, there HAS to be at least some factor of chance involved in gender ratio or the human race and mammals all together, would have died out a long time ago. You can see this in dogs and cats and animals with litters...they usually have both boys and girls, because it's "smartest" to have both boys and girls unless something in the environment makes it much more likely that one gender survive over another. Swaying can't ever be 100% because it IS "smartest" to have both sons and daughters - your genes are most likely to survive to be handed down that way because you have both the "sure thing" (80% of all the women who've ever lived have had at least one child that survived to adulthood) and the "gamble" (only 40% of all the men who've ever lived have had children, but men can potentially father an unlimited number of children while women can only have a few.) So unless some signal is received very clearly that one gender has a better shot at survival than the other, I suspect that your body just reverts to a coin flip.

Secondly, there has to be some overall bigger luck at play beyond the race to the egg, as in, you just happen to TTC when your body was more boy-friendly. Even if you were girl-friendly every other month of your life, if just by sheer virtue of luck you got pg the two, 3,4,5 months when you were boy friendly, you might totally think that you're "destined" for blue but really it was just luck that you got pg the month in which you did.

Plus, there have to be opposites born and a lot of them, or else back when we had only access to a few basic foods and couldn't travel and interbreed like we can nowadays (like the Incas eating potatoes as their staple), if eating potatoes or drinking wine or only DTD on certain days or whatever swayed with 100% (or even 60%) effectiveness, we would see at least some isolated tribes somewhere or cultures throughout history with dramatic variations in gender and yet we don't see that. Whatever swaying is, it can't be totally effective or somewhere, sometime, the gender ratio would be totally different. Luck has to enter into it somehow. This is especially true for girls, because mammals do ok with an excess of females and few males (because the males can get more than one female pregnant) but the other way around doesn't seem to work out so well and at any point if a lot more males than females started to be born, that species prob. wouldn't last very long. So females have to be conceived even when the environment is "blue" and that is why I think there have to be factors beyond diet, minerals, ions, etc. to level the playing field.

So I think it's luck in a lot of different ways, not only is it luck in terms of you may be totally set up to conceive a baby boy and then you roll over at the last minute and things shift and your egg floats into the only cloud of the opposite gender sperm, but it's also luck in that you just so happen to decide to TTC in a month or series of years that the odds were stacked a certain way. Like if you only had children in your 30's, who knows what would have happened if you'd had a child at 18, 22, 25, 40?

Looking at the Duggars, if they had stopped at 3 or 4 they would just be one of those lucky families with both genders and would be totally unremarkable, but later on they had long runs of both boys and girls, longer than a lot of us have ever had. If they had started with one of those runs rather than the pigeon pair run, it would totally have seemed like they could only make one gender. So it seems to me that even families with pigeon pairs/mixed lots may still very well be "set" to produce more of one gender than another, or at least in spurts they are. If we all had 10 kids over a 20 year period, I strongly suspect that most of us would NOT have 5 B and 5 g, but more of one or more of the other; yet we'd still have some of each and I also strongly suspect that we'd have runs of one gender and then runs of the other just like the Duggars do.

Beyond luck, Y sperm apparently have some sort of major advantage which is why there are 140-160 boys conceived for every 100 girls. So many more boys are lost than girls are that the gender ratio at birth falls to 105-100. A woman whose body is ideally prepared for conception and maintaining pregnancy may in effect be upping her chances of blue. Because everyone's odds of conceiving blue are so much higher to begin with, if our bodies can carry those baby boys successfully, even if swaying to control conception is nothing but smoke and mirrors, than being very healthy and able to sustain pregnancy will sway blue just from a sheer statistical viewpoint.

not sure how clear that is, trying to make dinner!!

[zanacal]

Not bad multi-tasking Atomic! Very interesting

[lobella2]

I also have a pp but have always only wanted girls. Not much changed between my two pregnancies. I know I did eat more for breakfast with my son. I always had a waffle with peanut butter and syrup, but ate less with my daughter. However, I have never been one to skip breakfast. I think that I got her from low sperm count and a cutoff. She was an oops from a pull out days before ovulation. I conceived both in January and I was actually heavier when I conceived my daughter. I was actually really upset that I got pregnant with my daughter because I had plans to sway in June and so I thought I had ruined my chance of having a girl. I just got lucky.