It’s clear enough who he is, when he’s born, who his parents and sister are and other traditional personal details – so, let’s drop them!
But what about the chapter title – “Personal”? How about my “Personal” feelings about becoming father of a little boy? This will do!
Before you were born, or the magic formula
We wanted a son. We had a lovely girl,
we lived in our own apartment in a fantastic location, and we wanted a son. But how? How to make sure that the child is going to be a boy?Julia, having as usually very trustful (!?) sources, found a magic mathematical formula. It was quite simple – it only needed three parameters – parents’ dates of birth and a conception date. Then it was magically predicting sex of a child! What a joke!
Being a computer programmer I could not let this so called formula ruin our dream. So, I have programmed it and had to test it. Yes, test it! You may ask – and I can see some smiles and hear some jokes – how the hell I could test it? It’s simple – you use historical data – your parents, relatives, friends and their kids, and everyone who can supply the three dates! Results were quite surprising – the formula was predicting sex with an accuracy of over 80%!
I have extended the formula just a bit to create an adviser tool - based on two dates (parents’ dates of birth) it recommended conception dates for having a boy or a girl. Having applied it to ourselves we found that we didn’t have too many options – unless we try now we had to wait for over two years for a boy!
The rest is not that interesting. We trusted the magic formula and we had a boy – Ilusha!
I believe everything in life has a reason. May be this story explains something in Ilusha's character?
I still didn’t explain why I wanted a son
It’s simple – why a man wants a son? To teach him everything what you knew, and see him learning what you didn’t. To play all sports you love and assemble all models you failed. To have a partner to go skiing, bike riding, playing soccer and tennis, watching kill-and-shoot movies, play games, drive and talk about cars and everything else what you don’t even know but feel that something beautiful would happen when you have a son! Did it happen? Yes, it did! And much-much more! But about this later …
