I was really thrilled to find out about the book, It's a Boy because it's a topic I had been wondering about. Girls are familiar to me, I mainly babysat for girls, I had 2 sisters, and their world is familiar to me as I was a girl! I'm a lot less confident about raising boys. I was glad I had a girl first. While I have nothing against having sons, I wanted my girl to be the firstborn. And I'm still hoping for at least one more. Girl clothes are so much cuter, just looking at them alone makes me want another girl baby. When I was pregnant I talked to my friend Diane who had a baby girl about a year before I did. We talked about how scary the world is now that you are a parent, and specifically with a girl-you worry about her dealing with men(eventually). Although boys get their hearts broken too, women just seem to get the worse end of the deal more often, and in crueler ways. We were all too aware of how men treat women and never wanted our daughters to have to go through that.

So now I wonder how to reconcile the way I think of most men with the little boys I have to raise. Sure they're all adorable now, but one day they'll be men. I can try my hardest to make them into the kind of man I would have wanted-but kids aren't just little balls of clay that you can mold. It just doesn't work that way.

By the way, in an interview the author/editor said that after doing a boy book and a girl book, the biggest difference between raisings boys and girls seemed to be that the relationship between mother/daughter seems to be more intense. That sounds about right to me.