It's a boy! It's a girl! It's ... Mystery Baby!

If all goes according to plan, It will be arriving about this time next month. “It” is my wife’s and my nickname for the bundle of joy our son Ben and daughter-in-law Heidi are expecting – our first grandchild. 

The first thing supermarket cashiers and postal clerks and toll booth collectors ask when I tell them I’m going to be a grandpa is, “What is it – a boy or girl?”

I tell them the truth: I dunno. Everyone in both families and all of Ben and Heidi’s friends know but us. We don’t want to know.

So far, so good – nobody has spilled the beans and it surely hasn’t been easy for them to keep a lid on It. Heidi, for instance, recently emailed that we’re being invited to a baby shower. The other guests are getting invitations that are gender-specific. Ours is going to be like Switzerland – neutral. And we’re not attending because the gifts would reveal something we don’t want to know quite yet. Heidi's aunt, my Facebook friend, posted the other day that she has been shopping for a "special" baby who will be arriving in a month. Thanks, Denise, for remembering we want to stay in the dark until the moment we get the call that It is here.

We think we know what It will be. We even think we know what they are going to name It but we haven’t discussed that with the parents-to-be for obvious reasons. On the other hand, we’ve been wrong before. We were confident we knew what son Stuart, whom we had spent nine months imagining as daughter Catherine, was going to be right up to the second he was delivered. We could have found out in advance but chose not to. We have always been glad we didn’t.

One thing about growing older is that nothing truly surprises you any more. By the time you're old enough to be a grandparent you’ve pretty much seen it all.

But It will be a surprise.

And whatever It turns out to be will be exactly we wanted all along.