Summer Pregnancies and Births

by Chris McGinty of AccordingToWhim.com

Just to warn you, I don’t really have much of a thought here. I was told a story by my mom while I was researching my baseball articles, so I was looking for an angle to write about it. I’m going to deal with two basic ranges of calendar days for the purposes of this article.

The first is simple. If we agree that summer runs from June 21 to September 20 then anyone born between those days is a summer birth. I’m saying this aware that defining summer isn’t exactly that simple.

The second range of days is even less exact, which is me using an online pregnancy calendar to estimate the due dates that conceptions between June 21 and September 20 would generate. The calculations show March 13 to June 12 births could be considered summer pregnancies by estimated conception date. With all that in mind, I’m going to do the incredibly pointless task of telling you about the summerness of those of us here at According To Whim, and our offspring.

I was a summer baby. I was born July 24, which makes me a Leo. Leo on the other hand was born on December 24, but since it was the 70s it makes him a Chris. Ignore those last two sentences. It was a joke for me. I don’t currently know anyone named Leo.

I have five children (and one former stepchild). Two of them have August births, making them summer births. One has a February birth, so no summer connection here. Two of them have March births after March 12, so they can be considered summer pregnancies. My stepchild barely made the cut as a summer baby. When she was one year old she called sunglasses “cool babies,” because her mom and aunt said she was a cool baby when she had the sunglasses on.

Nathan and Chris in their cool babies.

Nathan has a November birthday. He has two children. One child is an August birth, so summer birth. The other child is a November birth, so no summer connection.

Miguel, who is presumably part of the ATW, has a November birthday as well. Miguel has one child and one wife. Both of them are Leos. This is probably why Miguel is the only one in that family who likes me. I’m reasonably sure that we’ve told this story on the audio show, so I’ll tell it here.

Before Miguel moved out on his own, he and his mom had words one night. I’m not sure the full extent of why, but she felt that he shouldn’t hang out with me on that particular night. When he denied her wisdom and advice, she said, “Go to Chris, your god!” I’m just going to point out that I’ve never really felt all that worshiped by Miguel, but it’s nice to have at least one sheep. Miguel’s daughter was born on my 30th birthday. This led to the notion that that must make her my goddaughter, since I’m Miguel’s god. I don’t think that I have any sort of official capacity as a guardian if Miguel and his wife spend too much time on social media and end up in the loony bin, but it’s nice to have a title.

I recently wrote a blog post about hitting my brother in the head with a baseball bat. My brother has an early June birthday, meaning that he may very well have been a summer pregnancy by conception date. While I was writing these baseball themed posts, I called my mom for some fact verification. She told me this story.

The first thing is that my mom remembers the swing differently than I do. I remember swinging too far around and hitting my brother in the head. My mom said that I told her I was practicing checked swings, and when I swung back from the checked swing I popped my brother in the head. Either way, he ended up going to the hospital that night.

My dad was in the Air Force, so my mom took my brother to the base hospital. The doctor in the ER rotation that night was a woman who was an obstetrician. The OB doctor playing ER doctor for the night examined the significant cut on my brother’s head by spreading the skin of the cut open, and told my mom, “Look, no skull fracture.” Who needs an x-ray?

While this should have made my mom happy, it instead made her queasy. Let me explain a quick tidbit about my mom. She doesn’t get queasy like that. Maybe it’s like the analogy where a carpenter will try to fix every problem with a hammer and nail. Maybe as an obstetrician, the doctor was just looking for signs of pregnancy, but she told my mom that she was going to schedule an appointment, certain that my mom was pregnant. My mom went in for the appointment and it was verified that she was pregnant with my sister, who I never hit with a baseball bat. I did steal one of her toys though.

When my sister was 7 years old, I told her I was going to take this toy. She agreed. The toy was Mokey the Fraggle, but after a name change, sex change, and species change he is now Imp the Imp.

As a quick aside, while my mom found out in the summer that she was pregnant with my sister, her birth date suggests that she was conceived in the late spring.

Chris McGinty isn’t an obstetrician, and he doesn’t play one on TV. He did however spell obstetrician correctly on the first try.