It started, as migrations often do, with a late night flutter in the tummy—and a seemingly urgent need for an early pregnancy test. But five years ago our neighborhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, had yet to be set upon by 24-hour drugstores. And so my wife, Cathy, set out on an impromptu bodega crawl, ducking into one little store after another, searching for a thin strip of paper that promised to turn pink if our lives were about to change forever.

She came up empty-handed at the first two stores. But at the third, a blue-eyed Central American man looked up from behind the counter and studied Cathy’s eyes. "We no have a test," he said. "But you for sure pregnant. You gonna have a boy."

"Holy s—!" was my rather predictable first thought, after the clerk’s predictions were confirmed by an expensive series of doctors’ visits. My second was: "We’ve got to get out of here."