How to Conceive a Girl

While skeptics claim that we can't truly influence the sex of our baby, there's certainly a lot of interesting (and sometimes humorous) theories about how you can make sure it's a girl.

Some parents swear that they conceived a baby girl by following certain rituals, using various "positions" in the bedroom, or even having carefully planned romantic encounters as opposed to "impulsive" intercourse. Although medical doctors largely disregard these techniques as old wives' tales, many gender-picking believers vehemently disagree.

If you're absolutely determined to have a baby girl, you may want try some of these tricks that some parents, astrologers, and even a few doctors recommend.

This famous gender-predicting calendar was handed around among women well before its ubiquitous appearance on the Internet—on paper gone fuzzy with multiple photocopyings. Purportedly dating back to China 700 years ago, it has been adapted for easy use with the non-lunar, or Gregorian calendar (the kind probably hanging over your desk). Based on the mystical calendar, a baby's sex is determined by the mother's age and the month in which she conceives. For example, if you are 25 years old and want to have a girl, you should try to conceive in January, April, May, or July, according to the Chinese birth calendar.

Lunar calendar adherents say the chart is 99 percent accurate. (Disclosure: It correctly predicted the gender of my little girl.) You can use BabyZone's interactive gender predictor, which is based on the Chinese lunar birth calendar, to find the months it predicts you can conceive a girl.