How Did You Share the News You Were a Mom-to-Be?
By Kristine
One of the favorite parts about my pregnancies was dreaming up creative ways to tell other people our big news.
The first time I was pregnant, I had this brilliant idea of posting a message to my husband on the Jumbotron at an upcoming St. Louis Blues hockey game. I was extremely excited and thought I was terribly clever. But as my husband came upstairs into the kitchen a week before the game, he caught me leaning over the sink, retching. The jig was up.
Of course, later he told me he had assumed I had food poisoning or the flu – it never occurred to him that I had morning sickness (it was night time, thought his male brain).
Telling my parents, however, went perfectly as planned. For the previous Christmas, I had given them a photo family tree from Red Envelope – the kind that contains a miniature picture frame for each person in the family. The tree came with an extra frame, so I secretly kept it. When Christmas rolled around again the following year, I placed a picture of baby footprints inside the frame & wrapped it up as a gift. As soon as my mom opened it, her eyes flashed to me and whispered “Are you pregnant?” Within seconds everyone was jumping up, hugging and crying.
The second time I was pregnant, our son whispered the news into my mother’s ear on Mother’s Day. Except this time, she already knew. My husband had unknowingly patted my tummy the last time my family had been all together. Mothers do not miss these types of subtle clues.
Sharing the news with friends the second time was a bit trickier, largely due to Facebook. We wanted to tell our families first, then wait until I was about 5 months along to tell friends & co-workers. So I did what I had to do, I “unfriended” every single one of my family members to prevent them from spilling the beans on my Facebook “wall.” (Sorry!)
Sharing the news at work was a lot of fun. My mom and I designed the little pink and blue bootie sugar cookies you see above. I placed them in a basket, then went cube-to-cube, asking my colleagues if they wanted a pink or blue cookie (I worked in a very small office at the time).
Hilariously, most of the single men took a cookie, said “thank you” and that was that. No other response. They didn’t realize I was pregnant until several weeks later.
How did you share the big news?
-----------------------
Kristine is a journalist-turned-Web designer. Together with her sons, they are learning more about dinosaurs than she humanly thought possible. Did you know all Stegosaurs had 17 plates on their backs?
1 comment:
The cookies were adorable.
With our first, we had tried for seven years to get pregnant and our last stop was IVF (invitro infertilization). After the grueling process, we waited on pins and needles to find out if it had worked or not. I went in for a blood test, and went home to wait for the call. We were so blessed in that my in-laws, who had driven 3 hours to be with us during the many procedures before that day also came back to be with us to wait for the news.
When the nurse called, I remember not even wanting to answer the phone. I went upstairs to talk to her, and my husband came with me while my in-laws waited downstairs.
She said "congratulations, you are pregnant!" I yelled "YAY!" and my husband immediately started to cry. There were many tears of joy that day, and while we would have normally waited to tell others, many people knew of our struggles and our journey anyway and were anxiously awaiting our test results, too.
Post a Comment