How We Announced It

I was starting to get sick and having symptoms, so I knew the kids would start getting suspicious.  T and I decided it was time to announce it.  On Monday night, we had a family home evening lesson about family, and then for the activity, I passed out brown sacks with a note, a pair of baby socks, a pink sucker and blue sucker (these were all hints if they did not understand the note). 

I passed out the bags to each of the kids, and I told the girls to not say a word as they read it, because this was K’s first time, we wanted him to read it out loud.  M read hers the fastest and said, “I know what this means, I’m not dumb.”  J read and whispered, “Are we having a baby?”  and I got after her, because I wanted K to read his before it was really talked about.  Silly girl never listens (he he).  C was laughing, but I think it was at J.  Then K read the following:

Sugar and spice and everything nice or snips and snails and puppy dog tails is coming to our family September 16, 2013.  Congratulations big brother!!!  (The girls of course said big sister).

We had to talk to him about this because he was not sure.  He first said “I’m going to be 8!”  We told him that was true, but was he a big brother?  He said “We are having a baby!!”  He was so excited he almost cried.  He hugged me, he hugged his dad said thank you, thank you.  I have never had a child act so excited, granted he is older than they were. 

He is so thoughtful and asks about the baby all the time.  It will be a long 7-8 months for him. 

Then because our kids cannot keep secrets.  They were facebooking and texting friends immediately, I hurried and sent out a mass text with the following picture to everyone.

             M                     J                     C                      K            ?

The only one we had to personally call was my daddy, because he does not receive texts.  I thought my phone was going to explode with all the texts and calls, etc. 

All the kids are excited.  They started picking out names, they want to buy clothes.  They cannot wait to find out what we are having.   If I did not have morning sickness, I may have waited longer to announce because this is going to take forever for them, but crazy as it seems, I am already showing, so I guess either way I would not have been able to keep it a secret long.

Patience

The one virtue that I am severely lacking in.  I wanted to have all my kids three years apart that was a perfect age for me.  I had them potty trained and able to do things by themselves so when another baby came along I did not feel quite as overwhelmed.  So as planned in my mind when K was the age to start trying, I was dumbfounded that I was not pregnant the next month like I was with all the others. I did not become concerned for a year or so and learned of something called secondary infertility.  Just because you have had children in the past does not mean you cannot become infertile.

We had four beautiful children, so I never felt the need to do anything medical to have any more.  I did have the feeling that I was not done, but then when one year turned into two and then three, I figured it was my own selfish need to want another little baby to hold and nurture and love because my baby was growing up and not needing me as much as before. 

I tried harder in my callings thinking that if I did better there, the Lord would bless us with a baby.  I was happy for friends and family who announced their  pregnancies but just a little sad because I was broken. I prayed if it was his will and then tried to be happy with the fact that He had other plans for me.  Big changes came in our life and so we felt it was probably better if we postpone, so for a year baby was put on a back burner, but T and I would go through baby hunger phases, and we would see little babies and remember the fun and the joy they are. 

When I was released from the young women’s presidency, I asked one last time if we could be blessed with a baby. We had mentally gotten to a spot where we were okay with just being a family of 6.  We love our little family, and we had started making some different plans and setting goals for our future. Plus I am closer to 40, and I swore that I would not be 40 and having a child because I am a product of older parents and I love my life and my parents; I just did not want to be that age and having babies.  At Christmas, it was announced that we would be taking a trip in 2013, so we discussed that we needed to take precautions so that we could make that trip.  Well, we made it through December, January greeted us with the flu for the kids and “the flu” for me, which I thought I got from the kids. 

I had some other symptoms that I attributed to some other things going on in my life, but being pregnant was not one of them until one day, I decided why not use the pregnancy test that was in our food storage.  (It was left over from a previous time we thought I might be…..no we do not put tests in our food storage).  When that test came back positive, I was stunned and rationalized that the test was probably expired because it was from a few years ago.  So I went to the store, and purchased a box that had three tests. (The one with three was cheaper than the ones with just one….go figure.) 

I was so unbelieving that I took all three of them and still was not ready to believe it.  There is one person I have a hard time keeping any secret from and that is my honey, so I told him right away and he was in disbelief as well.   There went all the plans that we had just made for 2013 and the goals we had set will now need to be tweaked a bit. 

This baby is due on his/her brother’s birthday.  We know this baby was meant to come at this time and will be a huge blessing to our family.  Now that we are not quite as shell shocked, we are excited!!!