Dear Baby #2,
First of all, we need to find a nickname for you so I don’t have to keep referring to you as Baby #2, it just sounds to statistical referring to a little person growing inside of me.
The news of your arrival was not what my pinterest-loving self imagined. I suspected that you may have been burrowing a new home for yourself for a couple of days, I had been feeling much crampier than usual and had a couple odd back pains that reminded me of your big sister’s pregnancy. For whatever reason, I woke up on a Saturday morning and decided, ‘I’m going to take a pregnancy test, just to see. It will probably be negative, but we’ll see.’ Less than a minute later, ‘pregnant’ shows up on the stick. I literally had a burst of 7 different emotions run through me, ‘I knew it, YEAH!!, uh-oh, is this real?, I need to tell Daddy, how am I going to tell him?
This is where a little better planning and timing on my behalf could have been useful. At the time, Daddy was in another room getting ready to leave in 15 minutes for a Bachelor party in Chicago for the weekend and Lexi and I were going to be heading up north for a couple of days.
Knowing we wouldn’t have any alone time for about a week, I decided I needed to tell him before he left. But how? I felt like I needed to do it in some creative way. I quickly ran downstairs, put some strawberries and blueberries into some tuberware containers and ran up to him with a huge smile on my face and said, ‘What’s your guess?’ And he responds, ‘No Thanks, I don’t want any.’ To which I respond, ‘No, what’s your guess?’ as I have a huge smile on my face and can’t look him in the eyes in fear he will see through me and my little game. Irritated, as I’m interrupting him from selecting which Cubs jersey to wear and he needs to leave shortly, he looks up and says, “I don’t get it.” So I spell it out a little more clearly, ‘What’s your guess, boy or girl?’ He looks down, chuckles a little and says, Girl, it is for sure a girl. He kisses me a couple times and continues on his way of getting ready.
It was the most bizarre response and just awful planning on my behalf of dropping a huge bomb on dada like that before he has to get into a car with one of his closest friends for 6 hours and not be able to say anything. The next week proceeded on and we had less than 10 minutes of time together where we were alone and awake and hadn’t discussed the fact that I was pregnant and our lives were going to dramatically change. It was so strange to not have talked about it at all. It was as if we were watching the news and the reporter said, the world is going to end in 5 weeks, but please continue to operate as normal? What?!?! How the heck do to you hear news like that and then proceed as nothing has changed and not discuss it at all?? Once we did have a little bit of time, we were able to talk and discuss and everything has felt much more normal, but it really was strange to share the news and then literally not be able to talk about it for a week! I take full blame on it as it really was terrible timing and there was no reason I needed to or probably should have taken the test when I did.
And that is how Dada found out about your arrival.
Love, Mama