If you have read my blog recently, you may have seen my post the other day where I announced my pregnancy. It is hard to believe that my husband and I are expecting our first baby, let alone that we are already 22 weeks gone. It is a very surreal feeling for somebody who has struggled with fertility. I honestly don’t think that I have ever been happier and for that reason I want to share a little more with you guys.
Today, I want to chat to you guys about how we told our family and friends the news.
I guess the thing to start with is, even though we longed to see two red lines on a test, we hadn’t thought twice about how we would tell our loved ones. The main reason for that is because we didn’t want to get ahead of ourselves and build up the moment in our minds, only for us to never reach that moment.
Just as we had made peace with the fact that we weren’t going to have children, so did our family and friends. When we first came off contraception and nothing happened naturally, we spoke openly to the main people in our life. Mainly so that we had people to lean on. But also, so we could manage their expectations.
Even though our family don’t expect us to have children and they have certainly never put pressure on us, there is no denying that our parents were born to be grandparents. We could both imagine our parents as granny and grandad, and it was heart-breaking that we may never be able to do that for them. To be honest, when we first saw the positive pregnancy test, one of the first things that we both talked about was telling people.
But it was important to us that we didn’t only enter the safe zone at the 12-week stage, I wanted to get well into the middle of my pregnancy. The reason for that was simply because I was scared that the rug was going to be pulled from under me and something would happen. If that was to be the case, I didn’t want to build our families hopes up after not believing that it would ever happen.
So, once we reached the 20 week mark we decided that it was time to let our friends and family know. But we just didn’t know how to go about it. The only thing that we did know was that it was getting incredibly more difficult to hide my ever-growing bump. In the end, that was what we decided to go with…
One by one, we visited our close family. But instead of draping myself in chunky knitwear and countless layers like I had been doing, I put on a midi dress that was form fitting and showed the roundness of my bump. We wanted to see their reaction when it dawned on them what was happening, and those memories will honestly stay with me for as long as I live. We did contemplate recording their reactions, but we thought it would give things away quicker if we were to walk in with an iPhone in their face.
Once our immediate family knew, we decided to share the news with other family members and friends with a text. A picture to be precise. I shared with them the picture from my announcement post of me trying to fit into my jeans with my bump. I did nothing more than quickly work down my recently contacted people on WhatsApp and I sent it to them all. My husband did the same with his friends. We then set our phones down and had a cup of tea while we watched our phones blow up from everybody getting back to us!
After everybody we knew had heard or acknowledged the news, we put the news out on our social media channels.
It was probably the happiest day of my life getting to tell people the amazing news that we are expecting. The outpouring of love is like nothing I have ever experienced before. It just makes me more excited for the next stages in my pregnancy and then getting to meet our little angel in a few months.
