So, We’re Pregnant

About 7:00am on Sat­ur­day morn­ing (Nov. 16th), Angela ran into the bed­room, threw off the cov­ers, and yanked me by the arm.

“Come here. You need to see this.”

Of all the thoughts run­ning through my head (not that many, since I was still most­ly asleep), none of them had any­thing to do with fam­i­ly. I nat­u­ral­ly thought some­thing was wrong or that she was angry with me (both hap­pen from time to time). Most­ly I just fig­ured the dogs were doing some­thing she want­ed me to see since that hap­pens a lot. How­ev­er, when she turned back around to me stand­ing at the sink hold­ing a lit­tle white plas­tic stick I was kind of shocked.

First Pregnancy Test

“Does that look like a plus sign to you?”

“Uh, yeah. Yeah, it real­ly does.”

“Okay. Lis­ten to this: ‘It does not mat­ter if the plus sign is light or dark. A plus sign means you are preg­nant.’ Hon­ey, I think we’re pregnant.”

“Oh! Well, okay then. We’re preg­nant. Wow, that did­n’t take long.”

I’ll spare you all the details, but here’s why I said that: we had sex with­out using con­tra­cep­tives twice. The hor­ror sto­ries you heard about get­ting preg­nant if you don’t use ‘pro­tec­tion’? The ones which you scoffed at say­ing it was so unlike­ly to hap­pen the first time or two that you need­n’t wor­ry? You were wrong, they were right. Appar­ent­ly we rolled some pret­ty amaz­ing dice on this one. Shoot me for say­ing so, but I so wished we’d put our pants on an dri­ven up to Atlantic city that morn­ing. Hey, we could have paid for a lot of dia­pers and pri­vate school. That’s all I’m saying…

Short­ly there­after, Angela noticed that the preg­nan­cy test she used had expired six months ago. She’d done some short research dur­ing phar­ma­cy school on var­i­ous preg­nan­cy tests and their effi­ca­cy but she was­n’t sure about how reli­able they were after their expi­ra­tion date. We decid­ed we’d try again the next day. That day was spent over in Char­lottesville with Meg and Travis. We went to a win­ery, out to lunch, on a short day-hike, and then out to din­ner. I know it had to suck for Angela to watch me sam­ple wines at the win­ery under the white lie that she had an upset stom­ach, so I don’t plan to do that to her in the future. We had sched­uled the win­ery vis­it some­time ear­li­er and did­n’t want to change plans at the risk of rais­ing sus­pi­cion. On the dri­ve home, we stopped off at the local 24 hour, chain phar­ma­cy to pick up anoth­er preg­nan­cy test.

The direc­tions said it could be used any time of day (most say morn­ing only) and might take up to three min­utes to pro­vide a result. Well, it turns out Angela is so preg­nant it took about thir­ty sec­onds to read “Preg­nant!” So, with­out any real doubt:

We’re hav­ing a baby!

Uh Huh

Now, why all the screwed up time­line? Why am I writ­ing about some­thing just after it hap­pened and you did­n’t hear about it until some­time lat­er? Well, we’re only about a month preg­nant (or less) at this point. Right now, there’s some­thing small­er than a raisin in Ange­la’s low­er bel­ly and hav­ing nev­er gone through this before, we sim­ply don’t know what’s going to hap­pen to her body and with the preg­nan­cy. We’re hold­ing off on the news with pret­ty much every­one until Angela sees her doc­tor and has a check­up. Until then, we’re read­ing every book imag­in­able and try­ing to plan for some­thing we real­ly have lit­tle idea what to do for. Oth­er­wise, we’re real­ly excit­ed. Also, to tell the truth, I feel incred­i­bly guilty for not telling every­one. I want to so bad­ly but I also don’t want to try and assume too much.

By Jason Coleman

Structural engineer and technical content manager Bentley Systems by day. Geeky father and husband all the rest of time.

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