i decided to create a diary of sorts, to write in throughout the pregnancy and birth of my first child, if not for myself, then for my kid to read about the hell he or she put his or her mother through. for starters, i want to say that i can't wait for the day we'll be able to tell what the sex is. until then, i will call the baby she, because i have a feeling it's a girl (maybe this is linked to the fact that i desperately want a girl). if we find out the baby is a boy, then i will, of course, change my pronoun usage to male. and, of course, i will be just as thrilled to have a little boy as i would a girl.
my husband and i got pregnant within a week of getting married, which makes me 14 weeks along. let me first say that the most confusing thing was figuring out how far along i am -- which doesn't make sense, since it's really just an estimation anyway. what i finally figured out is that the first day of your last period is the first day of your first week of pregnancy (what? you say. but there's no baby in there! pregnant?!). the second week is the week you ovulate, make a little hanky panky, and the beautiful miracle of baby making begins. the third week -- well, i don't really know what happens the third week, but the forth week is that glorious week you miss your period and run to the nearest drugstore to buy the most expensive multi-pack of home pregnancy tests (just in case the cheap ones really don't work as well as the box says they will, and in case the first test you take says you are, in fact, pregnant, so you can take the other three it comes with. just in case.)
in my case, i trusted the cheap tests (i didn't really believe i was pregnant) and bought the two pack. both came back with two little lines, or happy face, or whatever, and i couldn't find anything to say except "oh my gosh. oh my gosh! oh my gosh? oh my gosh! oh my gosh." both of us were thrilled even though we had made a plan not to have children for four or five years, and followed up this plan by not using any form of birth control whatsoever.
now, every book about pregnancy i have picked up had a chapter on sharing the news, but in our case, we couldn't keep our mouths shut and everyone on earth knew within two days that we were pregnant. i was leaning more towards keeping the news hush hush for a couple months, only telling our mothers (i had to tell my mom -- i was expecting to be like every other pregnant woman and hugging the toilet in a few days, and didn't want to deal with this alone. and my husband just had to tell his mom if my mom knew.) but the next night we told some friends of ours who are health nuts and have had all three of their children at home, which is what we are planning on doing, so we needed to know what the next step was.
after we sent an email to our mothers with a photograph of the positive pregnancy test and talked to them on the phone, my husband took it upon himself during the next couple days to call all of his family and tell them, too. now, let me explain that my husband is hispanic (as am i, but i am a halfsican, meaning half mexican, half white. and all my hispanic family thinks they're white, anyhow.) and in the hispanic community, families are very close and very important. so when i say he called his family, i don't just mean his grandparents, his dad, and his step-sisters. i mean all 12 of his aunts and uncles, his cousins, his second cousins, his aunt's and uncles siblings -- anyone related by blood or through marriage over the age of 18 who owns a phone. then he wanted to tell the staff at church, which he did the following days -- without me! i quickly let him know that i wanted to be the star of the show and had to see the reaction on people's faces too, and he learned to let me in on the news sharing (although, it was a little late, seeing as how now half the church knew.)
needless to say, sharing the news was great fun, but it all happened so quickly, and i wish i'd had a video camera to record some of the reactions we got. afterall, we'd only been married for 3 short weeks when we found out i was "4 weeks along." (not!) and i've also learned through the process that the women who complain that pregnancy is really ten months instead of nine (40 weeks = 10 months, hello!) have no reason to complain: you don't even know you're pregnant for the first whole month of pregnancy! which to me, is absolutely no reason to complain. i revell in that blissful ignorance.
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