See you in July

So sometime around last October we found out that my wife Amy was pregnant, so we went in for some tests and did the usual stuff. Apparently, you weren't supposed to tell people until the end of the first trimester because something could happen to the baby and that was when the first round of tests were going to be done. We were both excited and wanted to tell everyone but we had to also tell our parents, and then everyone's going to know and it was just going to be hard to handle, at least until we were sure.

A few of our friends knew, if only because they noticed Amy not drinking, but we kept things pretty much under wraps until Chistmas. That was when we were going to tell our parents, then it was a controlled dissemination that would start with our friends. An idea that Amy had was to take the most recent sonogram and frame it, with a speech bubble that said "See you in July", and we'd get both our parents to open them on Christmas day. I thought it was a little weird but people assured me that was totally legit, so we went ahead and did it. For the break, we went to Florida to visit my parents, while the gift for Amy's parents would already have travelled to New Jersey and be sitting under the tree.

I'm not sure about Amy's parents, but I think my parents pretty much gave up any hope of me having children. We were getting older, enjoyed travelling too much, and I generally didn't talk about it at all. So I knew my parents were going to be pretty excited about it. The night before we left the wrapped picture frame on the counter before we went to bed. My parents get up early so I knew they'd have gotten to it before we woke up (or at least before I woke up). Predictably, they opened it way early, took a picture, posted it on Facebook, and it traveled the world of social media all the way to China and Thailand (where my sister and brother-in-law live). So by the time we were up, they'd been chatting it up on the phone and on-line.

Amy's family gets up pretty early, too, and they had started going through their presents. At one point in the morning, they had called and we passed the phone around to everyone so we could wish everyone a merry Christmas, and I think my mom told Amy's mom "congradulations" at one point. What I can gather, was that they unwrapped the present that we left them, saw that it was a picture frame, and put it aside and didn't open the actual box. I think that may have tipped them off, so they had gone back and investigated the picture frame and called back 10 minutes later to share. It was a good time, everyone was so happy and excited.

So now, times are a changin'. Our lives are going to change dramatically soon, and I'm kind of looking forward to it. Change is good and while I may not like some of the lifestyle changes I'm going to need to start making, I'm excited for it nonetheless. We'll have to start thinking about names, and about re-arranging stuff in our tiny apartment, about what we need to start buying and probably a ton of other things I haven't begun to think about. We've purposely not been told if it's a boy or a girl, so we'll have to think of two different names (and no, we're not going to consider Japanese names). But I guess we'll see in July.

Filed under: Travel & Events
1/12/2015