Me: "Rach, what does this mean??"
Rach: "JENN. You're pregnant."
Me: "No no no. I can barely see a plus. I don't think it's right."
Rach: "JENN."
I'm pregnant.
I'm freaking pregnant.
At 18 weeks in, this still surprises me.
I've left this blog so very neglected for over two years while trying to reign in a life that was just too full of too many things... I needed to shed parts of my life just to be able to breathe, and our family's personal cyber-space took a backseat. But it's time to bring it back. With our new life here in Texas, both boys in school all day, a better ability to just say no to all the school volunteering and 1/30th the amount of PB&J clients, my time is more leisurely and I miss capturing the moments in our own lives. I want to keep our memories, my thoughts, and the boys' little lives, that are going by much too quickly, safe and savored.
So, back to where we started: I'm pregnant. 22 weeks from now, we will be growing into a family of five (FIVE!!!) with our Chuck, our Hank and our someone new.
Lots of people have asked me if we were trying to get pregnant based off my sheer surprise that I actually am pregnant. People seem very curious about that part of it. I guess the answer to that is, "sort of???" with LOTS of question marks. The juicy details of it for all you weirdos out there who want to know the insider information about my husband and my reproductive decisions is: We were sort of trying...? We wanted a third child. We just couldn't get past the part that having a third child meant having a third baby and that sounded awful and hard and we couldn't really get to the point where we were like "Sure. That sounds awesome. Let's definitively do that thing where we don't ever sleep again while a tiny terrorist screams at us for a year." It just seemed to us that getting pregnant by surprise would be a much better way to go about a third child because once it's done, it's done. It all seemed much less stressful to not have to actually think about all of that change... and all those diapers, and the waking up to pukey cribs, and the 1am and the 3am and the 5am feedings... It would be better if it just happened... Except, it wasn't happening.
So, we sort of tried for this baby. But we were also surprised. Because we only tried that one time. I know, I know, I'm in my thirties and only teenage boys trying to get in their girlfriend's pants think you can't get pregnant from just one time. But seriously!?!? In five years, we only tried the one time because we were big, giant scaredy cats about the whole thing. And by "try" I mean that I had enough wine at our going-away party (to which I had worn a sheer white skirt -- and Mike claims the skirt is the culprit to this whole thing) that I was very much in the mood to mask my devastated emotions about packing up our Virginia home with a less-than-mindful and wine-hazed bout of getting-it-on.
Wine + Impending Drastic Life Changes + Sadness + Sheer Skirts + Mike's Weekend Scruff = Babies
We spent the next 8 days in a 400 square foot hotel room (with a cat!) getting Charlie through his last days of fifth grade. On Wednesday June 17th, we flew 1500 miles south through a tropical storm, unpacked like tasmanian devils, and on the following Monday, had one of our dearest friends over for dinner who was in town on business. Still rather sad to be away from Virginia, I drank it away with some red wine with the guys and went upstairs to put the boys to bed. A tad tipsy, I passed Charlie's mirror while getting them in jammies and thought "oh my god, I think I'm pregnant" as I glimpsed my unusually large bosom.
Pretty sure I didn't want to have wine-laced pee tell me whether or not I was pregnant (I am, after all, a responsible mother who waits for sober pee to predict pregnancy), I went to bed just a little wary that I kinda, sorta, might be pregnant. The next morning, I waited for Mike to go to work and snuck a pregnancy test out of a still-packed box. Expecting the usual, boring negative, I was a bit confused when the very faintest extra line barely appeared. NOT BORING. I'm the kind of girl whose uterus is as consistently late as is the human who carries it around, so I stopped buying expensive pregnancy tests years ago, opting for the cheapest brand to tell me "no" instead. And this particularly cheap test was too inconclusive in my opinion. I needed more tests. I needed every test on the grocery store shelves.
Five tests later, I was fairly convinced, and surprised, that we were having another baby.
I totally understand the question people keep asking about whether this baby was intentional or not. I do have an 11 year old and a 5 year old, neither of whom was made with any sort of conscious effort, so I get it - it's not exactly the "normal" time line for creating siblings. And people are always curious when you don't do things the normal way. But I've never been a fan of doing anything the normal way. The six year age gap is our way and it totally looks purposeful now. Whoo hoo! Legitimacy! And we do really love the 6-ish year spread.
We will never have to pay more than one college tuition at a time.
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