The Big News

Well, I meant to write this post earlier in the week, but it’s been hard to get done all the things I really want to do given that I’m sleeping ten hours a night, that a sudden urge to bake a loaf of banana bread tends to trump whatever other task I’ve set out for a given hour, and that figuring out what to wear to school tomorrow currently involves 45 minutes of rifling through my closet trying to find those pants I used to wear back when I wore my pants much baggier than I have been lately.

That’s right: I’m pregnant. I’m at the happy point where my two months of horrible nausea seems to have abated, and at the awkward point where none of my real pants fit me but it’s a little early to bust out the maternity clothes. I’m excited. My Old Man is excited. Both of us are a bit daunted. O. is really, really excited, and not a bit daunted. “I’m going to teach the baby everything you guys taught me!” he says. And he’s already decided how this new development will impact the family rock band: the baby will play keyboards.

And so the big decision has been made. If you know me and have asked whether we planned this (and a surprising number of people ask that question), you have received one of two answers:

1. “It wasn’t planned, but it wasn’t really unplanned, either.”

2. “Yes, and boy did we get pregnant quickly!”

And we did get pregnant quickly. Like several months before we thought we'd turn the big decision over to fate and have that marvelous six months of unprotected sex. The night this baby was conceived, I can assure you that procreation was the furthest thing from our minds. But it also happens that I’d recently started taking prenatal vitamins (a bottle I’d bought months earlier on sale, thinking we might need them before long) and that somewhere in the vicinity of that night I can recall remarking to my Old Man, “You know, having Christmas at home this year really made me feel open to the possibility of having another kid.”

So it seems that fate has spoken, perhaps in unison with our own unconscious impulses. And we join an established family tradition of not-strictly-planned children. My mother-in-law at the slightest provocation will tell the story of how she and my Old Man’s dad deliberated over whether to have a third baby or to buy a woodstove. They picked the woodstove. “And then a couple months later, we found out we were getting the baby, too!” Luckily for everyone, that baby turned out to be an easy child and a sweet person. I myself was a resoundingly unplanned baby, conceived as I was during September of my mother’s sophomore year of college and outside the bonds of holy matrimony (but not for long!). I also like to think of myself as having been conceived in the backseat of a car in the Steak 'n Shake parking lot, but there is no factual basis for this. (What? You know me and I’ve told you that I indeed was conceived in the parking lot of the Steak 'n Shake? And you accepted it as gospel truth? Well, aren’t you glad you read my blog so you get to learn the real deal?) And, from what I’m told, I ended up being an easy child and something of a sweetheart myself. So hopefully the family tradition will continue, temperament-wise. Our arms and hearts are open, in any case.