Early on, we always agreed that the one thing we would do when (or if) we found out to be pregnant was to wait until the 3 month safety zone before we would announce to anyone. We couldn’t bare the thought of announcing something great and everyone being over the moon, only to have to re-announce to a lot of people that something tragic had happened.
Of course, we would probably have told our nearest and dearest if the worst had happened if we hadn’t got to the 3 months as I feel they’d deserve to know, but during the twelve week wait we wanted to keep quiet so that we could be left alone when it came to brewing a baby without any questions.

I had to tell my work colleagues pretty much straight away as I have a very active job, meaning as soon as someone falls pregnant they have to become office-bound. I didn’t want to become office bound to be honest, as I enjoy being out and about, but there was no way I was going to take any risks. As soon as I told people at work, it spread like wild fire and I had to keep reminding people not to mention anything on Facebook which actually turned out to be ok as people were surprisingly respectful of that wish considering people were really happy for us and wanted to share the news.

Anyway, the weeks went by and we had several sticky situations, for example, I usually eat my steaks medium rare; so when I went round to my sister and boyfriends house for dinner one night with S, my sister was surprised when I asked for a well done steak. Thankfully, I boshed her looks away by saying that it’s easier just to go along with S (who liked well done steaks) to make cooking easier for the boyfriend who was cooking his first steak. Score.

Other sticky instances have include being subtly slapped by S to uncross my legs (I can do this and actually enjoy it now I lost a ton of weight on my legs!), which was covered up by S saying I’ve been moaning about veins – lie – when she was caught doing it. I’ve also been questioned about asking for non-alcoholic drinks at pubs when we’ve been with friends (thankfully, I still have the “driving” card), and finally the fact that I went back into baggy clothing.

A lot of the time, people were afraid to ask as they understood that it’s not very polite to ask a couple who have been TTC for a while whether they are pregnant, but at the same time I understand the signs they see before them.

Anyway, the day finally came when we could announce. We had had a few “trial runs” or “red herrings” between S and I over the years where we would arrange to see everyone at my mums house for a nice catch up – we usually planned this around a time we came back from a holiday, for example, so we could hand out gifts. During these occasions, I would get asked, how “everything” was going, and I would answer “same ol’ same ol” and the conversation was dropped. Perfect. I know deep down that every time I had arranged these get togethers that my mum and sister would be sat at the edge of their seats waiting for THE announcement, but when it didn’t come they soon calmed down. I knew what they were thinking.

So when they day finally came, we had arranged that we would visit on the pretence of doing some gardening for mum and as we hadn’t seen the rest of the family for a while, it would be nice to see everyone. I would be bringing cake (an announcement cake in my head) which wasn’t an odd thing to do.

We bought a plain cake from our local supermarket that you could print things like photos onto and decided to write our message on that so than rather than going “Guess what” we would let someone else open the lid to the cake and get a huge surprise… and what a surprise it was.

There were tears and genuine sobbing, as well as a lot of happy screaming. It was the best reaction we could have asked for. Plus, we got to eat cake! What topped it off was that we were also able to present the 12 week scan picture – which meant that we had passed the danger zone and they were free to ask questions and that they did – hell, they had 3 months to catch up on!

K