Finding out

No sooner than I was off the phone with my grandmother on Sunday, Aug. 14, did my wife come into our upstairs room and tell me she thought she was pregnant. Wow.

She had done a home test while I was on the phone and I didn’t even know it. I looked at the nifty little plastic device that was no larger than a toothbrush. There was a plus in one window and a minus in another. Anyone who has used a home test knows what this means. The plus means she was pregnant and the minus meant the test was valid. She was pregnant. Wow.

My wife was stunned. She didn’t think it would happen so quickly. We were only trying for a couple of months, and we weren’t together really at the right times. We were too exhausted with work and her finishing her master’s degree at first. Then a couple of trips separated us.

While in North Carolina, she found a place she wanted to live and, yes, raise a family, even though she didn’t know then that she was in a family way. She liked the place so much that she, her dad and I drove to Raleigh the very next weekend to look at the place. We made the roundtrip in two days, leaving on Friday afternoon and coming back on Sunday afternoon. It was after the 12-hour journey, which began in a North Raleigh Hilton at 4 a.m., that she took the test and discovered she might be pregnant.

She was freaked out after I read the test. As I played songs saved on our computer with either sentimental or silly meanings, she reread the directions to make sure everything was done right. There was one caveat, it was only 86 percent effective because of the timing of the test. Aha! There might be a chance it was wrong. Although this wasn’t her true hope, she did vocalize it. We decided a blood test would do the trick. She made arrangements with her doctor and three days later we knew for sure she was pregnant. That’s the day I started this blog.

On the days in between the home test and the blood test, I was flooded with all kinds of thoughts about being a dad, since I didn’t really have one to learn from, and about what it would be like to have a baby around. I almost wanted to skip the pregnancy and have the baby right away. Of course that would mean skipping the fun of being pregnant. So, I settled on acting like Christmas is scheduled for April next year, and that the best gift of all was going to be delivered.

But as excited as we were, we couldn’t tell anyone. We didn’t want to jinx it before the blood test, but we were bursting to tell both sets of parents, or future grandparents. We had some creative ideas in mind and we finalized them. More on that later.

For now, we are just enjoying the idea of being “with child.”