Two Secrets

I've never been a good secret keeper.  In fact, I'm pretty damn awful at it.

But since March 6, I've been keeping a really big secret.  

On the evening of March 6, my husband and I were up late packing for a road trip to Cincinnati to visit my best friend.  We were a bit tipsy - we always crack open a bottle of wine before a trip, to make the packing a bit more entertaining.  I was in the bathroom packing up my toiletries, when I glanced under the sink and saw a package of pregnancy tests.  I honestly don't know WHAT enticed me to take one.  Sheer curiosity?  Tipsy-ness?  The fact that I was sure to be tipsy during my weekend away?  

I don't know, because we certainly weren't planning anything pregnancy related that month.  But for some reason, I took it.  And this happened:

A faint line = a line.  

Yes, people, I took a pregnancy test drunk.  And it came up positive.  

I ran out of the bathroom and blurted out the news to my husband who thought I was kidding.  We laughed.  Because we were drunk.  Then we went to bed and fell asleep easily.  Because we were drunk.  

I woke up around 2am, sober.  

Thoughts swirled.  Due dates were calculated.  I mentally went through the next nine months and thought of all the things I would be fat and sober for.  I thought about our house and how we would reconfigure the furniture.  I thought about college funds and sibling age differences and minivans.

I got stressed, but I also got excited.  We weren't preventing this, per se.  This was right.  This was going to stick.  Not like last time.  I just knew it.  

I managed to get a few hours of sleep.  When we woke up the next morning, we went about our day as normal.  We had our weekend in Cincinnati and returned and life went on.  Because that's what life does.   

And for the next two months, I carried this secret with me.  And that secret started making its presence known - through nausea, through bloating, through fatigue, through OH MY GOD HOW ON EARTH DID I FORGET HOW MUCH THE FIRST TRIMESTER SUCKS?  If you have a lot of time on your hands, and are so inclined, go back and read all of my posts since March 6th and read them with the undertone of I FEEL LIKE CRAP AND I LOOK LIKE I'M SIX MONTHS PREGNANT ALREADY AND MY HEMORRHOIDS ARE BACK.  

It was rough at points.

But I am overjoyed.  

This will be my last pregnancy.  It will.  So instead of wallowing in my nauseated misery, I am trying to take it all in.  Commit it to memory.  Imprint it so that years from now, when I look at my three children and marvel at the fact that they were all at one time actually inside of me, I can still hang on to this feeling.  Even if it is an exhausted, nauseous one.

Because after all, this whole thing is pretty miraculous.

On April 2, we saw this:   

On April 29, we saw this:

And on April 30 at 10:15 am, two days before I officially exited the first trimester, I got the call from the genetic counselor saying that we got the results back from our Verifi test (this is a new test, and science is freaking amazing).  We got great news - the baby is healthy.  And she also was able to tell us...

The gender.  

That's my second secret.  

Stay tuned.