yesterday we made some phone calls and generally started telling everyone we walked up to that we were going to have a baby. today both ryan and i posted some pictures on our blogs. i thought it was real before, and certainly the ultrasound went a long way to help that, but talking to my extended family and friends about the “big news” brought a whole new level of real to the situation.

i’m also “turning this site on” by linking to it from my main blog so people who weren’t in on it from the beginning can catch up if they want to.

hooray baby!

okay, if you don’t know us all that well, you’re probably thinking “wtf? why does a coffee shop know or care that you’re pregnant.”

well, you see, this is that starbucks i was telling you about earlier. the one we go to 5 or more times a week (every weekday morning, basically, plus a few random trips in the afternoons/weekends), where a very good friend works (who, as i’ve said, really should know, but i haven’t told), with a staff that’s really working the brand image of everyone knowing you and knowing your name and such. and yes, while i know they get paid to serve us *and* makes us feel like friends, they’re still folks i know, who are on the list of people who get to be told, and will probably be very enthusiastic about the whole thing, like real friends who don’t make you tasty beverages for a small fee.

however, and i *knew* this would happen, they figured it out. it wasn’t too hard. you just had to notice that instead of my daily 2-3 shot filled drink i’d started slipping down to a 1 shot (half-caf), or a chai tea and such over the last week or so. i’d gotten by for a while, mixing it up with baristas, but today i was in the mood for my caramel macchiato and i ordered it de-caf.

one does not order a caramel macchiato decaffeinated at 8:30 in the morning from a friend who knows better when the store manager is marking the drink without someone raising an eyebrow or two. they both did, one after the other. fortunately they were both subtle enough about confirming their suspicions that the members of our party that were not in on the secret did not catch on…or at least the party members were polite enough not to say anything.

which is good because many people from our office visit that starbucks, and i’d like to stay in control of the information for as long as possible. fortunately we won’t be back in the office until after the doctor’s appointment, and assuming everything goes well, we’ll be telling folks anyway.

So I’d been feeling under the weather a bit for the last week or so. Nothing too significant, given the amount of stress I’d been experiencing at work. I was kinda tired all the time, my stomach had been a bit queasy. That sort of thing. My period was a week overdue and all, but again, there was stress. Stress has a history of throwing me off by a week and sometimes more. So while I was “thinking about it” I hadn’t been exactly thinking about it. I’ve had too many not-pregnant weeks during the last year where I’d try to convince myself that I was pregnant based on quasi-signs and ended up disappointed.

I mean, I was only a little queasy. It hasn’t prevented me from eating or drinking anything special. And yeah, I felt like my nose was super sensitive to the smells around me, but that happens a bunch. It had been the main reason I thought I was pregnant previous months and was always a red herring. And I was kinda really moody, but the job is stress and I get moody before my period and there was “that one day” but seriously? Work was awful that day. I was kinda tired, even after decent nights’ sleep, but I’m always kinda tired and work has been soooo draining lately.

But it had been a week, which was about the point where I get tired of waiting and checking for my period and the “maybe you are” monsters get too loud so I bought a test.

The tests I use have two lines. Two lines means pregnant. Says so on the stick. One line on the right means not pregnant. So fine. I pee. I set it down. I give in to the urge to watch it tell me I’m not pregnant instead of flipping it over after 3 minutes have passed. And the weirdest thing happened.

One line showed up, but it was the wrong line. And I thought, “well. That can’t be right. Is it on the other side or something? Why would they do that?” and then the other line, the right-side-not-pregnant line showed up and for a moment I thought “That’s better. That’s the line I’m supposed to see. I don’t know what that other line is doing there.”

And then I realized there were two lines.

Two.

There’s a little key that says “pregnant” next to a drawing of the testing window with two lines in it, and that matched my window.

Two.

My eyes flicked back and forth and back again. Two. Two means pregnant. There are two lines. That means pregnant. That means I peed on the stick and I’m pregnant. It’s not an ovulation detector stick telling me I’m ovulating. It’s a pregnancy stick. It means that when there’s two lines, I’m pregnant. Two lines. Pregnant.

Pregnant.