Week 12: Sharing our secret

The 12-week mark is kind of a magical time in pregnancy. I’m nearing the end of my first trimester. Those sick feelings of nausea are starting to subside and—dare I say it—my energy level is starting to feel closer to a real person. Twelve weeks is also the time when many people decide to share their good news, and Dave and I are no different. At 12 weeks, we were ready to let the rest of the world (outside of this blog) in on our precious little secret.
There are so many possible ways to announce a pregnancy, and most of them involve social media. One Google or Pinterest search will give you enough ways to make your burgeoning bump known that you’ll feel like you need eight more pregnancies in order to use all of the cute ideas. You have to take a picture-perfect photo, post it on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and then for good measure, maybe you should create a clever hashtag as well. It’s kind of a lot of pressure for such a little peanut.
I did the requisite searches with our first pregnancy back in 2014, but we decided not to recreate anything we saw. We made our own that fit our personalities and our Husker football fan-ness.   Because our first little bundle was due to arrive in mid-August, Dave and I hung our Husker jerseys on either side of a mini jersey bodysuit. The caption: “Arriving in time for kickoff.” (Adorable, right?) We had our posting day planned weeks in advance. We would make our announcement on Valentine’s Day; make the day of love a little bit lovelier. It was a hit! We received a multitude of likes and comments (what seems to be the barometer for a successful announcement).
For our newest addition, we decided weeks ago we would nickname him or her “Pumpkin,” at least for now. I thought the name worked well for either a boy or a girl. Dave, however, thought a boy would like a more masculine name. Because he is convinced this baby is a boy, he’s been calling it “Pumpkin Badass.” Isn’t that sweet?

Either way, we were planning to announce the pregnancy in the fall (late September), so using pumpkins in the announcement seemed like a perfect fit. Our social media announcement featured our daughter in a pumpkin dress with a small pumpkin next to her. The text read: “Adding another little pumpkin to our patch.” For added cuteness, we included a photo of Olivia in her Big Sister outfit and another of a group of four pumpkins (two big, one small, and one tiny). After many likes and comments, I’d say it was a rousing social media success!

As a teacher, I love announcing my pregnancies with doughnuts (see my Week 10 post for more details on why they’re are so near and dear to my heart), so I brought glazed doughnuts with pink and blue napkins to school last Friday. While my students knew right away what blue and pink represented, it took quite a while for them to figure out why I brought them. Guesses ranged from, “Your sister just had a baby!” (she did) to “Olivia was really a twin!” (she wasn’t).
Finally, I held up my school walk-a-thon shirt. It was the day of our fundraiser, and I added a bit extra to my shirt. On the stomach, I’d written the words: “The TINIEST Knight … Marching in Baby Steps.” One of the students (finally!) guessed, “You’re having another baby!” Their reactions were priceless! There were amazed looks, squeals of delight, and a very flattering, “Your stomach doesn’t look big enough to have a baby in there!” comment. I sent the picture out to the staff, and our news was officially shared.
It is such a relief, if you’ve been keeping your pregnancy a secret, to finally let people in on your exciting news. While secrets can be fun, this secret was just too good to be kept. I was happy to let it out and let the world in … the Phillips family of three is no more, we’re about to be a family of four!