When we decided to start trying for the baby number two, I had a lot of anxiety. Since we never tested positive as pregnant with George until I was in my second trimester, I worried that we would have a similar process. However, this time we wouldn’t have a happenstance meeting with a sonogram to find out about this baby. (You can read more about how we found out about George here.)

We had been trying since August so when on October 1st I started bleeding, I just thought my period had come a week early. Being off birth control means that my period had no rhyme or reason to when it started.

That same day, I was running a 10K with my sister-in-law. I thought, perfect, what a day to start the worst week of the month when I have planned to run 6 miles. I had trained fairly consistently for this run, so I was really mad at my body when starting on mile four I was really lightheaded and had to walk most of the last two miles. I have gotten sick and endured cramps on runs before, but I had never been so lightheaded that I thought I might pass out.

Obviously I pushed through it, and finished the race not really thinking anything of the lightheadedness and just blamed it on it being “that time of the month.”

Then I didn’t bleed for the next two days.

On that Monday, I woke up thinking maybe I should just take a pregnancy test. I can’t really explain it but I just thought maybe this is why my body was weird all weekend.

So I peed on a stick and got ready for my shower.

And there it was. A faint blue line telling me it was positive.

I was in shock because I had prepared myself to never ever see the blue line after our experience with George.

I re-read the instructions to double check that a “faint” line was still positive.

Then I took another test from a different brand just to make sure.

Same result.

I am pregnant.

(I took another one a few days later before I met with my doctor, just to make sure too. There were definitely no faint lines that time!)

I hid the tests so Tom wouldn’t stumble on them since he was off that day. I knew I had to wait until after work to tell him.

It was all I could do to be productive that day. I was a nervous wreck with this secret in my belly.

Luckily, Tom had George that day, so I could run to the store to pick up a card for Tom.

In my head I always envisioned doing something elaborate to tell him, but I was just ready to tell him and there wasn’t time to plan something out. So he just got a “Congrats” card with two people high-fiving, which fit us perfectly anyway.

Tom cried when I told him, and then he proceeded to beg to tell everyone we know.

Since I had no idea how far along I was, I panicked and freaked out about telling anyone before we had anything confirmed.

We found out about George when we were 9 weeks pregnant and told the world when we were 11 weeks. So this was a huge difference for us.

I immediately started thinking about the worst case scenario, and wanted to keep this a secret until our second trimester.

Then I remembered an article that I read a while back that talked about why we as women have this idea that we have to keep this wonderful thing a secret and basically isolate ourselves until we are 12/13 weeks pregnant. There shouldn’t be this stigma that we can’t tell people this news that we are pregnant on the off-chance that something were to go wrong.  Here is the article that does a much better job articulating my thoughts. I don’t want to have to pretend this isn’t happening.

Plus trying to have my husband keep a secret for any amount of time is a struggle and an insane request.

But I still wanted to wait a little bit before we shared, so we compromised that we would share as soon as we saw the baby on a sonogram to confirm that everything was moving as it should. (And he could tell our Parents as Teacher facilitator who was coming over that same night.)

Because of some complications (blood clot and severe bleeding), we had an emergency visit where we were able to see the baby and it’s little heart beating at 6 weeks. I then saw it again with a specialist the next week. Everything was confirmed to be looking good and normal even with my history of issues. And here we are a week later, 8 weeks pregnant.

While this story is definitely not as dramatic as George’s story, nor did it take as long to get pregnant, we are over the moon excited about this transition in our family.

Up Next:  How we told our family!