The Story of How We Found Out

I had been feeling a little bit “off” for a couple of weeks. But honestly, neither one of us wanted to put the cart before the horse, so we were trying not to read too much into it. But then there was the one Sunday when I suddenly was hit with all sorts of cramping, and I literally spent the day in bed with a heating pad and a cup of tea. And then there was the day that I was sitting on the sofa doing some writing while Ryan was in the kitchen doing the dishes. He bent over to put a few things into the dishwasher, and when he stood back up, he no longer saw me sitting at the sofa. As the story goes, he walked over to find me completely asleep. Yes, in those few seconds I just laid myself down and completely fell into a deep sleep. And that’s really when we both felt like something must be going on. Or so we hoped.

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We drove to Target on June the 9th to pick up a pregnancy test. And immediately we faced our first challenge as hopefully soon to be parents, what test to get. We both felt riddled with panic over what would be the absolute best and most accurate test to take. We stood in the pregnancy test aisle for a good 20 minutes reading the boxes, and scanning through Google search results, with our conversation circling between things like “but will this test have the most accurate read. . .”  or “. . .are you sure that we will be able to see the lines clearly?”

After driving home, we sat down (of course only after washing our hands to the tune of Happy Birthday, changing out of our “outside” clothes, and thoroughly wiping down the test box), and we were ready.  This was the moment.  “Okay, let’s read the instructions,” I suggested.  Not like I thought that it probably wasn’t completely self explanatory or straight forward. But you know, better safe than sorry. And there it was, “best taken first thing in the morning. . .”

Both of our hearts sank.  We wanted this so incredibly bad that we didn’t want to do anything that could possibly screw up the result coming back positive.  So after finishing reading through the instructions, Ryan organized and prepared our bathroom for the morning.

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We were like two kids in a candy store when we went to bed that night.  We could barely calm ourselves down enough to fall asleep, but luckily we eventually did.  But staying asleep?  Well, that was a whole different story.  At 3:30 a.m. I woke up for the first time, and bleary eyed, checked the time on my phone.  Yep, 3:30 a.m.  Ryan excitedly woke up and asked me if it was time yet, but I assured him that we most definitely should try to sleep a little longer.

And so we fell asleep again, but only to wake a little after 5 a.m.  And at this point, we could not possibly wait any longer.  So I took the test, and Ryan set a three minute timer on his phone.  We ran back to bed and crawled under the covers, holding each other tight.  Ryan was immediately chatty about what might be, but I (surprisingly) asked him if we could just be quiet together.  I took a deep breath, I closed my eyes, and I prayed. I prayed for the strength to be every bit the kind of mother that I had always hoped and dreamed of being.

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“Beep, beep, beep.”  The timer went off, and hand in hand, we walked back into our bathroom with our hearts racing.  We both saw the test at the exact same moment, but somehow my eyes were especially bleary, and I felt in a bit of a daze.  “We’re pregnant!” Ryan exclaimed, grabbing me, kissing me, and hugging me; his eyes filling up with tears of joy.  “We’re pregnant!” he exclaimed again.  “What, we’re pregnant? Are you sure that there really are two lines?”  I could almost not believe my own eyes. But yes, there really were two pink little lines, we really were pregnant, and the greatest adventure of our lives had finally began.