The Reveal Details

After the excitement of Thursday and the million texts, tweets, and Facebook messages (which we loved, by the way – thanks, everyone!), the rest of the weekend was pretty low key. But I must start all the way back at Wednesday.

Wednesday night was the Big Brother 12 Finale. Jill and Brandon were coming over to watch with us. Jennifer (Jill’s sister) was scheduled to have baby Jillian via c-section on Friday, and Julee and Jill had made sure to tell Jennifer that if she went into labor early, it had better not be during the BB12 Finale. Jennifer and I even joked about it via Twitter on Wednesday afternoon.

We were watching the Finale, all wrapped up in what was going on when Jill’s phone rang about 9:30. Jennifer’s water had broken. We thought she was joking. She wasn’t. Being the huge BB12 fan and good sister she is, Jill stayed until the show went off at 10 and then left to meet Jennifer and Josh at the hospital. Jillian Kate was born at 11:58pm, a beautiful chubby and healthy little girl.

I had terrible dreams all night. I would even go so far as to call them nightmares. Jennifer is very organized and detailed like I am. I dreamed all night that because Jillian decided to come early, none of Jennifer’s details were taken care of, she didn’t have her house ready, her favor cookies to hand out at the hospital weren’t delivered, and Brody was having a hard time because Big Daddy (Jennifer’s Dad) couldn’t get off work to spend the day with him as planned. It was bad, ya’ll. Seriously, I woke up several times worried about Jennifer.

Thursday morning, I had my nurse’s appointment at the doctor’s office. At this point, no one knew we were expecting. So I finished up and went downstairs to visit Jennifer and Jillian. Jennifer looked great and Jillian was an adorable little thing all decked out in pink. I told Jennifer about my nightmares. She laughed and said that she had just finished checking her lists off on Wednesday afternoon, so everything was taken care of. I was relieved.

Sara was there visiting too, and we passed Jillian around. Sara has pictures…I decided not to rifle through my purse to find my camera because it was loaded with some very obvious “new baby” stuff from the doctor’s office, and I didn’t want anyone to accidentally see it. Yeah, I’m sneaky like that.

It was hard, not telling. I can’t tell you how many times in the last two weeks I’ve wanted to say something…to somebody. Anybody. And there were plenty of times I almost slipped. In fact, I actually avoided calling a few people because I knew I might accidentally say something. I knew we’d be revealing our secret very soon, but that didn’t really make things any easier.

We’d taken forever to find a “Big Brother” shirt for Caedmon. Not that there weren’t plenty out there, but Husband and I really didn’t agree on one we liked. So we finally found one shirt in the entirety of the Internet that we agreed on and ordered it. It seemed like it took forever to get here, although it really wasn’t that long. We hadn’t decided yet for sure when we wanted to tell everyone, but we knew we wanted to have the shirt. So when it arrived on Wednesday, I think we were both ready to let the cat out of the bag.

With Caedmon, we waited until 12 weeks to tell anyone. I was with a different doctor, and my 12 week appointment was actually my first time to see the doctor. I hadn’t even had medical confirmation of everything until 8 weeks. So we really wanted to wait until we saw the doctor and heard the heartbeat. This time, I’d had lab work confirming everything at 4 weeks and we saw the doctor and had an ultrasound at 6 weeks. So we felt a lot better about things in general this time. And having had the nurse’s appointment and making it to 8 weeks, we were ready. Plus I didn’t know how much longer I could hide it. I haven’t gained any weight yet, but the pooch is definitely there. It was just a matter of time until someone noticed, if they hadn’t already.

(I seriously need a t-shirt that says, “I’m not fat, I’m pregnant.”)

I picked Caedmon up from KDO Thursday afternoon and we went to find Husband. We’d decided that it was time. We explained to Caedmon that he was going to be a big brother, and gave him the t-shirt. He seems to understand as much as he can at this point. It helps that several of his friends have younger siblings and he’s seen that in action lately.

So we headed out to Mom & Dad’s. I was thankful Dad was home. If he wasn’t, we had decided to wait until Sunday. I didn’t get to tell Dad when we were expecting Caedmon (he was out of town), and I wanted to tell him in person this time. So we arrived and Caedmon was wearing his shirt. I let him give the good news…Mom saw it pretty quickly. It took Dad a few minutes – we had to tell him to read Caedmon’s shirt. They were happy and excited. Meanwhile, Husband was back at work, calling his parents. I texted my siblings (there would be no way to reach them all by phone) and we texted some friends. Then, Caedmon and I headed over to Mimi & Papa’s to give them the good news. Once we thought all the people who would be really mad if they’d found out on Facebook were notified, I gave Husband the go-ahead to Tweet & Facebook.

(If you found out via Twitter or Facebook and you were mad that we didn’t call you personally, I’m sorry. My brain was fried. But I’m confident you’ll eventually get over it.)

By the time we picked Husband up from work and were making our way home, it was after 5pm. I was starving and Caedmon was whining to “eat somewhere else.” So in honor of the reveal plus the fact that dinner would take an hour to fix, we stopped by Sonic. It was glorious. Never has a #1 with mayo & tots instead of fries tasted so good.

I’ve had some fatigue already during this pregnancy, but Thursday night I was exhausted. I barely made it to Caedmon’s bedtime, then I pretty much collapsed. But it was a good kind of tired.

It was a good day. Jennifer & Jillian were looking great and doing well. We were finally able to share our good news with family and friends. Then it was time for the weekend.