It’s true. I’m pregnant! Tyler and I are expecting our first baby, due at the end of October.
We are SO excited and feel overwhelmingly grateful for this precious gift.
We’ve loved being able to use this blog to share with those who have chosen to follow along as we haphazardly figure out the world.
And now as we navigate this new world of pregnancy and parenting, we wanted to document and share our journey. We will keep traveling and keep writing about it, but we also have a lot of new things to experience now.
So you can see in our menu above that we started a “Real Life” tab to keep track of posts like this–that aren’t all about where to eat in Italy and what eye pads I never go on a flight without.
Anyway, I wanted to share a little about our past year, how I found out I was pregnant, and how I told Tyler that he was going to be a daddy. I somehow managed to film that part, too, so you’re in for a treat at the end of this post.
Tyler and I had talked about starting to try to get pregnant this year for a while now. We are only 26, but we want a lot of kids. I want to be a young mom with enough energy to keep up with said kids, so we thought we’d start trying. I also have had some issues with ovarian cysts over the past few years, so I wasn’t sure if I would have trouble getting pregnant at all.
Anyway, I had planned on getting off the pill this January, but I ended up missing a couple of pills in a row when we were in London in November. So somewhere underneath London on the tube one morning, we decided to throw in the towel and throw away the birth control pack.
I was going to be chill. I mean after all, I hadn’t done an ounce of research, and I still to this day don’t understand how ovulation works. I planned on not even thinking twice about how soon I’d get pregnant. LOL.
After a couple of months of being irrationally and surprisingly disappointed that I wasn’t pregnant yet, I took a deep breath, gave myself a slap of perspective, and decided to just relax. I told myself that if we weren’t pregnant by June then we could start “properly” trying, and I’d research what exactly ovulation was. In the meantime, I would enjoy my time with Tyler and not put so much unnecessary (and frankly ridiculous) pressure on it.
(The last thing I want is for any of this to come off as flippant. I know many women struggle with infertility or loss, and getting pregnant is something that a lot people spend many hard years praying for and trying for. Believe me, I know how utterly blessed we are that all of this happened, and I do not take it for granted for a second.)
The next time I thought about my cycle was at the end of February. I remember exactly where we were because Tyler and I had used the long weekend to fly to New York.
While sipping a mimosa at a rooftop bar in Brooklyn, the thought crossed my mind, “Yikes, wouldn’t it be something if I was pregnant??” I gulped down the rest of my glass as it dawned on me that I should have maybe gotten my period by then.
I thought, “No, no. Enough with the dramatics. We aren’t going to do this every month.” And I forgot about it.
Three days later, back home in Mountain View, a wave of unbearable fatigue hit me halfway through the work day. I didn’t think anything of it, though, and figured I was still tired from getting back so late a few nights prior (and also blamed the inordinate amount of pizza I had eaten on the trip).
I skipped my workout and went home to collapse on the couch. I felt awful and spent the next three hours looking at pretty girls on Instagram and feeling bad for myself. Finally I remembered about my period again and shooed the thought away. I told myself that if I didn’t get my period by March 1st, I’d take a test.
Fast forward one hour later, and I cracked. I walked nonchalantly into the bathroom and reached for the last pregnancy test in my drawer. I figured I wasn’t pregnant, just bored and tired and wanting to move on from the idea that I might be.
I took the test, set it down on the counter, and started picking up the dirty clothes on the bathroom floor. I looked down at the test a minute later and had to squint both eyes to detect a FAINT second line on the screen. My stomach dropped, and I immediately grabbed my phone to FaceTime my older sister Bonnie.
She picked up right as her husband was pulling out my niece’s first loose tooth, so she was a little distracted until she walked back into her bedroom and I said “PLEASE LOOK AT THIS.” She squealed with delight, and my niece ran into the room yelling “RuRu did you lose a tooth, too??”
Bonnie yelled into the speaker that I was FOR SURE pregnant, that even the slightest sign of the line means there’s a baby. She begged me to do something cute to tell Tyler when he got home.
Without even bothering to take a second test, I ran into the kitchen and ripped my letter board off the wall.
I started rearranging the letters, and my sister and I were cracking up and yelling “This is gonna suck if it’s not real!!!”
I set up the camera (accidentally cutting off the top of shot; well, and the bottom), and waited for Tyler to get home.
Keep in mind that, on the advice of my sister, I didn’t even mentioned to Tyler that I might have been late. We hadn’t talked about the possibility of a baby in over a month. (Highly recommend this to all wives, by the way; the surprise was SO fun).
I lasted for about four minutes in the kitchen with him once he got home, asking about his day and not listening to the answer, before I walked back into the bedroom to “get a sweatshirt.”
I called him back into the bedroom, asking him to “look at something I was working on.” (Really, the best I could do?). You can see his reaction in the video below, but it was such an emotional and sweet moment. He was shocked.
We spent the rest of the night staring at each other wide-eyed and repeating “I can’t believe it” and “Wow” and “I’m so happy.”
It was truly a surreal moment, even more so than getting engaged, in my opinion. It just felt like everything had changed in a second. And it had.
God gave us a baby, and now it’s our job to take care of it!? Even now, at 16 weeks along, I still can’t believe how blessed we are and how much our lives are about to be rocked.
I’ll write more soon about how the pregnancy has been for me so far, but for now, I’ll leave this with a huge thank you to everyone who has shown us love and support the past couple of months. We are undeserving and so very excited.
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