Pregnant.
It was Friday, May 31, 4:20am. The house was quiet & I’d just stumbled into the bathroom with my pile of workout clothes to get ready for my usual Friday morning Orangetheory class.
As I wearily brushed my teeth, I stared down at the pregnancy test on the countertop. If you’ve ever taken one before, you know how long those couple of minutes can feel. The bars on the little screen slowly progressed until the final bar finally blinked. My electronic toothbrush had already stopped when it happened. The word showed up on the screen:
Pregnant.
I stared at it, toothbrush still in my mouth, with wide eyes.
Steve was still asleep in bed and I wasn’t about to wake him up with the news… yet. When we first started trying to get pregnant, I’d purchased a little “husband announcement” gift box on Etsy. I added the pregnancy test into the gift box (yeah yeah, I peed on it, but I put the cap back on, okay?!), stashed the box back in its hiding place & zipped off to my Orangetheory studio.
The next hour was a blur. My mind raced through what felt like a million different thoughts throughout the entire class. I couldn’t even tell you what they were at this point, but all I remember is that it felt like a whirlwind.
When I returned home, Steve was in the shower getting ready for work. The gift box ended up being kind of a perfect surprise, because he’d just started a new job that Monday. I left it on the kitchen table with a note letting him know it was to celebrate his first week at his new job, and to wait for me to open it.
I remember him commenting about how sweet he thought it was that I got him a gift to celebrate his job. Cue me dying of excitement inside. This was going to be the best surprise ever.
The look on his face when he opened the box was priceless, and his eyes welled up with tears when he read the card. “Really?!” he exclaimed. My heart was bursting.
Let’s back up a couple of weeks (or months). We’d been talking about wanting to start our family for a long while and decided that early 2019 would be the time to try. A friend gave me the advice to use ovulation predictor kits (OPKs) if we wanted to better our chances (or, at the very least, potentially help move the process along a little more quickly). So, we’d been using them.
It’s a little overwhelming, I’m not going to lie. It’s kind of all you end up thinking about — you almost have to take one every single day first thing in the morning until you really start to see a pattern. I know that some women track their basal body temperature and all kinds of other things, which seemed even more overwhelming to me, so we splurged on the OPKs.
Because of that, I was always hyper aware of my cycle & when things were happening (or not happening). Using the kits was also quite the educational lesson on *when* exactly you might become pregnant. For example, if you get a positive pregnancy test right around the date of your expected period (like I did), you’ve likely been pregnant for about 2 weeks.
What’s even more interesting: doctors track your pregnancy from the date of your last period. So when you get that positive test, doctors will say you’re “4 weeks pregnant” when you’ve *technically* only been pregnant for 2. Weird, right?! It’s true.
Anyway, this was the 4th month we’d been trying to get pregnant. Looking back, it really was perfect timing.
A couple weeks after we decided to start the process, Steve was laid off from his job. We were financially okay at the time, but the thought of getting pregnant on a single income was kind of terrifying. Around that same time, I’d resigned from my job to accept a new position at a bigger company (my current job).
When we found out we were pregnant I’d been in my new role for a little over a month and Steve had been at his for a week. Talk about huge life changes: trying to get pregnant, getting laid off, both of us starting new jobs, then finding out you’re pregnant… phew!
We both feel that God truly had His hand in our plans. (Well, they’re all His plans, right? What’s that saying — when we make plans, God laughs?) The couple months of disappointing negative tests were all because neither of us were in the right spot mentally or financially. It wasn’t until we were that we received our answer to prayer. And I think that’s just how God works; He knows what’s best for us even when we don’t see the big picture. Our answer to prayer came very quickly in the grand scheme of things, and for that we are very grateful.
Read the second entry to my pregnancy diary — how we shared with my parents + finding out some bonus news!
