Telling the family

Oy. This one is kind of a rough one...

I knew I wanted to tell our family in a fun way, and I knew that we would be going home to see them for Christmas. It was a little earlier than I would have ideally liked to break the news, but we wanted to be able to tell everyone in person and see their reactions. So I decided to go out to the dollar store and buy a couple of miniature stockings, then I cut out some cute paper from my collection, wrote a little poem on them, and stuffed them inside the stockings.

The poem went like this: "With all our adventures its been quite the year, so along with our wishes for holiday cheer, there's something exciting we want you to hear: a new baby Lindsey will be here next year!" haha kinda cheesy but whatever. 

The rough part came when I found out my dad had been diagnosed with advanced stage 4 pancreatic cancer. This was about a week and a half after I found out I was pregnant, and I honestly feel like this baby is a fighter. I thought for sure I would miscarry because of how I was constantly so upset and under a lot of stress.

Anyway, I had really mixed feelings about everything at that point. I wasn't sure if I even wanted to tell my dad because the diagnosis was so fresh and I didn't know if it would depress him or cheer him up. It just made the whole pregnancy stuff really bittersweet. I felt guilty being excited over something when all of this was going on with my dad and I felt like if I wasn't sad all the time it was betraying him. But I talked to my sister and she said that she thought it would make him feel good to know that I am happily married and starting my family, so I decided to tell him after all.

At this point the biggest symptom that I had was hunger. I was hungry ALL THE TIME. I still am, really. But I knew I wouldn't be able to keep it a secret for long because my mom is always on the look out for stuff like that. So Ben and I decided I would tell my family before he got there. So when I landed in Salt Lake, my cousins picked me up from the airport and took me to the hospital where my dad was staying.

I had brought my dad a shirt and a hat as a souvenir that said "Don't mess with Texas!" on them, so I handed those to him to see and then I ended with the stocking. I told him it was a Christmas card from Ben and I and my mom said, "Uh oh, is this a 'we're having a baby' Christmas card?" (I told you, she is always on the lookout for that stuff). I just stayed silent and let my dad read the card. I purposely gave it to my dad because I knew he would read it out loud. It's something that we kind of joke about in our family because he always reads stuff out loud. He got to the line in the poem that spills the beans and he let out a little howl and started laughing before he read it to everyone else. Anyway, my mom started crying and gave me a hug and my dad just laughed and said congratulations.

This is getting long, I'm sorry.

Now for the Lindsey side. On Christmas day we went down to Mapleton to open presents and everything with Ben's side. Ben had already told his brother Jonny the news so that he would get the video camera out when we gave his mom the card. So Ben put the stocking in a Christmas bag and handed it to his mom. She opened it up and read the card to herself and just started saying "Oh my gosh, did everyone else already know about this?!" and everyone except Jonny was just looking around like "Ummm we have no idea what that even says, let us in on it." So we told Ben's dad to read it aloud and at that point everyone got excited, but at first they were just so confused haha. I wish I had the video to put on here, but I haven't actually seen it yet.

Coming up next...I answer the question that everyone seems to ask right away "Was this planned?"