December 21, 2012

In the two weeks since we’ve announced on Facebook that we are having a baby there has been such an outpouring of love and prayers and positive thoughts that it has almost been overwhelming. The Monday after the announcement, I spent all day checking to see who was the latest to make a comment or to hit “Like”. Each click brought happy thoughts.

Since then, there hasn’t been much to report. I hope those of you who came to the blog in the days following the Facebook post will keep checking back, as I will continue to update the blog throughout the pregnancy (and also, maybe, after; if I can stay awake long enough to write something).

The one thing that has happened in the last two weeks is that the Holidays are wearing down our resolve not to purchase any baby clothes until we know, definitively, the sex of the baby. Last Saturday we were just a few miles from the Wrentham Outlets and we decided to take a peek inside some of the children’s stores there.

Lordy, that was a mistake. We tried to keep everything unisex. I could write a whole Gender Studies paper about the onesie that we bought with a dinosaur on it. A girl could pull that off, but had we bought a onesie with a butterfly on it we wouldn’t put it on our baby boy. What, exactly, makes a butterfly a feminine symbol? There are male butterflies and female dinosaurs. A tyrannosaurus with ovaries is just as likely to bite you in half as a butterfly with a penis is to flutter around your daisies.

Well, either way, we saved receipts.

December 10, 2012

Here's the photo from the Facebook announcement. Caption: Beverage Service in the Barcenas-Smith house starting June 2013.

December 6, 2012

Today was B.’s end-of-the-first-trimester appointment and we are officially in the second trimester. That means that the risks associated with the pregnancy are cut in half. It also means that it’s time to start telling more people.

We had planned to make an announcement on Facebook on Monday. Good thing we didn’t. We would have been overshadowed by The Royal Baby. Yes, Kate and Wills announced their pregnancy on Monday, prompted by a trip to the emergency room for Kate’s extreme morning sickness. The Barcenas-Smith baby will not accede to power through hereditary means and thus our announcement will not be covered, for three days no less, by the Today show. Of course we also won’t have to deal with radio DJs impersonating our parents and confusing the hospital staff.

I’m not sure how people announced their pregnancies before Facebook. I guess I have received postcards with ultrasound pictures of fetuses on them in the mail. And a traditional pregnancy announces itself at some point in the second trimester. Although if the bearer has not made some sort of formal statement there could be some awkward dancing around the subject of weight gain.

But like most of the modern world, we’ve decided to make it formal on Facebook. Now we just need to come up with something clever, but not too clever. Cute, but not too cute. There should be a visual component. It needs to maintain B.’s anonymity and it can’t identify our surrogacy agency. It needs to be informative enough that people aren’t confused (wait a minute, neither one of them has a uterus…), but it doesn’t need to go into any uncomfortable details (that’s what this blog is for). I feel like I’m directing a short film for Oscar consideration.

In any case, we’ll post it – whatever it is – in the next few days. And I’ll post a copy here for those of you that aren’t on Facebook.