Surprise!

The Binky Bitch wrote a post about how she found out she was pregnant. So did Karly at Wiping Up Snot. They were both inspired (or was it ordered?) to do so by Swistle (somehow I had never read her blog before, unfortunately). Anyway, since I am nothing if not a bandwagon jumper (except for Uggs, of course) I decided to share my story too.

When I got pregnant with Ironflower, Hubby and I were living together. We had just gotten engaged but had no intention of doing the whole formal wedding thing, so we hadn't bothered announcing the engagement yet. We got lax about birth control, but I figured that as a thirty-two year old smoker my chances of getting pregnant were very slim at best.

So three months after the birth control rule relaxation, imagine my shock at my late period. Not-Hubby-Yet hardly reacted. He calmly suggested that a buy a test. I bought a two pack. I did it one morning before work, as Not-Hubby-Yet slept upstairs. It was positive.

I did the other one just to be sure. I didn't know what to do. When we talked about it theoretically, he'd been excited. When I'd told him my period was late, he'd seemed pretty reserved. I left the tests in the trash and went to work. I spent the day trying not to cry tears of joy and terror. I wondered if he'd noticed the tests. I wondered what his reaction would be.

I came home to a clean house and a lovely dinner. Apparently, he knew exactly when it happened and hadn't been at all surprised. Unlike me, for example. I was flabbergasted. I went to Borders that night, hoping some reading material would turn me from a thirty-two year old party girl into a responsible mom-to-be. Sometimes I think I must have skipped a few chapters.

With Lovebug it was even more of a shock.

I didn't realize I was pregnant until I was four and a half months along.

No, I'm not kidding.

I breastfed Ironflower. My period didn't return in any normal way during the months I breastfed. A GP told me that it could take a month after I stopped breastfeeding to get my period. So the lack of period didn't clue me in.

I hit a plateau of losing baby weight. Nothing seemed to work on the last ten pounds. When I went back to teaching, I was so stressed out that I turned to one of my favorite comforts - food. Even as I gained weight, I just assumed it was because of my lack of self-control and the fact that I'd had a baby in my thirties. I even assumed the belly was because of how Ironflower had stretched me out.

I didn't feel especially tired and I never felt nauseous.

The strange flutterings in my stomach did freak me out a few times, but I assumed they were gas - that's what all the early movements felt like to me.

We had not been lax about birth control.

When I got pneumonia, Hubby took me to the ER. Before they took me for my X-ray, they asked if I could be pregnant. Thanks to an incident two weeks prior, I said there was a slight chance. They did a test. It was positive. Hubby and I stared at each other, panicked. Ironflower was only 11 months old.

Later they did an ultrasound to see how far along I was. And there was a twenty week old Lovebug, showing off his penis to us all. And I fell in love. When they returned me to my room at the hospital (something about making the pregnant woman with pneumonia actually rest and get lots of antibiotics), my OB-GYN was there, laughing at me.

Sometimes I want to have another baby just so I could the whole thing with INTENT.