My Clever Pregnancy Announcement

Alright, alright, I know I was supposed to post this, like, ages ago, but let's just say I had a very pleasant surprise come my way. Baby Lukas was born, as a matter of fact!! And now, I finally have *some* time to blog again, after the readjustment, all the visits and sleepless nights. Here it goes!

Last March, my husband and I found out we were expecting. But since we lost our first baby at 14 weeks, we thought we would wait a little longer before announcing to a n y b o d y too soon. So we decided to make the announcement to our families over the Easter weekend, with everyone under the same roof. Oye, we were not sure if we could pull it off, but we gladly accepted the challenge, or shall I say, challenges.

Challenge #1:
Getting both families under the same roof at the same time, some time during the Easter weekend without our intentions being obvious. (If we were to suddenly be interested in reuniting both families for a "family night", I am sure someone would have caught on.)

Challenge #2:
Finding a unique way to announce our pregnancy: It had to be perfect and fun.

Challenge #3:
Keeping it to ourselves for almost a month and a half!!!

Okay. Now that you know of the challenges we faced, here is how we executed this whole thing.

Knowing that my husband's parents extended an invitation to my parents the Easter before, we thought we would somehow convince my mother-in-law (hehe, sorry!) to invite my parents again this year and then build on that. On the one hand, my husband was asking his mother if my family would make the invitations list that year and fabricated a story that my parents did not really have any plans this year, and on the other hand, I was asking my parents what they had planned over the weekend, and that they should really join us for a nice dinner and games. Finally, FINALLY, my husband and I succeeded in completing phase one of our plan. Our parents fell right into our trap!

Then came phase two of our grand master plan: Figuring out how to tell them!! Since my in-laws like playing Easter-inspired games when they host Easter dinner, I thought we could somehow incorporate a game of our own. ;) I did a bit of digging, many hours of pondering, and came up with a list of clever ideas. In the end, an Easter egg hunt is what we chose. But no ordinary egg hunt, oh no. I went to the dollar store, bought empty plastic eggs, and placed a number or letter in each one (along with a chocolate egg, of course) and hid them all in my in-laws' basement. Everyone was instructed to find one egg, bring it upstairs into the living room and wait until they were all collected before seeing what was on the inside. Once everyone found their egg, I instructed them to work together as a team and crack the code. *Note* I decided to switch letters for numbers and numbers for letters, and their only hint was D=5. My only exception was Z=0, because there is no letter "equivalent" for 0. So the numbers and letters they found were 14, 15, 22, 5, 13, 2, 5, 18, B, Z, A, E. These symbol, when arranged properly, made out the phrase "N O V E M B E R  2 0 1 5". It was soooo entertaining watching them struggle, but in the end, the tears were flowing as they found the answer. And all of a sudden, this Easter dinner became a lot more significant. It was just fantastic and so meaningful to have everyone who is important to us be the first to know that my husband and I were expecting. And now we have a sweet baby. <3