the best laid plans

The whole telling my parents thing didn’t go as smoothly as planned. Got a few minutes? I’ll tell you the whole loooong story.

We decided to tell my parents and M’s brother (KD) by sending them flowers congratulating them on their new family roles. Normally, we would never “announce” a pregnancy this early, but these people have followed our IVF to the day, so it’s not like we can just shut up all of the sudden, you know? So anyway, flowers to Uncle KD – success. Flowers to my parents – another story.

My parents own a B&B in a small town so my mom is a frequent flyer at the local flower shop. She’s in there a few times a week and considers the owner to be a friend. I knew the owner would be thrilled to fill this flower order and she was. She was so sweet on the phone – so excited for us and for my parents and she wanted to hand deliver the flowers herself so she could see the look on my mom’s face. She said she knows all my mom’s favorite flowers and she’d put together something perfect for her. I asked her to wait until a certain time so that I’d be off work when they were delivered and able to field the resulting phone call. From the agreed upon time on, I sat and stared anxiously at my cell phone.

Five hours later… M is home from school, we’ve talked to Uncle KD who received his flowers just as expected, called M’s parents and shared our news with them, and my parents still seem to have not received their special delivery! I started to worry that they were away for the night or something, so I called my mom’s cell phone to try to figure out what was up. She answered and informed me that they’d gone into the nearest city (45 minutes away) to do some shopping and they’d been there all afternoon and evening. They were heading back home soon, but given the time change between us, it would likely be after 11pm by the time they got home. I couldn’t stay up until 11pm these days if I tried! I didn’t want the fact that I called to seem fishy, so I stayed on the phone with my mom for an hour while she shopped, making small talk and smacking myself for coming up with such a complicated plan.

When I got off, M encouraged me to go to sleep and just keep the phone by my head so I would wake up when they called. I woke up at 1:45am with my bedside light on and the cell phone beside me – no missed calls. I turned off the light and tried to go to sleep, but all of these worst case scenarios kept running through my head – them in a ditch, never knowing about the grandchild(ren) to come and so on and so forth. I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep, so I got up to check my email, thinking that as long as I knew they were home safe, I could get to sleep and talk to them in the morning. Thankfully there were two emails from my mom. She hadn’t wanted to call because it was so late – silly! I went back to bed but realized quickly I wasn’t any closer to sleep, so I just got up and called them. And that is how I ended up on the phone with my parents, from 2:00 to 2:45am, talking to them about our expanding family. It was past 3:30am when I finally made it back to sleep. It made for a long, but happy day.