I suppose there’s no way like the most direct to say this, now that the cat’s out of the bag.

I am pregnant.

I am a little over nine weeks pregnant. Our due date is July 24th. Things have been going pretty well thus far, queasiness/nausea aside.

We decided to try and were incredibly lucky to be successful during our second cycle trying. In mid-November, I took a test at 4AM one morning and saw a faint pink line. I woke Josh up to confirm (after I took a second test) and I have never seen him bolt quicker out of bed. “Is it pink? Is it pink? Is there another line?” Indeed, those two (plus the eight others I took) confirmed it repeatedly.

It’s slowly settling in, the fact that in July we’ll have a third person in our apartment. We think Ava will be just fine and excited to have a third person to dote over. We have a million things running through our heads that thousands of other first-time parents have also pondered and worried about. Names, what the baby’s personality will be, who will the baby look like, and all of that jazz. “I do not want to raise an asshole!” I keep telling Josh. If my kid turns out like Bill O’Reilly, I promise to lock her/him up in front of a repeating Yanni video.

We saw a heartbeat (171 bpm!) a week and a half ago, and it looks great so far - sitting in the uterus well, and beating away like mad. It was the weirdest thing to see a spot on the screen pulsating of its own volition. When I saw it, I breathed in sharply. There is a growing baby in my belly. Very bizarre and weird and miraculous and all of that.

Phew. I was dying there, not saying anything.

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Edited at 6:11PM Central time to add that I have been keeping a separate pregnancy journal that I started when we first started trying to conceive. If you would like access to it, please email me at caseycasey -at- gmail -dot- com or leave a comment here with your valid email address.