on being preggo

Jess: For those of you who are freaked out by change, I want to assure you that we'll be going back to normal with me starting the blogs and leaving little scraps of fun stuff for Wes to write about.

Well, I hope by now that most of you have read/heard/found out in one way or another that Wes and I are expecting a baby in early December. This has brought on quite a few questions, and a lot of excitement among our friends and family.

One of the first questions was "whatever happened to adopting?" Well, Wes and I definitely still want to adopt. It's something that's very important to both of us. But as we researched adopting an infant, we started to realize that we just weren't ready for that kind of process. There's a lot of waiting and wondering and nervousness. Also, we are too young to adopt through a lot of places and we didn't want to limit our options. Although we loved Angel Adoption, we then had to take a serious look at the cost. Now, we're well aware that having kids isn't cheap. The problem was that we just weren't ready or able to put forward upwards of $20,000 before even knowing if we would have interested birth parents. That seemed really terrifying for our first kid--especially considering how young we are.

Finally, we talked about adopting infants in general. As many of you may know, adopting an infant is hard. There are a lot of people who have fertility problems, are older, gay couples, etc. who have only a few options for having an infant at all. This isn't a problem for Wes and I, and we didn't want to be "competing" with people like this to have a baby. I for one am leaning more toward having a child or two of our own and then fostering/adopting older children or sibling groups as our children get older. We'll see, but adoption definitely isn't off the table--it's something for a different time/place in our lives.

Another big question is how we're going to manage school and a kid. Why did we choose now? As Wes and I sat down and talked about our options, we realized that waiting till a "good time" would most likely mean waiting for quite some time. If we waited until we were both done with school, that would necessarily mean waiting until I was at least a year or so into my first call, since I wouldn't be comfortable with going on maternity leave any earlier than that. We just didn't see a "good time" opening up for a long time, and we've been talking about kids for awhile. So here we are. Wes will be finishing school for good (at least until he decides to get a doctorate) at about the same time the baby comes. I'll be taking some time off at the end of the semester, and then not taking a J-term class this year, which means I'll have about 2 months off with the baby before going back to school. Then we're just going to figure out what works for our family in terms of class and work and everything else.

Finally, the most important question: are you going to find out if it's a boy or a girl? Yes! But don't ask us about names, because those are going to be a secret until little Wessica/Wessico's birthday. :)

Wes: YAY! We're having a baby! Woo Hoo! It's a boy, by the way. Jessica won't admit it, but it's true. I just have a feeling. And everyone knows that the father's gut instinct is always right when it comes to the gender of the unborn baby.

That was sarcasm. Jesus invented it.

We really don't have any other news to share, and our lives are now completely engulfed in baby mania, so I don't even have any pressing issue to talk about. Really, it's just the baby. So, since Jess didn't leave me anything specific to talk about, I'll tell you about some of my favorite responses we've received so far once we've told people that we were pregnant. And, just to make it entertaining, I will share them in the form of awards.

The award for Most Excited Response goes to my Papa and Mamaw (Mom's parents). Even after the blatant, "We've got great news, so we need you both on the phone" line I fed them, they still acted as if they had no idea what was going on. Then, when we told them, they yipped and hollered and celebrated with us in the most awesome and glorious way.

The award for Most Awkward Response that was Filled with the Most Amount of Sexual Innuendo goes to my Grandpa (Dad's dad). His initial response was something along the lines of "You finally figured it out!", and they just got... worse... from there. Definitely made Jess and I laugh, and reminded me just why I love my family in all of it's great glory.

The award for Cutest Response goes to Mallory Grau, a friend of ours from TLU. On Jess' Facebook post where we announced to the interweb our wonderful news, she responded with the phrase, "you did it!" We laughed at this for quite a while.

The award for Best Dumbfounded Look goes to my little sister, Katherine. We face-timed with my family to tell them the news, and Katherine's reaction was priceless. Her eyes got real big, and her mouth hung open for a good minute before she realized that she hadn't actually said anything yet. Then she smiled big and said, "YAAAAAAYYY!" It was great.

Well, those are the awards for now. Maybe if I think of any more awesome responses, I'll share those a little later.

By the way, shameless plug, we have our registries (I know, already!) at Target and BabiesRUS.

That's all for now! You stay classy, World Wide Web!

-wes and jess