Well, the cat is out of the bag, and we have officially announced that Baby #3 will be making his or her way into the world in May 2015! We were planning to keep it a secret a little longer than we did, but our very excited 3-year-old daughter was basically telling everyone- friends, people at church, total strangers- that her mommy has a baby in her belly. Yeah, I didn't think that through… the thing is, Jake was 9-months old when we were pregnant with her, so it never really dawned on me that the two of them might break the news to others before we were ready! But such is life.
As for Josh, I promised him awhile back that if we were to have a third, that I would find a cool way to tell him. I always had the intentions to do that the first times around, but instead it always ended up as one of those, "uh honey, could you run to Walgreens for me?" moments instead. So this has been a long time in the making.
Even though I had my idea for a long time, I did not realize just how tricky it was going to be to pull off. It stemmed around professional photos being taken, and one photo in particular. Ever since we got married, our family has had the same picture taken year after year, of our feet. It's cuter than it sounds… and as our family grew, there were more little cute tootsies (and sometimes the entire kiddo) in the shot. Here are some from years past:
I so desperately wanted to make this picture happen again, but once we were all lined up, I'd pull a pair of baby shoes out and set them down between all of our feet and SURPRISE! And of course, the photographer would be in on it and would take pictures of the whole thing. Easy peasy, right?
I have never been more proud of pulling something off. Between quickly finding a friend (who also happens to take gorgeous pictures) wo would be available to take "Lilly's Third Birthday Pictures", making sure she understood the plan, keeping the news TO MYSELF for a week and a half (yeah, there was a lot of deception going on!), playing off that we should probably all go (and be camera ready) "just in case" there was an opportunity to get a family shot, and successfully hiding baby shoes in my back pocket for just the right moment, there was a lot of stress involved, but it was worth it!
It's funny though… he couldn't find a place to park and so he called me and said he'd just circle around until we were done. Um, excuse me??? I don't think so. So I made him illegally park where we could see the car and come out and join us. Then we added the shoe picture as if it was an afterthought and I "explained the concept" to our friend, Ellen, as if she didn't know it was coming.
And here's the moment of truth… she captured it all so perfectly!
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| Lining up |
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| Oh wait, I forgot something |
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| These need to be in the picture, too! |
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| Are you serious??? |
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| There was lots of laughter after that… he had NO idea! |
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| The kids finally catch on. Yay! We're having a baby! |
After that, we took some pretty cute shots that we could use later for an announcement to everyone else:
And so you have it. The family pictures and sweet ones of our first two kiddos were just an added bonus!
So there you have it… a super complicated way to announce some good news! We ended up telling our immediate family and some close friends the following weekend at Lilly's birthday party by having her unwrap a "Big Sister" shirt in front of everyone. I have video of everyone's reaction, but I'm not going to post it since it's mostly of the ceiling and 20 minutes long, because I never hit the record button again to stop it! And even though I'm sure you've seen it on Instagram by now, this is how we told the rest of our world:
A VERY special thank you to my dear friend, Ellen Turner, for taking these incredible photos, and for keeping a secret for as long as she did! And to a few others who helped me keep up appearances until the day came that I could pull this off. Needless to say, this family is very excited!
