Date: Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Time: 5:45am

When the alarm went off, I opened my eyes, saddened. For the second night, Sarah hadn’t slept in the bed with me. With a sigh, I swung my legs off the bed and walked downstairs. Sarah slept soundly on the couch. I took a deep breath, continued my morning routine, and left for work an hour later.

Date: Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Time: 7:30am (approximate)

“Hello?”

Sarah’s voice answered through my phone’s speaker, “Hi.”

“Why’d you sleep downstairs again?”

I listened as Sarah explained. After some discussion, we both confirmed that we were still in love with one another, exchanged goodbyes, and disconnected the call.

Date: Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Time: 10:30am (approximate)

My phone rang three hours later. Sarah’s picture flashed onto the screen. I pressed the green button and waited for the tone in my headset to signal that the call was connected.

“Hi, honey,” she said.

“Hi, what’s up?”

“Well,” she started. I listened as she explained.

“How long?”

“A week,” she said.

Recalling her reasons for sleeping downstairs the night before, I replied, “Well, that would explain why you threw up last night.”

“Yeah, and why I felt like a furnace the night before that. So I was thinking about buying a pregnancy test when I go to the store today.”

Date: Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Time: 4:00pm (approximate)

She took the stick into the bathroom, while Tyler helped me in the kitchen with dinner; we were preparing corn on the cob and some meat for the grill. The instructions for the pregnancy test clearly stated to wait three minutes for a result. When Sarah returned from the bathroom, she set the timer on the microwave to three minutes and pressed the “Start” button. Over the course of the next 180 seconds, we caught each other sneaking into the bathroom to look for the blue line. We were simultaneously giddy and anxious for the results.

Ten minutes later, Sarah caught me sneaking into the bathroom again to look for the blue line we still had yet to see.

Barely loud enough for me to hear in the other room, Sarah said, “The instructions said not to trust it after fifteen minutes.”

I looked at the blank window on the stick for just a moment longer. I lowered my head, disappointed, then walked back to Sarah in the kitchen. My eyes flicked to the box for the pregnancy test. I picked it up and read the front of it.

“99.9% effective,” I mumbled, reading the box. Just about as accurate at detecting a pregnancy as a condom, birth control pill, or IUD is at preventing one. Sarah had her IUD removed two months ago, in the hopes of us adding one more to our family. We timed and planned it so that we wouldn’t have another summer baby. As much as we love, cherish, and adore Tyler, Sarah was miserable in the summer heat of her ninth month of pregnancy. You always hear of people that take pregnancy tests, scared of possibly getting a positive result, because the condom broke, or she forgot her pill “just that one time,” or from pure foolishness. We planned this; we wanted a positive result. A little more hopefully, I continued, “Maybe we’re the 0.1%.”

“Yeah, maybe. Even the test line didn’t turn blue.”

We then concoted myriad reasons we didn’t get a positive result, from the fact that she probably should have taken the test with her fist pee of the day, to maybe she held the stick crooked.

We decided to try the second test in the morning.

Date: Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Time: 7:00pm (approximate)

“I need to pee.”

It had only been a few hours, but I couldn’t resist. I told her to do it. So what if it was negative again? I’d just go buy another test for the morning. Damnit, I’ll just keep buying them until it gives us the answer we want!

Taking a deep breath, I tried to calm myself. I was too hopeful for a positive, and too worried about a negative. I took another deep breath as the bathroom door opened.

“Three minutes, my ass! It lit blue in three SECONDS!”

We high-fived and hugged and kissed each other.

Sarah asked, “Tyler, do you want to be a big brother?”

He answered without hesitation, “Yeah! Bruhver.”

We are overjoyed to announce that we are expecting our second child on, or around, February 15, 2011. As of the posting of this entry, we are nine weeks along.

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