S/O: Creative ways to tell

[CharlotteMommy]

I am about 10.5 weeks pregnant, and haven't broken the news to any family, friends, etc yet. DH and I typically like to wait until after our 3 month doctor visit just to make sure everything is ok.

I am looking for ideas on how to share the happy news with our family. Some family members are local and we will be able to tell them face to face, while other family members are long distance, which makes the personal aspect a little more difficult.

For pregnancy #1, we framed copies of our 8 week ultrasound, and added a personalized caption that varied depending on the relationship to DC: "Your future grandchild Due June 28". Our three month time frame coincided with Christmas, so we wrapped each frame up like a Christmas gift and presented to the recipient as the last gift to be opened. For those who we saw at Christmas, we were there in person to share the news and see the reaction. For those who are long distance, we asked that they opened the gift while we were on the phone.

So... any creative ideas on how to share the news of this upcoming pregnancy? TIA for your suggestions!

[daisymommy]

I love the ultrasound idea! How cute!
I have a friend who had a T-shirt made up for her daughter that read "Big Sister" with the due date beneath that (I think it was done at a mall T-shirt shop). She had DD wear it when family came over for dinner and the waited for everyone to notice :)
She took a picture of DD wearing it, with a good shot of the words, and then emailed the picture to family further away.

With my child #2 I made Onesies decorated with fabric paint, reading "Baby ourlastname, Due XYZ" and then wrapped them in nice little boxes, and sent them to the grandparents.

[BabbyO]

We did the "I'm the big brother" t-shirt this time. Totally cliche, but the grandparents LOVED it. (Apparently they'd never heard of it being done?!)

We did the same thing for the babysitter and her family. The fun part about that was DS was wearing a zip-down, hooded sweatshirt over the T. We know that the sweatshirt usually doesn't come off until mid-morning-ish...so it was fun waiting for them to finally see the T-shirt and get the call.

The best part was the sitter knows we get lots of hand-me-downs from a family at work and she wasn't sure if it was just a hand-me-down or a real message!

Other family, we just called and told...sometimes with something fun like, "Grandma, we thought we'd outdo your kids in 1976 and give you 4 great-grandchildren in 2011." (she had 3 grandkids in 76 and this year she'll have 4 great-grandkids - I think that's the most for any given year!)

We told my sister, who'd just had her first that we couldn't think of anything to get her DD so we decided a new cousin was in order.

Silly things like that...

Congrats and good luck!

[logan's mom]

Yay! Yay! Yay! Congrats! I have been meaning to email you for several reasons! I am expecting too! I will be 14 weeks on Saturday. We just told everyone last weekend. For Ronnie's parents, I had Logan give an ultrasound pic to Grandpa, who of course had no clue what it was and gave it to Grandma so she could figure it out. For my parents, we tried to get Logan to say that he was getting a baby. It didn't really work but after asking him are you getting a pet fish? are you getting a swingset? My mom yelled are you getting a baby and he said "baby."

I liked the Big Bro t-shirt idea but was afraid that I would never logistically get all the right people in the room at the same time and then get his shirt on/changed. I liked this shirt because it could even be personalized with your due date month/year. http://www.fibers.com/shop/design/soon-to-be-big-bro-license-plate.D12135/toddler-t-shirt.P103

My other idea was to have pictures taken of Logan and have one of him holding the ultrasound. Then give a stack of "proofs" to my parents to decide which ones they wanted to order. When they got to the end, they would see the ultrasound.

Congrats!

[AnnieW625]

I like the framing of the u/s idea. We didn't do any of those ideas. We just called our parents and friends with all of my pregnancies. We didn't tell DD1 I was pregnant with DD2 until right around a Christmas IIRC so I was almost halfway done with the pregnancy so we didn't do the tee shirt thing until after DD2 was born and we had her wear it to preschool right after DD2 was born. She loved that.

[Swallowbird23]

I saw this idea somewhere else, but we're going to use it. We're going to take a picture of the two of us from our honeymoon. On the bottom he's going to add a caption like the old credit card commercial. (We haven't decided on the final items we're going to use for price points, but these were all somewhat recent so thought they would work well. We're not telling parents until after the 8 week ultrasound in 2 weeks if all goes well, so we have time to finalize this)

Rehearsal dinner: $____
Wedding: $____
Honeymoon to Cozumel $____
Knowing there are actually 3 people in this picture: PRICELESS


DH is a wonderful photographer and is ALWAYS editing pictures and showing our parents, so it won't be out of the ordinary for him to say "Hey, look at this picture I edited"

We'll see how long it takes them to get it!

[MacMacMoo]

I don't like sharing ultrasound pictures, and my mom has a thing against looking at them so ultrasound pictures as way of sharing doesn't work for us.

With SqueekMoo is was purely word of mouth.

With Matthew we had SqueekMoo hold up a large board book that I had wrapped in white paper and wrote "I'm going to be a Big Brother spring 2010." Sent the picture as a mass e-mail. only glitch was my sister thought we meant he was going to be on the show big brother.

With Sproutlet we are in the middle of the move. We are sending out a change of address e-mail tomorrow. It has our names, that we are moving, and what the new address is. But it also says: "A new addition will be added in July and our happy home will be expanding by two feet." There's a picture of the new house and a picture of a pair of blue baby booties. Hopefully they figure it out lol.

[DietCokeLover]

With Sproutlet we are in the middle of the move. We are sending out a change of address e-mail tomorrow. It has our names, that we are moving, and what the new address is. But it also says: "A new addition will be added in July and our happy home will be expanding by two feet." There's a picture of the new house and a picture of a pair of blue baby booties. Hopefully they figure it out lol.

This is so cute.

[BayGirl2]

We are telling our family next weekend too. I ordered DS a shirt that says "This monkey has a big secret" on the front and "I'm going to be a big brother" on the back. If I can teach him to point to mommy's belly and say "baby" that will be the finishing touch. (He likes talking about babies right now, but we haven't told him yet because we don't want him talking about it before we tell people.)

We have a family dinner with DH's entire family so we can do the shirt reveal all at once for them. Not sure how we'll handle my family, probably will get them on skype and see if they can read the t-shirt.

It will be such a relief to be able to tell people. It's been a long time to hide my constant sickness and not drinking.

[vonfirmath]

Our family knows we are pregnant, but we are preparing a big to do after we have the big ultrasound and find out boy or girl.

They have 3 children. We have 1 (other than the unborn baby)

So I'm thinking of ideas to include all of them.

I'm going to put the ultrasound pictures in an album and wrap them up for my son to open - then he gets to share them (and he LOVES pictures)

For their kids, I am wrapping up 3 different gifts to be opened in a specific order

#1 has clue No.1 to the name "First name is a book of the Bible"

#2 has clue No. 2 to the name (We're still working this out. Will be different for boy and girl. I'm leaning toward "Our Rapture baby" for a boy and "Father's joy" for a girl.)

#3 will be a pink or blue balloon with the name written on the side in marker. I figure we will blow it up, write the name on the side. Then let the air out and wrap up the deflated balloon.

Then we'll all go out -- probably to Red Robin where they give balloons away so all the kids end up with a balloon!

[morgan1611]

I planned to tell DH on his birthday, so I made a bib and a burpcloth from fabric with his favorite team logo. However, he picked up a few hints from my behavior and confessed before he opened his gift, " I don't know what's in here, but I know what's in there" as he pointed to my belly.

He wanted to tell our families right away.
We went to visit my family that afternoon to show them our recent vacation pictures - I wish I'd thought of the "3 people in this picture" idea. I knew they would have no interest in the pics after we told them about Baby, so after we went through them all, I made sure everyone was in the room (large family) and said "It's a good thing there are lots of Aunts!". Everyone but my Dad caught on right away.:wink2:

We visited his family that evening for birthday dinner, and we took along the bib and burpcloth (in box). During dinner MIL kept saying things like "when I was your age, I had 2 teenagers". (DH is 41). At one point she got really light-headed/ heart racing and had to sit down. I thought, my gosh, our news is going to kill her!
After dinner we made her sit down and DH gave her the box to open. "See what I got for my birthday".... She opened it and said "Oh, Alabama football, nice..... THIS IS A BIB. THIS IS A BABY BIB. Is this a baby bib? It's a baby bib!"

happy memories!

[bostonsmama]

My parents knew very early b/c I had to go to the hospital for some early bleeding (and with my history, I wanted all the prayers I could garner). But for my in-laws, I had a maternity T my friend bought me that said "Due in November." I put the T on and got a photo of DH and I (and the dog) and put a caption that our dog Boston was going to be a big brother. ;) I also sent them a scanned copy of the ultrasound photo. Stupidly I saved the file as "baby 8 weeks," so they didn't even have to see the pic of DH and I before they figured it out. They opened the email over the phone and MIL screamed. LOL

We did something creative to announce the sex of the baby. We threw an impromptu announcement party where we had all our friends and family show up dressed in either pink or blue to "vote" what they thought the sex was going to be. We had pink and blue balloons around the house, and we served light refreshments with the finale of passing out cupcakes to announce girl or boy (blue cake for boy, pink cake for a girl). I wound up making strawberry cupcakes from scratch (it took 4.5 hrs!) and frosting them with a homemade buttercream sprinkled w/ sparkle sugar. They had foil wrappers, so until we peeled the cupcakes out of their liners, no one knew. It was great--everyone loved it--and they were the best darn cupcakes I've ever had!

Oh, and when we announced to our church lifegroup, we waited until we had a big get-together where we put name tags on, and I put my name and "+1." It took most people, especially who knew me, to figure it out, but we got all kinds of hugs and congrats. And funny enough, each time someone "got it," you'd think they'd spread the word, but they just let everyone figure it out, so we got lots of puzzled looks and told our story over and over.