A convoluted announcement

Around 4 years ago, I sat on this sofa (well, not this one, the old one), staring in disbelief at a stick I'd just peed all over.  Jamie wasn't going to be home from work for another 5 hours or so, I couldn't tell him by email or phone, and I couldn't, just couldn't, cope with this on my own for 5 hours.  So I rang my sister.  She knew how for the last 6.5 years, we'd been trying to have a baby, and how we'd pretty much given up and were looking into what our options for medical assistance were.  After a convoluted introduction, where I explained how I'd been feeling nauseous and sore, and how I'd been trying to calculate when I last had a period but couldn't (damn PCOS), I told her that I'd done the peeing, and there were 2 lines looking defiantly back at me, but I couldn't believe they were true.  She screamed, and cried, and came to her senses and talked me into going out to buying another (six) tests.  I returned home (after a hilarious encounter in the pharmacists, where the pregnancy tests were located on the shelf below the haemorrhoid creams, and two elderly women were very s l o w l y and LOUDLY deliberating the efficacy of each and every one; while I dithered behind them, muttering under my breath about needing to GET A DAMN PREGNANCY TEST NOW), peed on 6 more sticks, and ended up staring at 7 lots of glowing double lines.  Yep, no mistaking those.

Living 3 hours away from my beloved sister means that we don't get to spend as much time together as we'd like.  When I next saw her, I already had a little bump going on.  We took this photo of me with a real bump and her with a cushion stuffed up her dress, to commemorate the occasion.

Fastforward 3 years, and sometime last year I had a phonecall from my sister.  "I need to talk to you," said she.  It transpired that she was on her own, her husband at work, and she'd done a bit of peeing-on-a-stick of her own.  But, presuming it to be negative, she'd forgotten to actually look at the stick, had merrily tossed it in the bin and gone about her day ... until she next went to relieve herself.  She found herself looking into the bin, where the discarded stick showed two unmistakable lines.  I screamed, I cried, I congratulated her.  And persuaded her to go out and buy some more tests, just to check.  She did, she peed: they were positive.

She's now got just a month left to go, and when I saw her just before Easter, we decided to recreate the above photo, in reverse.

Just a couple of days after the above photo was taken, I was back home again, alone (well, as alone as you can be with a very noisy toddler running around), and making a necessary call to my sister.

"I need to have that conversation with you that we have with each other before we have with our husbands", I said.  After a beat of confused silence, she screamed "Are you fucking shitting me??!" (which, funnily enough, were the exact words my husband would say a few hours later).

It turns out that in the above photo, I didn't need a cushion at all.

EDD: 9th Nov '12