How I Kept This Pregnancy A Secret

 

Happy Friday everyone! It’s been so exciting for me to catch you all up on what has REALLY been going on with my life. It was so hard coming up with blog material when all I wanted to do was shout from the roof tops “I’m pregnant”!!!

I’ve got a great group of family and friends that I am so close with! One of the reasons why we are so close is because we see each other so often! In fact, I even work with my brother, parents and best friend Jill! And having to hide a huge part of my life from them on a daily basis was torturous!

Even so, Ryan and I knew that we wanted to keep this secret to ourselves for a little while and this took some serious work! Here’s a little on how we did it!

Jell-o shots anyone?

After we found out we were pregnant one of the first hurtles was a Canada Day Committee party where a portion of that party would be at our place! The first thing I did was plan on making Jell-o shots for everyone! We decided 2 flavours was more then enough and got to work!

The orange shots had the designated 1 cup of vodka in them and the green we made with no alcohol! We both everyone at the party that we were experimenting with the level of vodka and that’s why the orange ones were SO much stronger! Needless to say, I had many shots of plan Jell-o that night (along with other people) and no one clued in that they were in fact virgin shots!

I knew I’d have to have a drink that night so before the party I took an empty bottle of vodka and filled it with water! All night I would pour from my vodka and make myself a very watered down “vodka” and 7-up!

Pre plan! And get your man on board with the plan!

A huge part of keeping this a surprise was enlisting the help of Ryan! He had to keep many social visits when I was around to a minimum so that I didn’t have to repeatedly turn down drink offers.

We would pre-plan Rock/Paper/Scissors games to determine who would be the designated driver – where I would obviously lose.

If I was forced to get a drink Ryan knew that we would have to end up alone somewhere so that he could chug my drink back!

He also had to work hard on not mentioning to anyone about any of my symptoms! He couldn’t mention about his wife being crazy emotional and so tired all the time!

Track your cycle

As I mentioned I work very closely with a lot of my friends and family. And, sometimes they can recognize when I am having a visit from Aunt Flow. I didn’t want any suspicions to raise so I continued to track my cycle so that I knew what my next expected period would be. When I was tired and someone would mention it, I would just say “Oh well it’s that time of month” if it really was!

Sometimes avoiding social events

Ryan and I are pretty social people but sometimes it’s hard to avoid booze at a party or restaurant. That’s why I had to keep my social events to a minimum. There were a couple of times that we would made other plans for a party because we knew it would be too obvious if I wasn’t drinking.

Beer for Ryan and lemonade for me at our brewery tour in Halifax.

The other problem with social events is usually they go on till WELL into the morning. Being so sick and feeling so tired meant that I was in bed pretty early. I could handle staying up till 10-11 on the weekends but any later and I would notice the next day my nausea would be worse! So, sometimes this Momma would decline an invitation solely because I needed sleep!

Don’t talk baby related stuff

As soon as you see that you are pregnant you start envisioning what your new life with a little one will be like! You want nothing more then to talk about baby names and nursery ideas! I’ve always had the occasional baby talk with my parents and close friends but never anything too serious! I’d just start the talk by saying “when we are ready”.

After I knew I was pregnant I had to keep the baby talk to the minimum and continue spreading the idea that Ryan and I just weren’t ready! It was hard to directly lie to people and even harder to not talk about all things baby!

My reading material on our trip to Nova Scotia!

Start a “diet”

Pregnancy and dieting are probably the most unrelated things in the world! But, sometimes to avoid alcohol and certain foods that I knew would make me sick I would say that I was watching what I ate. I could avoid going out to eat by saying I’d prefer to eat something healthier from home! This saved a lot of embarrassing trips to the little girl’s room and the joy of staying close to home when you just aren’t feeling the best!

Wear your fat jeans!

No body wants a muffin top and no pregnant lady who is trying to keep it a secret wants to be looked at with side glance. While you don’t typically have a baby bump in the first trimester you do have a thicker middle! Pants start feeling uncomfortable and sometimes you just want your gut to hang out. This is the time that I would bring out my fat jeans. Every girl has a few pairs of super comfy jeans that hang a little looser! These were glorious for me!

I’m also someone who is ALWAYS cold! I didn’t want anyone noticing my thicker middle and covering up with a sweater in the summer is really not that far fetched for me!

Continue on with “daily” life

The biggest key to keeping a pregnancy a secret is making sure your life is boringly normal! I tried to keep life very low key in the first three months! There were no dramatic changes. Work and the occasional visit with friends and family was what life consisted of. We never made any huge life adjustments. No renovations, no unexpected or unplanned trips and carrying on with our day-to-day. We continued with our date of the month and the bare minimum social event like the Shawville fair. Life was boringly normal for the outside word looking in but in our world we were busting at the seams with excitement!

 

I know for some people keeping a pregnancy a secret is not a priority. To us, it was important that we got to enjoy this early stage between the two of us. I wasn’t necessarily scared of miscarriage because I would have probably told my closest friends and family if I had to go through that. To me, keeping it a secret brought us so much closer to one another. We got to openly talk about baby until the cows come home without any outsider advice.

Life is SO much easier now that our pregnancy isn’t a secret but getting to enjoy the early weeks just the two of us was so special!

Have a good weekend!

xo