Every other year, my family takes group vacation to Destin, Florida. We rent a big beach house, take turns cooking dinner and generally just relax and enjoy ourselves for a week.
It's kind of hard to enjoy yourself with the threat of a miscarriage hanging over your head like storm clouds. Just two days earlier, we had gotten the news that our baby might not be developing like it should, which could mean that Jun would miscarry sometime in the near future if that was the case. We were prepared to have to cut our trip short if we needed to in order to get Jun to a doctor. Now we faced the dilemma, do we tell everyone in our family about the pregnancy? What if everything was not OK with the baby? Eventually, we decided that we would tell them, so everyone would know why Jun was taking it easy, and not lifting things, and generally going slow. It also couldn't hurt to have some extra prayers at this stage either.
Not long after we found out we were pregnant, Jun and I started talking about how we would tell our families. Of course or parents knew the same day we found out, but it's always fun to tell the extended family. For Casen, it worked out really well that we told everyone on Thanksgiving when we asked my dad to say he was thankful for "all eleven" of us (which would have included the baby). I didn't take long for everyone to do a quick headcount of the table and see that there were only ten of us sitting there and make the connection.
This time, as soon as we got to our beach house, we changed Casen into a shirt that we had made up which said "Big Brother" across the chest and let him run around until someone noticed it. We thought he may run around for awhile before someone noticed (seriously, how often do you read a toddler's shirt?), but a scream from my sister Becky a few minutes later meant that she had figured it out. Of course her scream would also draw everyone in the house to her room as they thought someone was hurt.
We told everyone the story of the early/late ovulation story and explained that we were telling them early in case the worst were to happen. Everyone understood, and said they'd be praying for our little baby.
With that done, we went about our vacation. We swam in the ocean, we ate delicious seafood meals, we built sandcastles, we watched fireworks shoot over Destin Harbour from a boat. But most importantly of all, we made it back home still a family of four.
