My mom is a really, really big scrabble player. All growing up, whenever my mom and Grandma Downing would get together they would play scrabble what seemed to be all day long for two weeks straight. My mom is professional. So, Dave came up with the brilliant idea to announce our pregnancy to my parents through a game of scrabble.
For father's day we invited my parents over for dinner. We set up a scrabble game as though Dave and I were in the middle of the it when they came over. Dave spent about 10-15 minutes coming up with this:
We had it planned that when my parents came I would tell mom that she needed to help Dave because he was trying to put a word down that didn't work--"baby" in the lower right hand corner under "first." We knew that would get her looking at the board and try to come to his rescue.
We made sure to hide a camera so we could have the classic reaction we knew would come from my mom.
Then showtime. As soon as mom knew Dave was in need of her expertise she was ready to dive into the game. She laughed at Dave for trying to put "baby" at that place, because "ib" isn't a word. (note that the word Dave was trying to put down was BABY!!) She then went on to tell us that you can't put January down because it is a capital word. We asked, "so you can put mom and dad, right." That was fine. She was looking all over the board trying to find a different place for Dave to go--she even told him that he had horrible letters. Finally, I asked how are our other words. She looked around the board and said, "Oh, 'expecting' is a really good one." and kept looking. Finally, (she said it was when she read toddler that it clicked) she looked up suddenly and basically yelled to let us and my dad know, "You're going to have a baby...in January!!!!" It was such a classic moment. We couldn't have planned a better reaction.
I'm now 22 weeks along, but here I am at 18 weeks (I don't have the 20 or 22 week pictures on my computer!)
It has been fun to begin the fall going ons with Dave starting to teach again and beginning his Master's program and I am teaching at BYU and my sister's studio. Time will fly by and we are excited for the future!
