Baby Chapman: Telling Family and Friends

After I spilled our baby news to Zac and we had time to celebrate and take it all in, we got to work on finding a doctor. We wanted to make sure that I was indeed pregnant and that everything was okay with our little jellybean before filling our family in on our exciting news. A week or so later we found ourselves in a doctor's office answering a ton of questions and I geared myself up for the not so fun physical examinations I knew were ahead of me. The doctor confirmed that we had a little one on the way and estimated our due date as May 14. A few days after this appointment we went to an imaging facility to get the first peek at our little bean.

It was great to see that there really was something in there since I wasn't feeling pregnant in the slightest (this changed VERY soon...but more on that later). The sonogram technician estimated that I was about 6 weeks pregnant and that little baby's due date was actually May 20.

Now that we had confirmation that our family was expanding we started to discuss when and how we were going to let family know. We decided not to tell friends and coworkers until I hit the second trimester and everything was going great. Keeping the secret from our parents and immediate families for six weeks however was not something that we wanted to do.

We were inspired by this photo from our wedding:

We thought that it would be cute to put a little spin on this picture using the shoes that I had purchased to tell Zac about baby. This is what we came up with:

We put the pictures together in double frames, wrapped them up, and prepared to give them to our parents. Zac's parents were coming for a visit and my dad's birthday was right around the corner. We had the perfect opportunities to give these gifts and share our news. The funny thing about these reveals is that it took a few moments for our parents to understand what the pictures meant. My mom was the only one who got the idea right away. Once everyone understood that there were three pairs of shoes in the bottom picture and that the empty shoes were baby sized the hugs and kisses were countless and the excitement was unmeasurable. Both sets of parents were anxious to share the news with others as much as we were. The time couldn't pass quickly enough. (That changed pretty quickly, too.)

I have been blessed with an amazing group of ladies in my life. I have the sweetest most thoughtful and fun girls to call my sisters. I couldn't ask for better relationships! I knew that my baby was going to have some fantastic aunties and I wanted to find a fun way to tell these girlies the news. I got my craft on...

...and hand painted some tote bags for each of these special girls. I was able to see some of them in person and the others who live out of town were sent little care packages. The phone calls that followed the out of town deliveries and the moments that came after the in person announcements are ones I won't forget.

Pretty soon we had hit the second trimester and made our announcement to friends and coworkers. I posted our shoe photo on instagram (@cristina_chapman) and Facebook and the response was overwhelming. The sweet congratulatory messages were plentiful and Zac and I were happy to finally share our happy news.