How we found out about Bambin@

We found out about the pregnancy while traveling in Europe. We'd been traveling in Vienna and Prague with both sets of our parents and Ben's sister for a week when we began to suspect that I could be pregnant. This is the story of how we found out. It is almost all directly from the notes that I wrote down the day that we got the positive test, so it may provide more information than most people would care to know, but c'est la vie.

Family dining in the Czech Republic.

On Thursday, we were in Prague and I suddenly began to feel PMS symptoms. They were perhaps stronger and more painful than usual, but they were not categorically different from my usual symptoms. I felt certain that my period would come soon and began to expect that it would start any moment.

Blissfully unaware that we were already parents.

I had been charting my BBT for awhile at that point. For those who are unfamiliar with the concept, your basal body temperature is your body temperature in the morning, right when you wake up. In women, ovulation produces a noticible upward shift in the range that these temperatures can be. So, if you are recording your temperature at the same time every morning, then you should notice a general shift right after the day of ovulation. Cool, huh? Since the shift doesn't occur until after ovulation, though, it is recommended that you also check your cervical mucus -- as cervical mucus changes indicate rising fertility, whereas a temperature shift indicates that the most fertile period is already over. But there is no quantitative method for charting cervical mucus, and I am much more comfortable with quantitative data, so I hadn't been consistently observing my cervical mucus. Using the temperature method, I had a rough idea of when I typically ovulated each month and how long my luteal phase (comprised of the days after ovulation and before menstruation) typically lasted.

Unfortunately, my charting had been inconclusive that month because my temperatures had been very sporadic and I had stopped taking my temperature once we'd arrived in Europe, so I wasn't sure exactly when to expect my period or when to consider myself "late." I knew that an early estimate would mean that I should expect my period on Friday, July 6 and a late estimate would mean that I should expect it on Sunday, July 8.

On Saturday, Fertility Friend (the website I'd been using to enter my data and create my charts) was proclaiming that I should take a pregnancy test. On Sunday, I decided that I should test on Monday morning, but I wasn't sure where to find a pregnancy test. After some internet research, I found out that Tesco (a European supermarket that I knew well from my days in Ireland) sold a house brand pregnancy test. I decided to buy one at the Tesco around the corner from our hotel in Prague before our flight to Venice. 

A cute car on the walk to the nearby Tesco.

My parents had already left Prague that morning, so I didn't have to worry about running into them next door. Ben's parents were still in the hotel, though, and so I knew that I had to be discreet. When I went into the hallway, I could hear my father-in-law, Gib, on the floor beneath us, talking to Carol and Elisabeth. I jumped in the elevator and took it down to the lobby rather than risking going past them on the stairs. When the elevator stopped, I poked my head out to make sure they hadn't come down the stairs in the meantime, as it had sounded like they were making plans to go out. I scurried out of the hotel, looking behind me as I quickly turned down the street. I felt like a teenager sneaking out of the house. It wasn't that going to Tesco would automatically paint me as a woman who intended to discover whether she was pregnant or not. But I was worried that if I told them I was going to Tesco, they would offer to join me and then I wouldn't be able to buy the test.

Our hotel in Prague.

As it turned out, Tesco didn't sell pregnancy tests. Or at least not any that I could find. I walked up and down every aisle -- even the breakfast cereal and the jam aisles. I even looked through the ten refrigerator cases devoted to types of yogurt. It seemed far more likely that it would be in the toothpaste-tampons-condoms-baby formula aisle and so I walked up and down that one three or four times, but I walked all the others at least once for good measure as well. But no luck.

So we left Prague without a pregnancy test.

At the airport in Prague. Nervously wondering whether there was a fetus amongst us.

 As soon as we checked in to our hotel in Venice, I asked the gentleman at the front desk where we might find a pharmacy. He said that the only one that would be open on Sunday was the international pharmacy (just the kind of pharmacy I wanted!) and gave me directions that coincided with our proposed walk to the Piazzo del San Marco.

Our hotel in Venice.

Little did we know, there was a non-International pharmacy right around the corner from our hotel with an exterior vending machine that sold a pregnancy test, amongst other convenience items. 

What a convenient way to purchase a pregnancy test!

But of course the man at the front desk didn't know what we wanted the pharmacy for, so it was good of him to direct us to one with humans in it. It's lovely to see pregnancy tests in vending machines, though, I must say. I have taken a few tests over the years and even though I have never been underage when purchasing them and in fact I think I may have been married for all or nearly all of these purchases, I have always felt embarrassment at the check-out counter. I don't know why. I guess it's just such a personal thing to be sharing with a stranger.

In any case, we didn't know about the vending machine, so we found the Farmacia Internazionale on our walk. 

Our local Venetian pharmacy.

Ben thought that it looked closed, but it seemed fairly open to me and so I walked in. A man appeared at the desk and in heavily-accented English told us that the store was closed, but that if we needed something, he could help us. I paused for a moment, wondering whether it would be polite to try to ask for the test in Italian (I had looked it up before, so I knew that it was in our Rick Steves Italian phrasebook, but the wording had since left me and so I would have to ask Ben for the book in order to look it up again.) I decided that I shouldn't waste the time of a man who clearly spoke better English than I did Italian and just bit the bullet and asked for a pregnancy test. He said, "Ah, yes, I have just this one." And then he left for a moment and returned with a box.

A knowing woman invites me to pee on a stick.

 The test was all in Italian -- a Test di Gravidanza -- so he kindly described how to take the test, how long to wait, etc. My favorite part was when he pointed at the results pictures on the outside of the box. Pointing at the "positivo/incinta" picture, he said, "If it looks like this, then you are happy . . ." and we had a good chuckle together. I was glad that Ben was there with me. I think it made it clearer to the man behind the counter that we would be happy with a positive result. In all the other times that I've bought a pregnancy test, I have never talked with a pharmacist about it before. I wonder if my options in Italy provided me with the perfect balance. I could either buy one at the vending machine and have total discretion and anonymity. Or I could have a chuckle with an Italian father-figure as he explains to me how to use it. In the US, the experience is this weird middle-ground, where you don't really talk about it with anyone, or even say the words "pregnancy test" out loud, but you have to sheepishly bring it to the checkout counter and hand it to a 19-year-old boy to be rung up.

I fell asleep that night with much anticipation. I had planned on testing once in the evening, and if it was negative, using the other test in the box in the morning with "first morning's urine." But as it turned out, I was so dehydrated that I couldn't produce much that night anyway, so I decided to fall asleep and wait for morning.

Around 6:00am, I woke up and needed to use the restroom. I tried to go back to sleep, but I couldn't. So I grabbed the test off the nighstand and stumbled to the bathroom. The instructions from the pharmacist had been to hold the test in the stream of urine, but the bathroom was quite cramped and I was concerned about how to do this without creating a mess. So I collected it in a plastic cup and dipped the test instead. But the dipping also presented a problem. The test said that I should, "Tenere il tampone assorbente sotto il flusso di urina per almeno 10 secondi." 

The instructions. Very Italian.

I wasn't sure whether "almeno" meant "no more than" or "at least" and Rick Steves' phrasebook did not include this word in the dictionary. Furthermore, neither "at least 10 seconds" nor "no more than 10 seconds" was consistent with what I remembered from what the pharmacist had said (which I had remembered as either 3 seconds or 5 seconds). So I decided to compromise by dipping the stick and counting quickly to ten. When I got to ten, though, I nervously continued on to twelve and then decided that that was enough.

I re-capped the test and laid it flat on the sink. Then I got back into bed. Ben turned over and asked me how I was doing. I told him not to drink the apple-juice-like fluid from the cup in the bathroom (I hadn't poured it out yet, in case the test was defective and I had to use the other test from the box). I waited for the requisite three minutes and then I went back into the bathroom to check on the test. 

Oh my! I appear to be quite "incinta."

Peering over it, I called out to Ben, "It's positive." Ben called back, "It is?" and got out of bed. I said, "Yeah, it's lighter than the control line, but they say that that doesn't matter." When Ben came in, I added, "It is, right? You see that line too -- I'm not hallucinating, right?" He said, "No, I see it too. That's definitely a line."

When I'd first seen the test, it didn't surprise me, initially, that it was positive. But the more that I looked at it, the more stunned I became. Sharing it with Ben made it all the more unbelievable. That we were both seeing this. That we were both happy and nervous. That we were saying to each other, "I'm pregnant!" and "You're pregnant!" (Which we did for much of the rest of the day.)

We spent the rest of the day doing all the things we'd already planned to do. We visited the Doge's Palace. We went to a Gelateria on the palazzo near our hotel. We toured the Basilica. For much of the day, we felt just like tourists, not like expectant parents. But every once in awhile, the reality would sink in again and we'd look at each other and "Squee!" or "Meep!"

A celebratory gelato.

 

In the first few days, I wouldn't know what to think in the morning. It would take me a moment to remember that I was pregnant, that this was real, that it wasn't a dream. We only had the one day in Venice, so the rest of our trip was spent in Switzerland. 

Am I glowing yet?

I feel so lucky that I didn't experience any morning sickness during the remainder of our trip. I hadn't expected any, since I know that it usually doesn't hit until week 6 or so, and I was only 4 weeks pregnant at the time. But once it did hit (which I'll write about later), I was extremely grateful for that last week in Europe, when I was peeing a lot and still experiencing PMS-like symptoms, but for the most part felt normal and good. We went hiking in the Alps and ate delicious food and enjoyed the chilly weather that we'd missed during the 90+ degree heat that we'd had in the other cities on our trip. It felt so good to be distracted and happy and enjoying just the two of us . . . but knowing that there were three.