The Sound of Joy

One of the most exciting things about being pregnant is telling your friends and family. Moments after I'd taken my third pregnancy test, Brandon called my sister, Kara, on the phone and told her to come over (it didn't take her long considering there's only one wall separating us in our section of town homes). Kara came in with a look of dread thinking that we'd just had a really big fight or something. I blurted out, "We're going to have a baby," and I heard "the sound of joy."

There's a book I read to my students (The Christmas Tapestry) about two Holocaust victims that are reunited some fifty years after they both assumed their spouse had perished in a concentration camp. The moment when they're finally reunited, the author says can only be described as "the sound of joy." It's an incredibly sweet moment and my students and I are always teary eyed when we reach that page. I know that being pregnant cannot be compared to being reunited with a spouse you assumed was dead, but when I heard Kara make that sound the first thing that came to my mind was, "That is the sound of joy." It was like shrill shriek escaping from a mouth that doesn't know whether to laugh or to cry - completely uncontainable.

Today I heard that sound of joy again when I told my work colleagues (or "work family"). Instead of just blurting it out like I had to Kara, I decided to be a little more creative. I had been working on typing up some multiplication quizzes for our grade level to use and they knew I was going to "unveil" them at our summer grade level meeting. I stapled the quizzes in packets and attached a sheet to the back with a picture of the sonogram and a note that said "Baby Jones: Arriving March 2013." I explained the contents of the packet to my colleagues and as I passed them out I said, "But the most exciting part is on the last page." Before I even sat back down a sound erupted in the room that, again, can only be described as the sound of joy. Considering it was 9 people, it was a little louder than Kara's reaction...but not by much, haha.

We are still in the process of deciding how to release the news on Facebook and to our friends. I think the only thing more exciting than this will be revealing the gender (girl, of course)!