Below you can read a story of how a couple shared the news they were pregnant with all their friends. I know many of you have thought of unique and ingenious ways to tell your husband, your children, and your friends that you are having a baby. I would love to hear these wonderful stories. If you would like to share your story, can you please send it to me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.? Thanks.
Write PREGGIE STORY in the Subject Heading. Make sure your email is at the end of your story. I will share some of them on Facebook, but ultimately I would like to gather some for printing in the next Above Rubies. I can't wait to hear of all the original and exciting ways you thought of to tell the great news.
~ Nancy
TOP SECRET EXPERIMENT
By Bridget Welch This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Before I found out we were pregnant, my husband and I had three beautiful children--Alyssa (9), Josiah (7), and Emma (6), and they were all about to have birthdays. We had been wanting another child since our littlest Emma was a baby, but the Lord had other plans.
During these infertile years, God brought a beautiful young mother with three young children to live us for a time while she transitioned out of an abusive relationship. She became integral part of our extended family. We watched her go from a hurting lost young lady to a Jesus-loving, homeschooling mom.
Shortly after we setup our young mom in a house of her own, a precious girl named Katherine came to live with us. She had left home under some very stressful conditions, and God opened doors for her to come live with us. Four years later, she is now a full time member of the Welch family. Even though we did not have a newborn child these last six years, God gave us others to nurture.
As the years went by, I began to cry out even more fervently to the Lord, "Please Lord, Emma will be seven soon. Could You please give us another child?" One night I was at a Above Rubies Bible study group with some of my closest friends and I began to cry. I poured my heart declaring how much I really wanted a little one to hold. We petitioned God for a miracle during that time of fellowship, and a few days later I noticed that I had not had my monthly cycle in a while. I had been late before, so I did not get my hopes up until a friend of mine gave me a unused pregnancy test she had lying around the house. I had taken many tests over the last six years, but I prayed that this test would be a positive one.
I waited until the next morning after my husband had gone to work to take the pregnancy test. After he left for work, I snuck downstairs before the children were awake to take the test. With my eyes firmly shut, I waited a minute for the results to materialize. I slowly opened one eye and peered at the result. It was positive! I fell on my knees and cried out, "Thank you! Thank you, Jesus!" I felt like Hannah who cried out and the Lord heard her cries.
When the children awoke from bed, I immediately told them the exciting news. The children began brainstorming on how we could break the news to Daddy. We stuffed the pregnancy test, a rock, and a bunch of tissue paper in a box we had just received recently in the mail. It still had all the postal markings on it, so it looked very official. I then called my husband and advised him that a surprise package had arrived for him, and he needed to come home at lunch time to open it because it looked important and the children were dying to look inside. Luckily my husband only works about eight minutes away, so he was more than game to come home for lunch.
When my husband, Byron, came in, the children gave him the box and he gave it a shake. Then he cut it open and pulled everything out of the box and finally saw the test. He had a happy look on his face, but not an overly surprised one. My husband has a gift for knowing when women are pregnant, so he probably already knew in the back of his mind. After loving on me for a moment, my husband asked, " So how are we going to break the news to everyone else? "
While he was thinking about how to break the news to our friends, he swore me to secrecy to not tell anyone else until the big reveal. Now I have a big personality and I am a social butterfly. This request of his was very hard to keep, but I did! I was even at a swap meet with a friend who I consider a close sister to me. She noticed I was purchasing baby clothes, and I would like to think I was able to make a generic enough reason that would not have her suspecting anything.
My husband decided to inform all of our friends and loved ones at the upcoming Saturday House fellowship gathering. From the dollar store he purchased 20 pregnancy tests, and a large white poster board which he emblazoned with the title, "TOP SECRET EXPERIMENT.".
He asked me to take 18 pregnancy tests over the period of two days and asked Katherine, our adopted adult daughter to take the two remaining tests. He then pasted all my tests on the poster board in labeled chronological order. He labeled a small portion in the bottom corner of the board, "OTHER TEST SUBJECT" where he pasted Katherine's two negative pregnancy tests.
Saturday came around, and my husband brought out the board and told everyone he had been doing a "Top Secret Experiment" for the last few days. He explained it all to them and explained it in big words so it sounded official. The funny thing was that tests which were purchased from the dollar store were just small little sticks and no one could really make out what they really were. So everyone was squinting trying to see what he had done, because he was being very serious. After a number of perplexed looks at the board, the whole gang clued into what we announcing.
Today Jeremiah is eight months old and he has changed our lives so much! He is truly a blessing from the Lord. God has given us four blood children, one adopted child, and four very close spiritual children, and we love all of them as our own.
~ Bridget * This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Last night we popped over to Serene's to see the baby. What a joy to bask in the delight of this little newborn, although he is now three weeks already. Babies grow too quickly. But there was more than a baby. Around the room were eleven of Serene and Sam's thirteen children, plus two of her grandchildren. As we talked together it came upon us again the power of a baby. If we had decided stop another baby coming into the world at the time of Serene's
Your day is made up of little things, but all those little things add up to big things. When you do all the little, simple, even mundane and boring things with joy, it makes your family life great. Enjoy the poem:
Psalm 139:14 says: "I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: MARVELOUS ARE THY WORKS; and that my soul knoweth right well."
You are an extraordinary "work of the Lord." Each one of your children are an original and only one-of-its-kind "work of the Lord." Even more. God planned you before the foundation of the world. You were in His heart and His mind from the beginning. God is eternal, omnipotent, and omniscient. He knows everything from the beginning to the end. He knows everything you will think and say today and in the days to come. God wrote your whole life in His book befor
The trying days, the sighing days, the days when things go wrong,
Continuing the discussion from yesterday's post, TWELVE BIBLICAL REASONS WHY GOD GIVES US CHILDREN, one writer commented that most of the Scriptures mentioned were from the Old Testament and that in the New Testament we are not obligated to bring forth natural children, but only spiritual children.
I want to share Rachael Stokes' testimony which she wrote in response to yesterday's post, especially because it is her little grandson, Jackson who is pictured. She shares:
After reading my post yesterday of TWELVE BIBLICAL REASONS WHY GOD GIVES US CHILDREN a number of mothers shared that it was hard for them to read because they struggle with the pain of infertility. Dear precious ladies in this situation, I want you to know that I agonize with you. The ache and longing for children can be unbearable. After many years of barrenness, Rachel, Jacob's wife, cried out in despair, "Give me children, or else I die" (Genesis 30:1).
1. BECAUSE HE WANTS TO BLESS YOU (Genesis 1:27-28; 9:1, 2, 7; Psalm 128:3-4 and loads of others). There is a whole chapter on these blessing Scriptures in the book, Be Fruitful and Multiply.
All about us we have voices vying for our attention. Voices that fill our mind, program our minds, and even propagandize us. What is the loudest voice in your mind?
Do you like to wear an apron? I'm one of those people who need to wear an apron when I'm preparing food or I soon stain my clothes. I love pretty aprons but mine don't stay pretty for very long as they soon become stained and look well-used.
Never give up. Keep faithfully building each new day to make your home a happy and healthy sanctuary for your husband and children.
The greatest temptation from the enemy of our souls is in our minds. This is where he loves to attack us most, or should I say, even torment us. It is in our minds that he brings thoughts of doubt, deception, despondency, rejection, anger, self-pity, and even despair. If we are not aware of his tactics and do not resist them, they will become bigger in our minds and he wins the victory.
My daughter, Serene's little boy, Shepherd, is the gatekeeper of their land. Because they have to keep their cows from getting to the neighbors, they have two gates to get to their home. One is about 500 feet from their home and the other about 100 feet.
God's will for you is to flourish in your home. Here's some ways to flourish in your home:
Did you know that God's plan for you is to FLOURISH? And where does He want you to flourish? In your home. Psalm 128:3-4 (TLB): “Your wife will be like fruitful vine, FLOURISHING within your home. And look at all those children! There they sit around your table as vigorous and healthy as young olive trees. That is the Lord’s reward for those who fear Him.”
Jesus came to glorify God on this earth (John 17:4). Although Jesus is no longer on earth in bodily form, He still has the same passion to glorify His Father on the earth. But now He wants to do it, not only in Jerusalem and Israel where He came in person, but throughout the whole earth. Now He wants to do it through YOU.
What is your disposition toward your husband? I was struck by another phrase in Way's translation of Titus 2:4 which exhorts wives "to be amiable and submissive to their own husbands." To be amiable makes for a happy and loving atmosphere.
I love the Arthur S. Way's translation of Titus 2:3-5 where it tells the older women their responsibilities: "They should be teachers of virtue, qualified to school in self-control the young women, to teach them to love their husbands and their children, to be discreet and chaste, to recognize that their sphere is home, to be amiable and submissive to their own husbands, so that no slander may assail the Word of God."