I wanted to do something clever for April Fools’. I thought about writing some elaborate story for a blog post and then at the end declaring, “April Fools’!” I mean I see statuses and such on Facebook all the time. But I was somewhat hesitant about doing it, because as a writer I know building trust with readers is important and a big fake out like that… I just wasn’t sure. And then even if I decided to do that, I had to think about a wild tale I could tell. Something fantastical, but not so far-fetched it is completely unbelievable.
The only two stories that I came up with were saying that I was pregnant or claiming to have won the lottery. As far as pregnancy, it’s been done, but also it is impossible for me to get pregnant so anyone who knows me in real life would know it was a fib, and I could have fun with it. And as far the lottery goes, who hasn’t dreamed of winning? What a crazy and wonderful story I could spin about all of my plans now that we have millions. But I paused when considering both things. If I made these outrageous claims would the universe decide I didn’t deserve to have kids? And instead of a 1 in 198,000,000 chance of winning the lottery, was I screwing myself there too? I mean we don’t even play regularly, but when we do I’d at least like to be 1 out of 198,000,000 instead of a big fat 0. I’m not superstitious at all, I mean really, but I am a worrier and so I just paused long enough to decide, “Better not chance it.”
So then I had to figure out what to write about because I wanted to do something, which is funny since I don’t ever prank others on April Fools’ Day and I think people know better than to try to prank me. And then I remembered a dream I had a couple of months ago and it took place on April Fools’ Day (in my dream, I didn’t actually dream it last April). And I thought, well why not. It was amazing and ridiculous and about April Fools’ or something that everyone thought was a prank, but it wasn’t. That could work. So that’s what I am going to do. And here it is, a dream I dreamt a few months ago about an April Fools’ Day I would love to have materialize for real – no joke!
Roy (my husband) and I were pregnant! Or expecting, since the bun was in a surrogate’s oven. And by expecting I mean we were expecting our little ones (twins!) any day now. On April 1 of whatever year in the future the dream was supposed to take place, super early in the morning, our babies were born. We were so happy, and shocked and even a little intimidated, because we had a beautiful baby boy and a beautiful baby girl… and another beautiful baby girl. Triplets! But we were only expecting twins.
I have no idea if this is even a thing, or how likely it is, since our surrogate would be getting regular, quality medical care during the entire pregnancy, but one of those little ladies flew under the radar, and now we were proud new parents who had been trying to wrap our heads around having two, equally matched our first time around, and now we were outnumbered.
Roy wants two to four kids, and I want a soccer team, and of course once we have kids these numbers will go up or particularly in my case down (because having ten may just not be feasible 😛 ). We’d love having twins because we’re not getting any younger and as cold as this sounds because of our fertility issues, having one child is about $180,000 while having two is roughly $240,000 – so it is just more practical for us to have twins, and twins happen to run in both of our families (not to mention be more prominent when doing IVF), but even I admit that being outnumbered from the get-go would be intimidating and overwhelming, but still all kinds of wonderful (I’ll take triplets over no kids at all any day).
So, once everyone was born and several hours had passed, we posted something on Facebook, announcing the arrival of our angels. But because everyone who knew we had babies on the way thought we were having twins, no one believed our babies were born. They thought it was a joke, because of our one baby extra and left comments asking whose babies we were posing with and telling us it wasn’t funny or to stop playing, because that April Fools’ joke was tired.
I thought how funny it was that it had been so hard to find a way to have kids at all and now we had more the first time around than we ever considered. And even funnier at how many people were excited and happy for us, but refused to acknowledge their births because they thought we were just playing a popular April Fools’ joke on everyone and they didn’t want to be laughed at. It wasn’t until a few days later, when we all went home that people realized, “Hey, they weren’t kidding!” And then the congratulations came. But some people still didn’t completely buy it until they met our three babies for themselves because you can’t photoshop real life! 😉
And that was my dream. For someone who wants kids as badly as we do, getting an unexpected extra is not a bad deal at all. It would be a wonderful surprise, though we would have to come up with a new plan in terms of caring for the babies and switching off feedings etc. And, well, we would probably be a lot less shy about asking for help! 🙂
-DMW
