Breaking the News: Hartman Grandparents

Being thousands of miles away, chances were slim that we would be able to break the news to my parents in person. We had lots of different ideas to tell them their first grandchild was on the way: Send gender the results directly to them and let them reveal it to us? Involve friends and family to surprise them with something? Catch them on a surprise FaceTime?

Plenty of good ideas, but none as authentic to my family as what actually happened.

The ruining of the surprise harkens back to 12 year old me being the most technologically literate one in the family. My mother was still struggling with leaving her Palm Pilot behind and getting used to the growing wave of technology called "smart phones." She, and the rest of the family, needed a good calendar solution and I was happy to get the ball rolling. I set up a Google calendar for us all to share, as well as a unique calendar for each member of the family. It worked and a few of those calendars are still used to this day, the shared Hartman calendar being filled up with birthdays, holidays, and flights as we travel to see each other.

At some point between 2007 and now, Google introduced a feature to streamline creating Google calendar events from information sent via email. They would take any Google invite and place it right on your default calendar - how convenient.

I presumed my default calendar was the calendar I had been filling up for a decade and a half, the calendar named "Zak". Google didn't like that plan, and my default calendar was actually the shared family calendar, "Hartman". This means that any event invitation that hit my personal email would automatically end up on my shared family calendar. Fortunately teenagers never plan out their hijinks with google event invitations so I avoided any embarrassing exposures for a long time. That changed recently.

Alyssa and I had my sister and brother-in-law, Jess and Brion over for dinner and we couldn't possibly contain this news from them all the way until the 12 week mark of the pregnancy. We were so excited to tell them, and Jess' reaction was everything we could have imagined. As we settled down, Jess asked how we planned to tell Mom and Dad. As Alyssa explained that keeping the secret would be so hard, a shy grin crept across Jess' face and she said, "I think I have a secret for you."

Apparently, earlier in the week she had called my mother curious as to why there was an Ultrasound appointment on our family calendar.

Is everyone okay? Is someone having a health scare?

My mother let her know that the Ultrasound wasn't for her and that she can't explain what it is from? It's not Dad's appointment, non Mom's, and not Jess'.

So process of elimination left only one Hartman that the appointment could be for...

Everyone in my immediate family apparently had suspicions that Alyssa was pregnant (rightfully so, the appointment did include "Birth Center") and was just quietly waiting for the confirmation.

Instead of waiting four weeks and throwing some awkward surprise for my parents who already knew, we decided to call them on the spot.

They answered straight away and we broke the news, or more accurately, we confirmed the news. Yes the Ultrasound appointment you saw in the calendar is for Alyssa, and yes we are expecting a baby.

Definitely not the way we expected that to go in our head, but it is surely a memorable way for the news to be broken to them. I'm sure there will be plenty of similar moments where things don't go as planned in the coming months. All I can hope is that they still result in the same joy that this moment brought us.

And yes, I absolutely changed my default calendar to my personal account the next day.