It's official!

We are happy to announce that we are expecting our first child in June 2009! We finally told our families at Thanksgiving even though we had known about the great news for a couple months. Although we had agreed to wait to tell our friends until we told our parents, Shereif told all of our friends early on since he could not contain his excitement. We wanted to tell our parents in person and to surprise them in a memorable way so we devised a plan for how we would tell each of them.

When we arrived at Shereif's parents' house, we hugged and kissed his mom upon entering and asked where Giddu (which is the word for grandpa in Arabic) was. She was taken aback for a second; but then Shereif's dad came into the kitchen, and Shereif called him Giddu and his mom Teta (which is the Arabic word for grandma, as you probably guessed). They were so excited! Shereif's mom promptly told us that she wanted us to have a girl since she has two sons and never had a daughter. We could only laugh at the request :)

When we arrived at Pam's parents' house, Pam gave her mother a bag filled with a few belated birthday gifts. The last gift was a picture frame with the words "#1 Grandma" printed on it. As Pam's mom pulled the frame out of the bag, she took a minute to read the frame and to examine the sonogram picture we had put in it. She immediately gave us each a hug, and Pam's dad quickly realized what the gift was and congratulated us as well. Pam's younger brother Pat was also there and commented that he had known about the news even though no one had told him. It must have been brotherly intuition, but the announcement of our news didn't end there. We later learned that Pat had left a message that night on his Facebook profile that he was going to be an "Uncle Diddy." Since Pam's older brother Joe was away at a convention, he had not been told the news yet; but he quickly found out through a phone call made by one of our cousins to congratulate him after he had read about it on Facebook. So, we were not able to tell Joe in person, but he found out the news regardless. We promised we would tell him about the next kid in person.

Now, all of our friends and family members know about the upcoming arrival of Baby Pea D this summer. We are excited to begin the new journey in our lives as parents and thought that a blog would be the perfect way to stay connected with all of our family and friends who cannot share this experience with us first-hand!