A positive test.

"Honey...honey...wake up. Honey..." The lamp on my nightstand shocks me into bleary eyed alertness.
The room is warm and humid. I grab my glasses to focus on my wife's face. Concern? Excitement? It's 2:30am and she's holding a plastic wand in her hand.
"...it's positive!"
Huh?
"Look. It's positive!"
Awake now, I know how badly Victoria has been wanting to get pregnant. I don't want her to be disappointed if the test turns out to be wrong, so I slip into Realistic Rob, almost negative, "Before we get too excited, we should be sure. It could be wrong."
The second one was postive too. And so was the third. We were pregnant.

Victoria and I had met nearly ten years before that night at a hospital - when a mutual friend was having a baby. A little boy. A little boy who, nowadays, isn't all that little.

After six years of dating we finally got married. We both knew that we wanted children. It was a regular topic of conversation. Kids, vacations, and how was your day. Victoria definitely wanted more than one. She attributes her shyness to the fact that she's an only child.
As an only child, she says, you have no one with whom to compare your behavior. You don't know if what you're doing is "normal."

I'm the youngest of three. My brother and sister are much closer in age to one another than they are to me. They hated each other growing up. I was Switzerland. But I agreed that I also want more than one. Which really means two. I think Victoria would ideally like three. That would be fine too.

Now our first is on the way. How far along? What is it? Are we ready?

We should be ready, or at least ready to get ready. We had already started looking into adoption after choosing not to try invitro. We had been trying to conceive for more than a year with no luck. Victoria had scar tissue from a surgery she had back in college that was getting in the way. The doctor wasn't very optimistic that removing it would lead to a successful conception, but it was the first step toward invitro. We had the tissue removed, then decided not to go through the long, seemingly painful process with no guarantee of success. We had long before decided that we would adopt at least one of our children anyway. We assumed that we would have one biologically, and then one or two adoptive. After no success conceiving, we just adjusted our plan.