Congratulations, you're finally pregnant! But how do you hide this from your friends in the first few months, when they will guess within seconds if you order water instead of wine on a night out? Here's Marissa with some tips on keeping mum about your early pregnancy secret:
So you're finally pregnant! Firstly congratulations are definitely in order. Whether you had endless months or even years of strategically peeing onto very thin sticks, using a diary for the first time since your tweens, visiting specialists or perhaps for you it was simply a case of that extra bottle of Sauvignon Blanc on Saturday night? However you made it here to the point of conception, you might be forgiven for thinking that the difficult part was behind you...WRONG!
One of the trickiest things that I think very little time is spent addressing rears its head during those uncertain first 12 weeks. Quite a lot of people attempt to disguise an early pregnancy and this is no mean feat. If your best friends are wonderfully skilled wine swiggers (obviously unlike mine *coughs*) and haven't known you to order a diet coke in their presence since you were 10, how on earth do you keep this schtum?
Here are some suggestions...
- Ye Olde Faithful - My favourite was to play the reliable "I'm on antibiotics" card. However, especially when you're onto a subsequent pregnancy, as you will have had to subsequently confess that you used this excuse the first time around, you are required to get increasingly creative
- Hide & Sneak - A friend of mine whilst out at a dinner with a large group, ordered wine and allowed her glass to keep being topped up, meanwhile her partner (sitting next to her) had sneakily been quaffing the entire lot, plus his share! Needless to say we didn't suspect a thing, except we wondered why on earth she'd married such a lightweight đ
- Vodka, Lies & Soda - Order something that looks like an alcoholic drink i.e. lime and soda and pretend you're supping the hardcore version. Now this is effective for the first drink (order before everyone else arrives) but more rounds lead to more problems. I used this once and had to order a "Vodka, Lime & soda please" and then had to keep surreptitiously running to the bar to remind them to leave the vodka out! Personally, this was way too confusing and exhausting for my liking
- Taxi! - You can try to convince everyone that last night's episode of Top Gear has reignited your driving spirit or simply that you have an early start the next day. This may well prove successful unless previous attempts at picking a designated driver have literally ended in drawing straws or mammoth sessions of scissors, paper, rock!
When did you share your news with everyone? Did you bother hiding it initially? Surely you can come up with some better excuses than I have đ
Having quit the City to spend days knee-deep in nappies & Weetabix, Marissa is mum to R (now 2) baby No 2, born in April 2013.
Living in Surrey, she blogs at Little Rascal Reviews on products, life & toddlers!
Image: Champagne Supernova via Flickr Creative Commons
I found it an absolute nightmare. I did actually use a couple of your suggestions at the time, but as a fairly hardened drinker, I’m not sure I was fooling anyone. In quite a few cases, I found the charade so stressful that I actually declined invitations.
I found it easier to just not go out too, as everyone would have guessed instantly when I wasn’t drinking. My best friend actually suggested I try a fertility diet he’d read about that involved stopping drinking, so I told him I was doing that (very timely excuse). The big mistake I made was at a work day out – I told everyone I wasn’t drinking and of course they guessed. My scan was the day after so I figured it didn’t really matter, but thinking about it, it would have been easier and drawn far less attention to not mention anything and just have a drink in my hand I reckon.