Going public...

So I'd told my mum and J, after some persuading, called his dad. He won't admit it but I think there's a certain amount of "but it's discussing my sex life" horror about it for him too, but I wanted to tell the children when the time was right, not wait because we hadn't told other people and so on.

J's dad was clearly blown away by the news. There is something about announcing twins that's different to announcing a singleton pregnancy. Anyway he was pleased and excited so that was nice.

We called J's sister and I emailed my brother, each of whom called our sanity into question in a joking manner and then we told some friends.

Then I realised we hadn't told the boys yet...

Telling children they are going to have a sibling is a tremulous experience, they can react in so many varying ways, and what one needs as reassurance can have a detrimental effect on another, so having to tell three similar, but in many ways different, children at the same time is scary.

We were fairly confident Sam would be fine, after all he's been through it twice and having babies arrive is a fairly commonplace occurrence for him, what was more, one of his best friends at school had recently told him that he was to have a baby brother or sister in the spring. This would tie in nicely.
Ben, the current baby of the family could have gone either way, at almost 3 as he was at the time he wasn't a fan of babies.
And Josiah was the real unknown quantity, in many ways Josiah is my most sunshiny child, he's generally a delight, but he has moments of thunder and lightning, he displays a lot of the legendary "middle child syndrome" qualities. If we wanted him to react well, we had to choose our moment carefully.

It came a couple of Sundays later. We'd had a lovely afternoon, a big family tea and were still sitting round the table laughing and joking together.

Sam's first reaction was "But where will we put the shopping? The car will be full!"
The tack we'd taken with Ben was that he would be a big brother, and he was delighted with this news, although I need to remember that he's not faced the reality of a sibling yet, so this may change...
Josiah was a cheeky delight, "We can call them Loo-loo and Poo-poo!"