When I found out I was pregnant, I was really excited to share with others. The problem is, there is a good couple of months where you are hiding it from at least someone. Mostly, the people you work with.
Pregnancies are unusually common where I work now - I have never worked anywhere in my career where 3 or more people are pregnant at once, especially not smaller offices. My excitement had been building, especially with friends and co-workers also announcing while I stayed silent. As my excitement built, my ideas on how to announce that I too was joining the club of parents were growing larger and larger.
Then it hit me: use this as a creative outlet. I got my sketch pad out, mocked up a quick quiz and logic for a calculator that would allow you to guess my due date and tell you how far off you were, and then got to work. I took all the photos, pulled free vectors from sites like Vecteezy, and came up with something that I hoped would make my co-workers smile.
The great thing about interactive web experiences is that you get your user interested. This made my announcement feel personalized to my company and to each person. Everyone got to find out in their own way - and the responses shown to their answers changed depending on what they answered. People who correctly guessed 'girl' got to know I already bought matching dresses, while I didn't show that for those who guessed 'boy'.
I also didn't tell people what was going on, I just shared a link to something I had made and let everything come together. It made for a nice surprise, a good story, and made it a bit special for me. Which, I'm not going to lie, I wanted since I have have always wanted to have kids, Jason and I just waited until things were stable. I also am incredibly grateful that I have co-workers who were so excited for me - my boss had even suspected me and had confetti to throw.
I didn't do anything quite as fancy online - I honestly wasn't 100% sure if I would really 'announce' online as much as just start taking photos of baby stuff one day (what I did) - but I really enjoyed making the announcement something fun for the people around me on a day to day basis.
