I really am taking this “random fact” thing seriously.  I am not following any discernible order in writing about the facts and I certainly am not on any schedule to get them done.  I guess they are random indeed.

Pam and I had been married for about a year when we decided that we wanted to try and have a child of our own.  We were parents to Leslie, my daughter from my first marriage, but we still felt like a larger family was something we wanted.

Making that decision began a couple of years of disappointment for us.  We watched while other couples in my class at Duke Divinity School went through pregnancies and we hoped for our own.  But we were not getting pregnant.  At some point in time we decided that we needed to make up our mind about either adopting or seeking fertility treatments.  So, we scheduled a little weekend get-away so that we could really focus and talk about what we thought would be best for us.

We arrived in this little North Carolina town that we had decided to visit around dinner time and found an interesting local pizza place to eat.  It was the first time either of us saw a menu that offered spinach and pineapple as a topping selection and on a whim to see what it was like, we ordered one.  I can still taste that pizza. Yet, like so many other “firsts” in life, the taste has never been recreated.  We’ve had excellent “specialty pizzas”, especially at “Pies and Pints” here in West Virginia, but I don’t think I have ever had as good a slice of pineapple and spinach pizza anywhere.

There was one problem though.  Despite it being so good, Pam developed a terrible case of indigestion and hardly slept that night.  In the morning, she still wasn’t feeling much better but we went on with our visit and took time to have our discussion.

Sometime in the afternoon of that second day, we had pretty much made up our minds to start the process of adoption.  For us, it just seemed like the right thing to do, especially since we both saw ourselves as “adopted” members of Jesus’ family in the church.  We also just could not justify spending the money on fertility treatments that may or may not work.  So we enjoyed the rest of our weekend and went home “at peace” with our decision.

On Monday, instead of feeling better, Pam was so ill she thought that she needed to go see her doctor.  I had to head off to classes at Duke but she was sure she could make it across town to the docs office and then to work.

I was a little surprised and worried when I got back from class that afternoon to find her car in the driveway and began thinking that she must have really gotten sick.  I was even more befuddled when after I walked in the house and over towards where she was sitting on our couch.  She got up, walked over to me and handed me this little plastic stick before I had a chance to set my books down from class.

I knew immediately what she had given me and one look down told me that she was pregnant.

I said, “Is this a joke?”

“Nope,” she said, “the doctor wouldn’t treat me for anything until they did a pregnancy test and you see for yourself that it’s positive!”

Now…it is at this point in the story that I have to simply say that my response came more from surprise, shock and disbelief especially after the weekend decision we had made.  My books hit the floor and my mouth opened more in reflex than anything else.  I won’t tell you exactly what word came out of my mouth but I will say that it was a word with which I was quite familiar.  My grandmother used that used like some people use sighing. These days, well, we jokingly refer to the word as “Nana’s Word” in our house.  The word has a bit of family history, to say the least, and chances are I have done everything I can to pass on the tradition – even without knowing it.

There you have it…Random Fact Number 6!