Three days late are three days too many

All the baby toys and clothes had been given away years ago, as if that was a reliable form of birth control. Yet despite those careful efforts, I was still sitting on my bed with my calendar, counting and recounting days since my last period.

The next morning, I looked with a growing feeling of panic at the early pregnancy test. "Inconclusive," my husband said over my shoulder, after studying the two vertical lines that should have shown a plus and a vertical line in case of pregnancy. "I'm pregnant," I replied. He was skeptical, given the sketchy test, but I knew. With or without the pale pink plus-sign, there was a new little person already growing inside of me.

After twenty years of marriage and six children, we had our first unplanned pregnancy.