pretty girl (Lauren/You- first person)

chapter forty nine.

"Look me in my eyes, and tell me that this was a good idea." I huffed, stepping back to take a look at what we had currently going on in the kitchen.

"It's not that bad." Lauren giggled, taking a step towards me and wrapping both of her arms around one of mine, resting her head on my shoulder. "We're almost done." I rolled my eyes, leaning into her slightly before kissing the top of her head.

"Define almost." I mumbled, heading back to the counter to finish rolling out the top crust for the apple pie I was working on. For some reason still unbeknownst to me, Lauren and I agreed to not only host thanksgiving for the second year in a row, but to make the majority of the food from scratch this time around. The pumpkin pie was finished, along with a few side dishes but while I worked on the apple, Lauren was seasoning and prepping the turkey. The sound of the tv was blaring from the living room where Delilah sat, putting a bit more effort into her homemade decorations this year by cutting a chain of leaves out of construction paper and going as far as to draw the stems and shade in the corners. I smiled each time I looked back to check on her, seeing her face scrunched up in concentration, she was turning into a regular Picasso and taking right after Lauren.

There was admittedly a bit of an ulterior motive for us having the holiday at our house, since we would have all of our family and friends under the same roof, we were going to share our good news. We had been discussing it back and forth, and while we were actually really enjoying keeping Lauren's pregnancy to ourselves, we felt this would be the best time. Not only because we had everyone together so we would only have to go through everyone else's excitement and questions only once, but also because we wanted to suggest that in lieu of Christmas gifts for the two of us, everyone picked something off of the baby registry we were still in the process of creating. Over the past month, we had been slowly digging into the various closets throughout the house and the garage, finding whatever things we had saved from when Delilah was a baby, which honestly wasn't much.

I looked up from the bowl of apple slices I was working on, turning slightly and watching Lauren work, letting my eyes fall to her middle where there was finally a tiny, yet noticeable, baby bump. I smiled to myself, watching her for just a few moments more before turning the opposite direction to check on Lilah. "Hey bug!" I shouted into the living room. "How's your leaves coming?!"

"Good mama!" She squeaked back. "Look how many I have here!" The patter of feet started quietly and got louder as she ran into the kitchen, showing off a chain of paper leaves as long as her arm span.

"Whoa!" Lauren encouraged. "That's so long!"

"I know! I want to make ten more and put them together!" The small girl jumped from side to side as she spoke, obviously enjoying the activity.

"You better get to work then!" I chuckled, shooing her off as she was already on her way, running as fast as her little legs would take her to make more leaves. Lauren and I shared an endeared look as our daughter disappeared around the corner. "Oh, okay. So I know that you said you didn't want to do anything cheesy for an announcement-"

"Where are you going with this?" Lauren cut me off, giving me a skeptical side eye.

"Hear me out." I held my hand up in defense, looking at my wife. She nodded as if to say "go ahead."

"I don't want to do anything that looks straight out of Pinterest either, but I think if we did a little something it would be fun." I began, pausing to gauge her reaction.

"What little something did you have in mind?" She tried to hide her smirk, playing up her disinterest, but not fooling me one bit.

"Well, since Lilah is making all those leaves to decorate, what if we had her cut out two big ones, a small one and a tiny one, then we put our initials on them. And a question mark on the tiny one. Then we can tape them to the wall, somewhere everyone will notice them. We don't even have to point it out, we could wait to see who notices it first." Lauren looked off to the side for a moment, and I was sure she was going to laugh at my suggestion by how long it was taking her to react.