7 Ways to Say Congratulations, You’re Going to be Grandparents

by Donne Davis on January 28, 2010



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Eight years ago we were celebrating my daughter’s birthday. After opening all of her presents, she told my husband and me, “We have a gift for you, too.” We opened the gift bag stuffed with tissue paper and, to our delight, found a personalized license plate frame that read, Grandparents…Finally!!!

That’s one way to get the good news.

Six More Ways to Announce Your Pregnancy

I’ve also heard from other grandmothers about the creative ways their children told them the big news. Here are six more ways to announce your pregnancy:

  1. One 30-year-old couple found out they were pregnant with twins last October and scheduled a sonogram for early December to find out the sex of the babies. Their family was urging them to schedule it sooner, so they could share the results at their large family Thanksgiving dinner. But they insisted on waiting. Then, to everyone’s surprise, at the end of dinner, the father-to-be pulled out two wrapped gifts and explained what they were. The couple had, in fact, gotten an ultrasound, but asked the technician to put the results in an envelope without telling them the results. Then they went to a baby store and asked the salesperson to look inside the envelope and, without revealing what she saw, select two outfits for the babies and gift wrap them. When everyone opened the boxes on Thanksgiving, they discovered one pink outfit and one blue outfit!
  2. Another couple waited until their parents stayed overnight. In the morning, when the parents came to breakfast, they found bibs with “I Love My Grandma and “I Love My Grandpa!” on their place mats. Another couple had original fortune cookies made. After dinner, they passed out the cookies to the whole family and waited for everyone to crack open their cookies, only to read “There will soon be a new addition to the family!”
  3. A grandma told me she received a small charm as a gift from her hair stylist 33 years ago, when she told him she was pregnant. She wore the little ivory egg hatching a tiny chicken throughout both of her pregnancies. It became a family tradition and was passed through the family. Her sisters wore the charm and so did her daughter. At a family Passover, the older sister stood up and announced to the family gathered around the table: “Now, I’m ‘passing-over’ the necklace to my sister!”
  4. Another couple had the whole family over for Easter and for dessert brought out a cake topped with two pacifiers to let everyone know they were having twins.
  5. One of my grandma friends told me her daughter shared the baby news by giving her a book called Just Grandma and Me. There are many other new grandparent books available.
  6. Holidays are a great time to share the news. One couple bought two Christmas ornaments that said, “Baby’s First Christmas,” and gave them to their parents when they got together to celebrate. For Valentine’s Day, a couple invited their parents over and gave them a picture frame with three ovals. Inside two of the ovals were pictures of the mom and dad-to-be. The third oval had a message: “Coming soon” with the due date written underneath. Another couple gave the grandparents-to-be an adorable Steiff teddy bear wrapped in a pink blanket.

The possibilities are endless and they just get more and more creative with all the technology available today.

Do you have a cute story to share about how you learned you were going to be a grandparent, or  how you told your parents they were going to be grandparents?

Please share it in the Comment box below.

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Tagged as: Family



  • Carol Covin

    I wasn’t sensitive to understand how great this news was, and told my son and daughter-in-law the story that friends had told me I looked too young to be a grandmother and one had made up a new name for me, “Glam-ma!” Their faces fell. My DIL had lost both her parents a year after they married and never knew her grandparents. My son finally explained to me, “You will be our child’s only Grandma, and we thought you’d be honored.” Of course, I am, and Grandma it is!

  • Anna DiGaudio

    My daughter recently sent me a video with my 2 year old grandaughter saying “I goin be a big sister.” I thought that was pretty clever.

  • Irene Madrid

    My daughter framed a photo of her sonagram and left it on the kitchen counter for me to find. It took a second to register.

  • https://accounts.google.com/ServiceLogin?service=mail&passive=true&rm=false&continue=http%3A%2F%2Fmail.google.com%2Fmail%2F%3Fui%3Dhtml%26zy%3Dl&bsv=llya694le36z&scc=1&ltmp barb

    I am a midwife and when newly pregnant couples come to me, I have them record the baby’s heart beat on their cell phones. Its fun to play the recording for their friends and relatives and see if they know what it is! A great way for the parents to announce their pregnancy.

    • Donne Davis

      Barb, thank you so much for sharing this precious idea. I think it’s brilliant and how wonderful that we have all the technology to do it. Wouldn’t our grandmothers be blown away by this kind of announcement?!

  • Denise

    My husband was in the military, so we didn’t live near any relatives… We had some newspapers made up with the headlines that read: John and Denise having another baby!!!! and mailed them to the parents. They loved it.

  • http://www.grannynannynews.com grannynanny

    The following story is not intended to convey a new or necessarily positive way to say congratulations to the new grandparents and aunts and uncles!

    Our daughter, Michelle, hard-pressed to keep any secret, let us know almost from day one that she was expecting, but we were not allowed to tell anyone including her brother, Dan. We knew Dan and his wife also wanted to start a family, but we had no idea when that would come to fruition since they were a bit secretive as well. We certainly weren’t expecting an announcement anytime soon.

    Shortly after Michelle broke her good news to us, we had a visit from Dan and Helen. As we gathered around the kitchen table I noticed a little album. With a grin on his face, Dan told us to open it. Inside were some kind of photos which, as I put on my dollar store reading glasses, I came to recognize as sonograms! Being totally unprepared for their good news, my first thoughts were “how did you get a hold of Michelle’s sonograms, and how nice that you put them in an album for her!”

    As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, I find it hard to “stifle” – but somehow I managed to keep those thoughts to myself or I would have been in hot water with both of my children!

    P.S. Our grandsons were born 10 days apart!

  • http://grandparents.about.com Susan Adcox

    Holidays do provide lots of creative ways to break the news. My middle daughter gave me a Christmas gift of baby booties to announce her first child. Some parents-to-be tuck copies of the ultrasound into holiday greeting cards. One of my Facebook friends posted a video of her breaking the news to her family on YouTube and then posted the link on Facebook. Another friend served her family a king cake like they serve at Mardi Gras with the miniature babies tucked inside. As you say, there are tons of innovative ways to break the news!

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