baby announcements

At work, at each meeting we have (about every three months), our principal asks for "celebrations." They are almost always pregnancy announcements, with the occasional engagement, house purchase, masters completion, etc, but by far, the majority are pregnancy-related. So at the one for the beginning of this year, the principal asked for any celebrations, and no one spoke up, so then he starts asking all the people who had babies last year how they are doing, and then went on and on about what a babyfest it was at the end of the school year. Luckily, my PMS was over, and I had already had a good cry about other people getting to have babies, so it only annoyed me instead of making me sad. It mostly annoys me that I have to hear about the announcement of the pregnancy, and then I get the mass email birth announcement, do I really need ANOTHER celebration for the same thing?

And I've also noticed that people without kids have a little more to talk about. They ask others how their summer was, and if they traveled anywhere, and then share stories about what they did over the summer. People with kids talking to another with kids only seem capable of asking "how's the little one(s)?" I'm sure I wouldn't notice this if I hadn't gone through infertility, but it's so obvious now. I was having a perfectly good, flowing conversation with a coworker whose wife just had a baby in May (our conversation was completely unrelated to babies). Then another coworker pipes in with "how's the baby?" He answered the question, and the conversation just kind of died because there wasn't any kind of follow-up or resulting flow of conversation. And then he and I picked our conversation back up. It was nice to talk to someone who didn't constantly steer the conversation back to his kid.