By TAYLOR BROWN
Nina Iampietro’s pregnancy has been full of surprises.
After trying unsuccessfully to get pregnant with her husband Jason for three years, a faint pink line on a pregnancy test in September caught her by surprise.
Now she is getting ready to bring her little boy into the world during a global pandemic.
Through a whirlwind pregnancy, she and her husband have had to overcome obstacles long before COVID-19.
When Nina and Jason got married in 2012, they agreed to wait before having children.
In 2016, the couple spoke to their doctors and began trying for their first child.
After three years of negative pregnancy tests, doctors suggested other options, but the couple knew they wanted to have their baby naturally.
“We really felt like if we could not have a baby naturally it was just the Big Man’s way of telling us we were not meant to be parents,” she said. “We were devastated, but we let it go and accepted it.”
Through difficult news, she and her husband tried to get back to normal when a miracle happened.
“We decided to try again, just because it felt right, and we got pregnant,” Nina said. “When I took the test, I was convinced it was going to be negative. But I saw a tiny, faint little pink line and I almost fell to the floor.”
That same day, she bought six more pregnancy tests and took them at a friend’s house.
“We cried together, I just could not believe it,” she said. “I wanted to wait to tell Jason in a fun, cute way, but I couldn’t hold it in and basically showed him all six tests at once as soon as I got home.”
After some surprising, but exciting news, the couple began to prepare for their “miracle baby.”
Immediately, there were complications.
“We had a scare right away and thought I had an early miscarriage,” she said. “But when I went to the hospital, it turned out I had a hematoma in my uterus that had ruptured.”
She had to wait four weeks before doctors could try to detect a heartbeat to determine if the rupture had disrupted the pregnancy.
“It was the hardest four weeks of our lives,” she said. “We were terrified.”
When the time came for the appointment, doctors were able to detect a heartbeat and give the couple good news: the baby was healthy.
In the coming weeks, Nina, Jason and their families faced adversity outside of the pregnancy itself.
Her “fur babies” had three major surgeries and her father, Mario Gonzalez, became sick.
“We had all of these obstacles and things finally started to settle down,” she said. “We were finally in the home stretch and getting so excited to meet our son when coronavirus hit.”
Pregnancy, she said, is scary enough on its own.
“Even before the virus, I was worried. I would constantly ask myself, ‘Is he healthy?’ ‘Am I healthy?’ ‘Do I have everything I need?’” she said. “You have little control over what goes on, and that is what is happening with this pandemic too. No one can control what is happening.”
Not being able to share her pregnancy with friends and family the way she had hoped has been difficult.
“This is our first and probably only child,” she said. “He is our miracle and we wanted to share this journey with our family and friends.
“This has changed my birth plan, made my appointments crazy, made me cancel my baby shower and has kept me from letting my friends or family put their hand on my belly to feel him kick.
“Everything we thought we would be able to do isn’t really possible right now.”
As a new mother, she took this as a lesson in parenting.
“I feel like that’s the first lesson you learn when becoming a mother, to find a way past the things you cannot change,” she said. “So that is what I tried to do.”
While she was disappointed in missing out on sentimental milestones, on Saturday she was surprised to find she would not be missing out on a baby shower.
Her mother, Cindy Gonzalez, said she never planned to let the day go uncelebrated.
Her best friend, Pam Sapp, suggested a non-traditional way to pull off the shower during the pandemic.
Cindy, Pam and a host of other family and friends ran with the idea for a drive-by baby shower.
“Seeing my daughter so sad because she could not have any of the traditional things that come along with a pregnancy, especially your first child, absolutely broke me,” Cindy said. “So momma bear mode kicked in and when my best friend told me about this idea, I knew we had to do it.”
In one week, she arranged for friends, family and the fire department to drive by Nina and Jason’s home in Carroll Township.
“It was a lot of secret phone calls and Facebook messages, but people were all for it,” Cindy said.
Saturday morning, she convinced Nina to get dressed up in the outfit she had planned to wear to her shower for some maternity pictures.
Instead, she got a baby shower parade outside of her front door, though it took her a second to catch on.
“The funny thing is, I saw all of the cars at the hall while I was outside, but I thought it was a funeral procession,” Nina said. “Then, even when I saw my mom’s car, I thought maybe she got stuck in the procession on the way to my house. Then I saw other cars I knew all decorated with balloons and signs and burst into tears.”
Nina said she was overwhelmed with different emotions.
“At first I was surprised and shocked and all of the emotion came pouring out of me,” she said. “It was obviously a great surprise, but it was a lot of emotion all at once.
“Being upset that I was not able to have a normal pregnancy and baby shower, but being so blown away at what everyone did for me. It was amazing and made me feel so special and loved.
“The drive-by baby shower will stand out in my mind more than any of the worry, the strife or the stress.”
Her son, Jett Adler Iampietro, is due May 19 — but is expected to make his debut into the world sooner.
“I am already dilating, so my doctor thinks it is more likely to happen in the next few weeks,” she said.
She is nervous about what life will be like for her little one when he is born.
“I want him to be able to be outside and see the world, I want my family and friends to meet him, I want to be able to yell to the other room to ask my mom or my mother-in-law for help, but that won’t be the case,” she said. “It will give us special time together, but it is still bittersweet that he won’t have those things right away.”
She is most excited for him to meet one of his “fur brothers,” a two-year-old standardized poodle.
“I can already tell they are going to be best friends,” she said.
When he gets older, she plans to tell him he was born during the pandemic.
“This is something that will be in the history books, that someday he will be learning about in school and I will be able to say, you were born during a global pandemic and everything turned out OK.”
Sooner rather than later, she hopes he will be able to meet the people who showered him with such love before he was born.
“They have provided security and strength for this baby and me in a moment in our history where that is the hardest resource to find,” she said. “I will never be able to thank them enough.”
Nina is the daughter of Cindy and Mario Gonzalez of West Newton.
Jason is the son of Chris Blednick of Eighty Four and Joe Iampietro of Whitehall. His step-father is Bruce Blednick.