Baby announcement gone wrong

She did know because the DH had lied to the MIL and said “oh no it’s not my Susan Smith, it must be the other Susan Smith in the village who is pregnant because my wife isn’t and hasn’t arranged a childminder!”
OP knew this.

Well in that case, just ignore them. Your DH has explained how this happened so the ball is in their court.

I completely get this. You don’t care about the ‘pregnancy announcement’. It’s that you tried to do a nice thing for PIL and instead of doing the totally normal thing and feigning surprise and being thrilled for you and telling your ds what a great big brother he will be, they were really nasty about it not being a surprise and acted like a bunch of mouldy old lemons at what should be a happy time for all of you, all just because they thought you didn’t do the surprise bit good enough.

It’s not the same but when I told my mum I was expecting my first (I’m an only child, these are her only grandchildren), her response wasn’t, oh my god, I’m so excited! I’m gonna be a granny! It was, “was this planned?!” 😳 I was a 32 year old financially secure professional woman who was newly married to lovely dh for 1 year, exactly the time in life you’d expect a baby to happen. And she acted like she needed to help me research my local bpas clinic like a 15 year old school girl. It was…weird. And as it turned out, said a lot about her and her own anxiety as a mother. We are NC for entirely unrelated reasons.

They have been awful selfish cows here and they need to apologise. I suspect this isn’t the first time you’ve seen histrionics like this from them though and won’t be the last.

You all seem to have made a drama out of very little. 🤷‍♀️

All of this ☝️

Needless drama - Your partner should have been honest with his mother, and generally, after the first grandchild, Grandparents seem to cool off quite a bit anyway.

The first child is the one who gets all the 'excitement'.

Yh sorry love I was gearing up to 100% be on your side but realistically you were trying to trick your MIL (both the hiding it in the first place then making her guess off a t-shirt) which is not the same as announcing

& Worst still(!) you didn't actually have a gift for your father in law's birthday.....?

I'd suck it up, apologize, (get FIL a card), & agree moving forward how they/you want them to know & at what stage & crawl under a rock till things calm down

Baby announcements are not birthday presents.

👏

Your cleaner and childminder shouldn't have said anything but you shouldn't have made out it was nothing when you knew mil already knew. She's obviously not stupid and probably felt like a twat when you decided to tell her.

(Also understand that the cleaner and childminder wouldn't have thought they were the first ones to know either)

Seems like all a bit deal out of nothing.

She’s not the only one.

Placing this level of expectation on other people's reactions is generally doomed to fail, to be honest- I always think staged announcements and reveals (and proposals) are quite stressful for the people on the receiving end!

On top of that, you did know they suspected already, OP.

I understand it's been disappointing- either because the cleaner and childminder straightforwardly blabbed or, as others have said, because they assumed the ILs would already know. Even so, you've got to keep it in proportion- what part of adult life goes exactly the way we expect?

And of course you must not cut your children off feom their grandparents over something so minor- will they forgive you? Would you?

Really agree with PPs who've noted that the real issue seems to be what's going on under the surface- both your relationship with MiL and your own childhood trauma. I think you'd be very well-advised to focus on addressing those things, so that you break the cycle and create a more emotionally stable family than you had.

Maybe this thread could be the start of something very positive for you all.

She DIDN'T KNOW they had already found out!!!

You obviously don’t like your MIL, why not be honest, it’s your mistake.
I really don’t understand why so many people have to be so confrontational and get so upset over things that in the great scheme of things really don’t matter. You might find life much less stressful if you let these minor irritations just pass you by.
You’ve created a horrible atmosphere, now why not just get over it, stop making mountains out of molehills!
Grow up …and stop being such a misery.

I’d sack the cleaner and look for a new childminder. You need people you can trust.

Your childminder shouldn’t have said anything. Your cleaner shouldn’t have said anything - but they did so instead of dealing with the situation you were in, your dh LIED to his mother’s face when asked the question. You both continued the lie by omission for several weeks allowing them to get more and more pissed off/hurt. Then you invite someone round to give them a birthday present and instead of giving them a birthday present you try to make them act suprised at a toddler in a t-shirt even though you know full well they aren’t suprised because they were told weeks ago and know they have been lied to. You built up the insta-moment in your head despite knowing it had been fucked up weeks earlier and that is all on you. Instead of being a grown up about it and saying “I know there were rumours and we lied by saying they weren’t true, but we wanted to do a dramatic reveal and pushed on ahead in the hope this would be a special moment. That hasn’t worked but the important thing is we are having another child which is very exciting. Sorry we didn’t get you a birthday present” you stomped off and are now denying a grandparent relationship but you definitely aren’t manipulative or a drama llama.

lessons to be learned

Your cleaner and childminder are unprofessional so you can’t glide through life as if they are.
Telling your mum an obvious lie and then cutely revealing the truth she always knew is more likely to result in hurt and annoyance than any genuine surprise.
Baby announcements are not birthday presents.
Locking yourself in a room until people leave does not resolve issues with blood relatives. Especially those who do childcare for you (assuming the “group” mil met cm at was a toddler group where mil takes the toddler on her “day” despite being a manipulative narcissist)
People don’t gaf about your ideas of a moment that are entirely in your head. They didn’t know you had a mental image of how this was going to go that was so powerful that you tried to push it through despite knowing the childminder and cleaner had already shot it down. They just think you’ve been acting weird for weeks and really don’t get why you wanted or expected a delighted surprise reaction to something they had already asked you straight to your face weeks earlier.
Social media has given people an unrealistic expectation of complex human behaviour. Your dh lied to his mum, and you both still expected this to be heartwarming. It was never going to be.

Sounds like they were massively unreasonable. That said, I wouldn’t necessarily give this one incident too much weighting and would care more about how they are generally.

Not read all comments, but I’d not be using that childminder now as you explicitly told her on the quiet and I’d part ways with the cleaner too! And I say that as a cleaner myself, I see loads of personal stuff in peoples houses, they trust me to not go blabbing to all and sundry, you just don’t do that.

You're being very dramatic.

The only poor soul in any of this, is the child, for their manipulative mother used them as a pawn against their grandparents.

People can only manipulate you if you let them. She wanted a drama and you gave her one.
you will take all the wind out of her sails if you act like this never happened and don't provide the fuel for her fire. Saying you will cut them off is silly and will just add more grist to her mill.
are you very young because you come over like a stroppy 15 year old.

Drama!

Would you honestly feel ok finding out your son is expecting through their cleaner?!

No, no one is picking up on MIL gossiping about her DIL, because she wasn’t!

Im sure as an ADULT woman OP could’ve not started childminding provision conversations for a five week fetus!

Absolutely this. You sound massively unpleasant and hugely controlling.

Growing up in my family, I was pushed aside by my own mother and got completely rejected when my sister came along and this was my biggest fear of this happening with a 2nd child and now this has completely conveyed my fears of this happening again, albeit it won't be by its parents this time.

Seek therapy to help you process this. You're making a MASSIVE leap here.

OP, from your other posts, you’ve long been avoiding your IL’s anyway, seems there’s no love lost there. What made you think your fanfare baby announcement would be any different? Strange to make someone’s birthday into a baby announcement if you don’t get on…

The cleaner and childminder shouldn't have said anything, it doesn't make it okay but they probably assumed if they knew then you probably did (childminder more than cleaner). I'd be angry at them however I would also initially have said to them that no one else knows so keep it quiet please.

You're angry at the wrong people, of course your PIL are upset. It probably looks like everyone else knows apart from them and it's understandable that you're upset too. Your reaction to that though is OTT.