I begin with the assumption you told your parents and close family at the soonest possible junction that you’re having a child.

No, I’m not judging you if you didn’t do that; I understand. Plenty of reasons to refrain from telling the people who brought you into the world that they will be grandparents — before you tell other people.

This is about the “other people” in your life, and how to keep them from hating your guts for eternity because they found out their good friend was having a child on Facebook instead of being told face to face. Seriously though, you could be having the time of your life and think everything is gravy, and then all of a sudden you’ve been cut off, just like that, because one of your loose-lipped friends let the cat out the bag. Like, it was all good just a week ago, now you’re up one kid and down a friend. So let’s avoid that.

I have a couple ideas about good strategy for sharing with friends.

I’m no intelligence operative, but I’m pretty sure information security goes a little like this: categorise the importance of information, make a risk assessment of how secure each information centre is, then create a damage forecast for all information leaks. So let’s extrapolate that with our baby news.

When to tell: one aspect of sharing this special news with your friends is the timing. Not all pregnancies are successful, and it is heartbreaking to have a miscarriage and then to have to share that with your friends. So consult with your physician about how stable your pregnancy is, then share when you are comfortable doing so.

Importance of information: you might think that telling a friend that you’re having a child is simple, but there are so many bits of information! When is the baby due? What is the sex? Where will you have the child? All these questions are possible bits of information that a friend can accidentally share. You have to assess how much you tell each friend and when. We all have “that friend” who gets too excited.

Information security: think of your friends as leaky faucets. Some leak a little, just a drip at a time, and some you can’t use until you call the plumber.

Decide which friends are the least leaky, and tell them first. Or try and have a casual party, where the most leaky friends can join, and tell everyone there. Your main goal is to make sure that the people that need to know first, do so, or it could get super awkward the next time you hang out. Don’t let loose lips sink ships!

Maybe all of your friends worked for the CIA and you won’t have any issues with people finding out before you tell them.

For the rest of us, we can only hope for the best. If it doesn’t work out as planned you can always use my go-to line: “Mistakes were made”.