Bride and Groom Go Viral After Shocking 400 Wedding Guests with Garter Toss Turned Pregnancy Announcement

Hundreds of wedding guests were shocked when a garter toss turned into a pregnancy reveal.

To share the news that they were expecting their first child together, Chidozie and Nnenna Onyima pulled a surprise switch on their 400 guests during their wedding reception on Sept. 21 in Burbank, California. Instead of removing the bride’s garter, the groom pulled out her sonogram photographs from underneath her dress.

“We knew we wanted to do a reveal during the reception for our guests, but weren’t sure how,” Chidozie tells PEOPLE. “Initially, we wanted the MC to do a his/hers style game like ‘who is most likely to…’ and eventually lead into him asking ‘Who is expecting?’ However, based on our program, we didn’t know how to fit that in. So, the week of, I came up with the idea of adding the garter toss!”

Only the bridal party and media crew knew that there would be a surprise reveal, but they didn’t know how it would be implemented into the big day.

The unexpected pregnancy announcement was captured on video by photographer and videographer Eze Egeonuigwe of Visualsbyeze. In the video, which has now gone viral, wedding attendees cheered on Chidozie as he met Nnenna — who was secretly six and a half months pregnant at the time — in the center of the dance floor.

The mother-to-be smiled at Chidozie as he went underneath her wedding dress and suddenly emerged with four sonogram images hanging from his mouth. The groom held his fists in the air as the crowd went wild, with many of the couple’s friends and family pulling out their phones and jumping up and down.

“The moment we revealed the surprise, the energy in the room was electrifying!” Chidozie recalls. “It felt as though we won the Super Bowl!”

Traditionally during a garter toss, the groom tosses the bride’s garter into a crowd of single men, where the man who catches it is considered to be the next one to get married. In this case, the single men were initially lined up for the toss, but once they realized it was actually sonogram photographs they began cheering with excitement.

“The photos were not thrown, but the moment was celebrated by all, with our guests rushing to the dance floor,” Chidozie says.

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The Onyimas met in pharmacy school at Howard University in 2019 and began dating in 2020. Three years later, Chidozie popped the question to Nnenna on April 15, 2023, during her graduation photoshoot at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington, D.C.

The pair first had a traditional wedding in Nigeria on Dec. 29, 2023. Their plans for their wedding this year changed when they found out they were pregnant in early May.

Their baby is expected to arrive during the first week of January 2025.