Hydrogeek

So, only 11 more days until my sonogram. I mean, that's basically just 258.5 hours, not that I'm counting.

Good thing I have this to distract me, huh?

Porch smile

You have been married too long when the following exchange occurs:

My husband calls me at 10am Monday morning and says "Did we forget something this weekend?"
Me: "Yeah, we totally forgot Halee's birthday on Saturday! I was just about to call you!"
MH: "Um, what about Sunday?"
Me: "No, it's on the 17th, Saturday."
MH: "And what's on the 18th?"
Me: "Oh. Yeah."
MH: "So. Happy Anniversary?"
Me: "You too. We'll celebrate that...later."

6 years.

It's true. She's taking steps. At first, a few weeks ago, only with lots of encouragement. This weekend, she let go of my knees twice and took a few steps. Running is mere moments away. Trips to Wal-Mart will never be the same again. She will be one next week. What happened to my little baby? 

Akeeyu is a must read every day for me.

She manages to make me laugh at infertility. And she also posts things like that link above, which makes me want to memorize it and also marry it.

Have you ever heard a more perfect sentence than: "People just don't fear large amounts of Stupid like they should."?

I have not.

Go read.

(Got tired of the farmery background and found this cute little fall-ish one. What do you think? I think I wish I could make cute backgrounds all by myself.)

Pebbles

And may I just say that it took all of my willpower to not give her any chocolate last night. Well, except that not giving it to her meant I got to eat it. So not THAT much willpower.

After our first miscarriage, I was pretty shell-shocked. I was on Men-Est, which combined with the trauma of miscarriage, allowed me 2 blessed months of no bleeding. After all the months of bleeding, it was a healing time, not only for my body, but for my psyche. Of course, as soon as the regularly scheduled bleeding resumed, we were back to watching my basal body temp like a hawk and screwing like monkeys. Basically that's all we did (besides work on the new house) between March and October. Every month the see-saw cycle of high hopes, dashed by the sight of blood on the toilet paper, followed by lots and lots of drinking. Lather, rinse, repeat. It led to some entries in my diaryland diary that looked like this. Finally in October 2004 I ended up with a fertility monitor and what looked like a cooperative uterus. I was full of hope. And 4 days late. You can see where this is going, right? Bloodbath, population: me, that's where it's going. (What? Did you think I was talking about a cute widdle cuddly baby?) Another early miscarriage.

Several cycles later and we are to January 2005 and this diaryland entry. Finally, a diagnosis of infertility. I could have had that label earlier, but I couldn't face it. So in January of 2005, I had a hysterosalpingogram. Also known as the shoot-radioactive-dye-into-your-uterus-and-take-x-rays-test. It wasn't nearly as bad physically as I had been led to believe. Uncomfortable, but that was it. Emotionally, well, that's a-whole-nother ball of wax. I took the whole day off work and after the test I went over to a girlfriend's house and we made and ate a batch of chocolate chip cookies. I was hopeful that the dye being forced through my tubes would facilitate an easy egg path and nice pregnancy, but like so many other pieces of rubbish crap that infertiles try to convince themselves of, it was exactly that.

The HSG came back OK. Kinda funny looking once the dye exited my tubes, but my tubes were clear. I was officially infertile. Guess what that means. You got it! No more insurance coverage for anything coochie related. Beginning in February I was on Clomid. The Nug was monitoring me pretty closely, so I got to be pretty good buddies with a very cute wand monkey named Luke. I was ovulating every month, my lining was perfect, and the sex was methodical. I was still not getting pregnant. I wrote this post  about how much money I'd spent in the first couple of months of being an official infertile. I'm now laughing at myself, because WHOO! A COUPLE THOUSAND BUCKS! I wish I could write a letter to myself saying. "Oh Honey, chill. This is only the beginning of the wallet hemorrhage. You have no idea how much money you will spend to become a parent." After 3 months of Clomid, The Nug suggested I take a break over the summer and we would discuss the next step and possibly see a reproductive endocrinologist in September.

I was disappointed, horribly disappointed, but resolved to enjoy the summer. You should know that I didn't stress about it at ALL. Seriously. I wasn't even thinking about it the WHOLE TIME.

My anal ass was not able to control this. Not with all the monitoring and all the drugs and all the google searches in the world. And I thought I had it bad. So many people have had it so much worse than me. But this is about me, and next time we'll talk about how I thought things were going from bad to worse, but it turns out scalpels are good news.

We interrupt this tale of infertility woe to bring you news of mobility. The Dora Child is crawling. Well, she's mobile, anyway. Using one knee and one foot on the ground to "crawl" just far enough to get to the first thing to pull up on. If nothing is very close to crawl to, she's likely to put both feet on the ground and try to bear-crawl or stand up by herself.

I am SO not ready for this.

At that first appointment, Dr Nug made me feel SO grateful and hopeful. Grateful because when I'd been married to my ex, I only went to Planned Parenthood for any kind of female healthcare, and PP in rural Texas was NOT quality healthcare. One lady there took almost 10 minutes of digging to find my cervix. I know 10 minutes doesn't sound like very long, but when someone is digging in your cooch, 10 seconds is pretty long. Anyway, Dr. Nug started me on some bio-identical estrogen (estrogen made of yams and soybeans) and then said he was going to run several blood tests, including a pregnancy test, just to get all my baselines. I kinda laughed at him, but he was very reassuring and said "Even if you are pregnant, this estrogen won't hurt anything." I believed him. When the nurse called later that day and left a message on my machine saying congratulations, I was elated, but only for a moment or two. Because remember all that bleeding? It was still happening. When I called her back, she told me to stop taking the estrogen, and I told her that the doc said it wasn't unsafe during pregnancy, and she said "OK, then keep taking it." Now, I knew that progesterone was the hormone that supported pregnancy, but I figured the good doc knew what he was talking about. When the bleeding didn't stop, Sean and I pretty much resigned ourselves to an early miscarriage. It was a heartbreaking Christmas.

My gift to Sean that Christmas was a trip to Washington DC to see the new airplane museum at the Dulles airport. He's a total geek like that, and besides, we'd never really gotten to take any kind of honeymoon, since we married at the height of planting season that year. The trip was scheduled for the second week in January, and when I still hadn't actually miscarried by then, I started kinda getting worried. I called Dr. Nug's office and asked for progesterone supplements. The nurse said she could probably call in a prescription for me. The nurse promptly called back and said Dr. Nug wouldn't prescribe the progesterone, because this early in pregnancy, there was nothing to be done to prevent a miscarriage and she suggested canceling my trip unless I wanted to end up in an out-of-state emergency room. We went on the trip. I still didn't miscarry. My boobs started feeling fuller. I started feeling pregnant. We allowed ourselves to hope, and get excited. We came home. We moved across the street. In the middle of moving, I miscarried. January 15, 2003. I labored most of the day at work, having what I'm now are certain were 45 second contractions every 2 minutes. I finally left a little bit early, came home, and spent several hours sitting on the potty. Sean kept coming to the door asking about me, and I got irritated at him interrupting my concentrating on the handle of the drawer in front of me. I finally kinda felt a huge blob come through my cervix, pushed a little bit, and there it was. A big blob of blood in the potty. I didn't call Sean in. I didn't do anything. I looked for a moment, then flushed. It took about 3 days with a heating pad for my uterus to stop being sore. It took several weeks to stop bleeding. It took several months for me to be able to talk about it. It took several years to feel not-guilty about it. In fact, I felt guilty until my first appointment with my RE, when I told her my history and she said "If the doctor had given you the progesterone when you asked for it, it probably would have prevented that miscarriage." I tend to feel guilty over everything (lordy, lordy, parenting is plagued with guilt), but I finally feel ok about this miscarriage. I did what I could do for as long as I could do it. I think that baby was a boy. I searched and searched until I found what he looked like when he passed. I have two friends who got pregnant about the same time I did, and they both have little boys. When I'm around them, I always think of mine.

(Please note that this picture came from a pregnancy that had to be terminated because it was ectopic.)

6 weeks in utero