Fertility Now!

In the forest

I am beginning to wonder:  if you are pretty sure you've ovulated, but have no idea when that occurred (and do not have any brightly shining pee-sticks to help narrow it down), does it count?  Right now, I'm guessing it happened around day 8 or 9, but, as my contract law professor used to say when faced with a complicated question, "Hell if I know."  I am strangely sanguine, likening it to a doddering old relative with an endearing tendency to wander off.  It'll come back before too long, right?

I just got back from a long weekend in New York with some girl friends, which was surprisingly lovely (pregnant ladies and all).  There is something quite calming about spending several days with people you used to live with, a certain shorthand and acceptance that is hard to come by otherwise.  And because these particular friends are as obsessed with food as I am, it felt perfectly rational to spend the entire time together either (a) eating; (b) seeking out more food; or (c) recovering from eating.  From the walking chocolate tour of the Upper East Side to the funky Italian salami shop in SoHo to the dim sum brunch extravaganza, we ate exceedingly well.  Despite my general love of food, I used to have a much more limited repertoire of things I ate, and it was so freeing and fantastic to be faced with anything, and say, "sure, I'll try that."  (I think my friends were pleasantly surprised, too, perhaps wishing I'd been as free-wheelingly omnivorous when we schlepped through France and Germany 15 years ago.)

Since I've been home, we've been doing lots of family walks, cramming as much summer fruit as we can shove in our mouths, playing with FDNY rescue vehicle toys, and learning about garbage trucks, cranes and space missions.  Hell, who needs ovulation?   

Boring

Yeah, so even heroic measures?  Not enough.  

The techs at the lab where I go for my HCG tests know me by sight, name and type of test.  They are very kind, though I can't tell if this is because they've intuited my problem or think I'm just a potentially volatile lunatic who needs to be treated with a delicate touch lest I...well, whatever it is that lunatics do these days.

I've been experimenting with different sized needles with my heparin, trying to choose between less bruising/longer injection and more bruising/briefer injection.  Sometimes, just to mix things up, I'll use one size of needle in the morning and a different size one in the evening.  

I couldn't bring myself to buy some digital pregnancy tests for this cycle last night, even though they were on sale, because I was pretty sure that seeing the words "not pregnant" (the "you idiot" part is apparently only implied) would send me over the edge.

I did, however, visibly goggle at this in the same aisle.   Seriously? 

A friend recently emailed me with her troubles getting pregnant with #2.  After several months of trying, they were going to see her doctor.  She was upset, depressed, feeling betrayed by her body--all of those things we know so well.  I spilled our recent woes,  offered support and chatted with her about the testing, and then didn't hear more for several weeks.  I emailed her again a couple of weeks ago.  She'd gone on Clomid, and surprise, surprise, her first   Clomid cycle worked.  I will be seeing her tomorrow, along with another friend who is about 33 weeks pregnant.  Awesome.

It has now been 4 unsuccessful cycles since my D & C.  We are considering IUIs if the next two cycles also fail.  

Stop me, oh oh oh, stop me, stop me if you think that you've heard this one before...

Continuing

I'm about 3 dpo, in what can only be described as a "heroic measures" month.  Seriously, if I do not get pregnant this month, then I don't think I ever will, without assistance.

We just got back from a week-long trip to New England, which went surprisingly well, given the vicissitudes of toddlerhood mixed with new locations every couple of days.  Three things which helped:  a portable DVD player; this bed (recommended by a friend, and fantastically useful); and a steady supply of snacks.  To show what lunatics we are, we actually combined the trip with some intensive potty training, and were not too much worse the wear for it.  I will try to write a post soon, detailing our potty training regime--what worked and what didn't--because I found it tremendously helpful to read other people's experiences with their kids, and liberally stole good ideas from any and all sources.

We have a lot planned for the coming months.  I am going to New York later this month, and San Francisco next month, and am looking forward to both trips tremendously.  My friend also convinced me to sign up to do this walk with her in the fall; she said, hopefully, that perhaps the act of paying the registration fee alone would be enough to ensure a quick pregnancy.  I tend to think this is a bit of hyperbole, but it can't hurt to have multiple options open.  I am starting training now, and I am looking forward to getting out walking again and hopefully getting more in shape. 

We are also looking at trying to renovate/remodel our kitchen later this summer, after a particularly nasty leak left one wall slightly rotted, all of the cabinets adjacent to it damaged, and several feet of tile broken and pushed up off of the sub-floor.  Our kitchen was redone about 25 years ago, and while the aesthetic choices were all pretty inoffensive (oak cabinets; off-white Formica counter tops; white ceramic tile floors), it has never been what we would have chosen.  It is large, and in some ways very functional, but its layout has never worked too well.  We would also like it to be open to our adjacent den, so that I could watch Andrew play while I cooked, and also look out to the back yard.  So as it doesn't make much sense to pull up the cabinets, counter tops and floor just to put it back exactly the same, we are looking at re-doing the whole thing--if, of course, we can actually get a home equity loan now.  It is exciting but a bit daunting--way too many choices!  I am trying to figure out how, exactly, we can replicate the Barefoot Contessa's kitchen with a decidedly un-Hamptons budget.  

Andrew has taken several great developmental leaps lately, and has taken to telling us how he "was a baby" but he "growed up."  (Especially amusing was his statement to our friends' very pretty 5-year-old daughter, "Yeah, I'm a grown up.")  Let's just hope we can add "brother" soon to his list of "big boy" accomplishments... 

Blahdiblahdiblah

My period arrived today.  I was not even slightly surprised, because I am pretty sure that despite my many other positive attributes, I am not, in fact, divinely qualified for an immaculate conception. 

This month, I took the ovulation induction drugs, peed on a stick, and on day 12 or so, got the two pink lines....and then Steve and I both got the stomach flu, and the thought of even attempting anything was so unpalatable to us both that we decided to just sit out this month. I was also almost out of heparin, and as it takes considerable time and effort to get refills (pre-authorization from insurance; ensuring that the pharmacy stocks it; etc.), it just did not seem to be our month.  Once the stomach flu left, it ended up being a nice little month, actually--no needles; no worrying about taking or not taking allergy meds, depending on where I was in my cycle; no obsessive, weird, pregnancy-symptom-analyzing behavior; no wasted HPTs.

I haven't written--well, published, actually--much lately because I have been feeling ferociously ambivalent about this whole quest these days.  It seems that as soon as I finish writing an entry about how "I'm Up for Any Challenge, #2 Full Steam Ahead!", I cannot bring myself to hit "publish" before the next post, unbidden, springs to my fingers:  "Why We're Getting Used to the Idea of One."  

On the one hand, during months like these, when I step away from the worry and the rigmarole and the fucking sameness of the pattern that it feels like I've been living, in one form or another, for six years, I feel such relief and lightness and readiness to be done with this phase.  I see the reasons why stopping now would benefit the family we do have, why giving up hopes for a second child would be a survivable resolution.  On those days, I see the now 4-year span between the children as an impassable chasm, reason enough to just let it all go.    I am struggling, I feel, towards making my peace--to accepting that a failure on this front would be, ultimately, not the tragedy that life without Andrew would have been.

On the other days, days like today, I still yearn:  where I hold Andrew's sitter's baby, a wee blue-eyed girl a mere three weeks older than mine would have been from the pregnancy-that-ultimately-wasn't from last summer; where I congratulate my pregnant friend on making it to 31 weeks with her twins (while on bedrest), and cannot help but think about what this time would be like for me now, at 31 weeks myself, had I not lost that pregnancy, too.

I hope I don't have to make my peace; I so hope the next month or two brings a healthy pregnancy and a lighter heart, a final, happy exit from the drudging tyranny of infertility.  I hope that this unintentional month of rest has fortified me for the dozens of shots and two-week waits to come.

And in the mean time, I will try to remember to laugh and smile as I puzzle through Andrew's bold and often incomprehensible pronouncements, like his most recent one to Steve: "You're my wife, and I'm your sister!"  Ah, kid--whatever our dysfunctions may be, thankfully I think they're a little more manageable than that.         

Un

-pregnant, that is.  Cycle #3 of trying since the D & C; cycle #3 of sad blank pee-sticks in spite of textbook cycles.  Cycle #1 of weirdo obsessive behavior since almost 4 years ago, when I got pregnant with A.  

Also, in the past few weeks, we have had:

• An unexpected and highly unwelcome tax bill (which we thought would actually be a refund, until a quick last-minute review of the return before sending it in--T*rboTax, you can suck it);
• A nasty leak in our kitchen sink, which was revealed to have done all sorts of lasting damage to our cabinets and floor in one half of our kitchen (meaning that a full kitchen remodel is probably in the not-too-distant future, whether we can afford it or not);
• A notice from our credit card company that, to reward us for our long history of on-time payments, paying each month's bill in full, great credit rating, and significant increases in our credit limit over the ten years or so that we've had the card, they were slashing our credit limit in half (B*nk of America, you can also suck it);
• The realization that I got the date of Memorial Day this year very, very wrong, when making trip plans for May; and (my personal fave)
• A bird shitting on my head.

Then again, today it is sunny and about 80 degrees, we had a major potty-training breakthrough with the sitter, and I stopped doing my god-awful Heparin shots.  So all things considered, I think we'll make it through just fine, but  I'm thinking a margarita is in order. 

Ungood

Several years ago, Steve and I traveled to Budapest for a conference.  I've always loved going to art museums, so we decided we'd stop by the Hungarian Museum of Fine Arts while we were visiting.  Although I have certain eras or artists that I particularly like, I'm always amazed at the new discoveries I make when just cruising through a new museum--the one Fragonard that makes me reconsider my disdain for the rococo; the fantastically ornate salt cellar that makes me think twice about skipping the long hallways of decorative arts. 

So I was surprised in this museum to realize that while a lot of the paintings certainly were...old, many of them did not have a whole lot else going for them.  I had the striking realization there that just because a painting had endured for 400 or 500 years did not automatically make it a work of art. 

I had a similar realization yesterday while reading a children's book to Andrew:  just because it's a brightly illustrated children's book does not mean it is any good.  So far, we've been lucky--most of the books that have made it onto his shelves or into his library basket are, at the very least, amusing or nicely illustrated.  (There was the isolated disaster with the DK Phonics book, which he picked out because of its brightly colored cover and demanded that we "read" to him every night; its utter lack of verbs or any plot was really our problem, and not an intrinsic failing of the book.) 

Yesterday, Andrew picked up a book that Steve's mom brought for him at Christmas, one of several gifts that she has given him with the gleeful statement, "this isn't really appropriate for his age, but I gave it to him now anyway."  [This is a common trend; rather than buying these things and discreetly asked me to squirrel them away for later, she lets me  be the bitch mom who tells him after he's opened them and I've realized what's inside that, no, that shirt won't fit yet, and no, I will not allow him to open the Connect Four game so as to allow him to violently strew the tiny discs about the room...Nice.] 

Andrew brought the book over to me, and I figured I would at least try to read it to him, despite the fact that it had a lot more words than his typical preschool favorites.  My MIL had told me proudly that it was autographed by the author, so I assumed it was something she picked up at a church function, or maybe at an outing with friends who also have grandkids near Andrew's age. 

It started off unthreateningly; while the rhymes were wordy and clunky, the illustrations were cute, and Andrew seemed engaged.  It was about a girl who didn't like school, and talked about her difficulties at such length that I began to wonder if it was a story about diagnosing and treating dyslexia.  Then an odd feathered creature made an appearance.  And then.  And then. 

The "bird" started talking about flow charts.  And bar graphs, with titles like "Days I'm On Time."  When I saw the word "histogram," I became very suspicious, and the following pages that talked about "affinity diagrams" and "lotus diagrams" only deepened my concern. 

It turns out, you see, that while it is ostensibly a children's book,* it is a children's book published by a national association of quality control personnel, of which Steve's mom is a member.  I was keyed into this possibility with the line "You see, if you keep track of whatever you do, you will know if a trend's there, or if the behavior is new..."   (Another fave:  "the best thing is that all of these tools can connect to create the best outcomes from one week to the next.")   

I suppose the book has its uses, and maybe for disorganized kids in elementary school, it has some helpful ideas.  But the juxtaposition between vapid industry buzzwords, clunky poetry, and brightly colored illustrations was just a bit jarring for this "Mike Mulligan"-loving mama who was expecting just another sweet book of fanciful characters and amusing wordplay.  I may have to ferret this one away for a while, lest I be forced to read it again sometime soon...

*******

In other news, 6 dpo, 3rd cycle since D&C.  Man, am I hoping for this to work.   

*I am not linking to it,  because I think that someone probably put a lot of thought and love into the book, and I would hate for them to find me mocking their book through a link or a search query.  If you're curious, though, email me, and I'll give you the details. 

Three

Three years ago today, I was struggling through contractions, fighting exhaustion and ravenous hunger.  I'd grown sick of the same tired pink hospital walls, the joyless liquid "meals" they brought me, the invasive, disinterested prodding and poking.  I was ready, but I was also anxious:  would the baby be okay?  I was terrified, yet somehow, feeling him thump around inside, watching the steady blips on the monitor, I knew that he would be fine. 

A few days after we brought Andrew home, after the hospital drama, and visits, and cards and flowers and expressions of love and welcome that seemed to gush from the skies themselves, I sat in my bed, nursing him in a tired haze.  And for a instant, I thought, "well, now I don't have anything to look forward to." 

Thankfully, I was not too tired to immediately smack myself upside the head.  After all the craziness of the previous months and weeks, the teeth-clenched wait for years to get to exactly where I was that day--that fantastic, elusive fantasy of motherhood so bizarrely now manifest in my life--it was a bit difficult to absorb that  the end of the anticipation signaled a beginning, not an ending.

You now have everything to look forward to, I told myself sternly:  first smiles and cooing laughs, tottering steps and babbling banter, imaginary friends and sticky kisses, birthday cakes and encyclopedic obsessions.  Over these past three years, I have relished as many of these moments as I can, astonished that in between the hard stuff (the sleeplessness, the willfulness, my apparent failure to ever fully master the morning drop-off), these things are as luminescent as I'd hoped.  I still have days when I can't believe he's mine, that this fantastic creature was my reward for the many months of anguished hope.        

Earlier this week, this post questioned whether parenthood made people happier. 

I didn't have to even consider the question.  How could it not?  

      

Happy birthday, my beautiful boy.  May you experience as much joy in your life as you bring to mine. 

 

Learned

I was talking the other day with some friends about what we've learned since our twenties, what hard-won knowledge we can feel good about having in exchange for flabbier arms, wrinkles around our eyes, and newly-vengeful metabolisms. 

In that category:

• Women's magazines (the bulk of them) exist purely to sell you crap. 
• Optimistic though you may be, you should not always take people at face value.  People can have really odd hidden agendas.  By the same token, you often have no idea how much crap someone might be going through privately. 
• You cannot make a second line appear on a pregnancy test,  no matter how hard you stare at it.

So, apparently my miscarriage-inducing MIL fears are unfounded, at least this month.  Now it looks like she'll be staying here while I'm ovulating instead!  Don't suppose I have much chance of  Steve canceling her visits because of that...

Family

Last Sunday, my mother-in-law called while Steve was out.  We chatted awkwardly, our lack of connection--even after 12 years of acquaintance--painfully apparent.  When Steve's family was here at Christmas, we talked about them visiting for Andrew's birthday (the first weekend in April).  His sister wouldn't be able to make that visit because of work, but suggested coming for Easter, the next week, instead.

So when I spoke to Steve's mom, we talked about when she (the mom) should come out for Andrew's birthday.  His dad will be out of the country, so it will just be her that weekend.  We discussed timing, and then I asked about his sister's visit the following week.   She said she didn't know, and would see. 

The next day, I got an email confirmation of Steve's mom's flight for Andrew's birthday weekend:  Thurs-Sun.  Fine.  Then, a minute later, I got another one, for his sister's flight out the following week.  Only there was one little thing different than what I'd expected:  his mother was also listed on the second flight.  That's right:  she'll be here one week, Thursday-Sunday, and then again the next weekend.  And she never said a fucking word to me when we spoke that she was planning to do that.

It's not a huge deal; she and Andrew adore each other, and I'm sure it'll be fine.  But it reminds me of the time around Andrew's birth, where we'd discussed her coming out for a long weekend (3-4 days), and--again!--she never said anything different, but when we got her itinerary, it was clear that she was staying for a week.  I was an exhausted, ill, super-hormonal new mother, and the thought of having to occupy her or deal with her AND my new son for a full week was terrifying.  (Her visit, and the stealth length of it, was the cause of the first real fight that Steve and I ever had.) 

So I'm annoyed because it appears a pattern is developing--of her ignoring my wishes and just doing whatever the hell she wants--but also because (arguably irrationally) I am sure that these upcoming visits mean that I'm going to have another miscarriage.

I probably lost you there, didn't I? 

Let me explain:  last year, on the weekend of Andrew's birthday, Steve's family was here.  I found out I was pregnant that weekend, then started bleeding that Sunday night.  They didn't know a thing.  Fast-forward to July.  Steve's family is here for the 4th.  I find out I'm pregnant, while they're here.  A few days later, also while they're here, I find out that the pregnancy is not going to make it.  Again, they have no clue, and probably wonder why I have to lock myself in the bedroom and cry before serving them and our other guests brunch.  Finally, Thanksgiving:  we find out a few weeks before that I'm pregnant.  Signs are conflicting, but right before we leave to meet up with them, I have a good ultrasound.  We spend the week together, and then I come home and have a very bad ultrasound that makes it clear that the pregnancy is not going anywhere.   

Rationally, of course, I know that the pregnancy losses had nothing to do with Steve's family.  Last year, we saw them a lot and I lost a lot of pregnancies:  the two just happened to overlap.

But right now I'm about 3 dpo, and realizing that her visit will come about the time I find out if I'm pregnant or not, or about the time the pregnancy would head south if I am.  Unsurprisingly, that makes me a bit anxious. 

I'm pretty sure, though, that Steve will not see this as a valid reason to cancel her visits.  Men!    

These Precious Things

A few minutes ago, I had to scrub Andrew's hands, after I caught him helpfully trying to scoop the dog poop in the back yard with his blue shovel.  And his hands.  He squawked with indignation when I interrupted his "very hard work." 

Now, he is sitting in the next room, "reading" a book out loud.  The story (as best I can tell from his dramatic rendition) is about a boy demanding peanut butter and jelly, often in a very loud, anxious voice.  This is what the story sounds like this: 

"'I want some peanut butter and jelly,' the boy said.  'Stop yelling,' he said.  He wants to yell all the time.  'He wants to and he wants to,' he says." 

A few minutes pass. 

"And that's a great book!"  (Incidentally, the book ostensibly about peanut butter and jelly is in actuality instead about a beaver trying to find a friend.  Totally the same thing, right?  I am sensing now that his story structure owes a lot to the "If You Give a Mouse..." books.) 

We had a parent-teacher conference recently, and his teacher told me proudly that even though he's a bit shy of three, she saw some behavior that required an evaluation form for older kids, rather than two-year-olds.  She was very excited, and remembered brightly:  "Oh, that's right!  He got a cup in the play kitchen, where he was playing with his friend, and he made his friend clink glasses and say 'Cheers!'"  I blushed, dirtily outed by my sweetest ally. 

He talks now, at length, to everyone--other kids, adults, animals, introducing himself to the world at large:  "HI!  My name's Andrew!"  Last weekend, he made a new friend, and when his friend didn't feel good, Andrew chased him, trying to comfort him with sticky hugs.  When we brought the cat home from the vet's the other day, he murmured to her on the car ride, "It's okay, kitty.  It's all right.  Don't be sad, kitty, we're almost home.  Look, kitty, there are the houses, and there's some trees, and..." He remembers things from months and months ago, and astonishes me with the way he pieces together connections from disparate things or events.   

[He's now moved on to making up a story about a fire truck and a rescue and some of his friends from school.  He's asking them to go in his rocket ship, which apparently has to be cleaned first.]   

We're making sporadic progress on potty training, but discussions of a "big boy bed" have been met with an indignant rant about how he has a CRIB to sleep in, not a bed.  So offended was he at my suggestion that later that night when I said it was "time for bed" he quickly corrected me:  "I don't sleep in a bed, I sleep in a CRIB, Mom, a crib." 

He is obsessed with Bob the Builder, replacing his previous love, "Word World."  He will sing along with the theme song; he's also started making up his own songs about various things.  He also loves "Skinamarinky dinky dink" and sings it vigorously, grandly  incorporating the gestures. 

Two days ago, he managed to lock us out of the house, and when we'd finally found a neighbor at home whose phone we used, he was disappointed that we weren't going to go around to more houses.   

He is funny and sweet and fearless and silly; gentle and kind but boyishly rambunctious.  We truly are lucky beyond words.