I’m visiting my parents, so I told them our incredible news a few days ago. They were completely overjoyed, and I truly can’t imagine that the reaction would have been any different if I were the pregnant one. I bought these ‘Grandmother Remembers” and “Grandfather Remembers” books for them a year ago. My grandmother filled out one for me (it took her 13 years!) and I love all the family history and stories in it. I wrapped them and told my parents they were late mother’s day/early father’s day presents. They unwrapped them and as they saw what they were I said “The baby’s due in December.” My mom just kept saying “Oh my God” and hugged me and my father got tears in his eyes. Then I showed them the ultrasound pics from last week. It was perfect. They asked lots of questions, but all were respectful and things I had no problem sharing. We should be seeing Trouble’s family in about two weeks and plan to tell them then– it’s nice to have the luxury to share the news in person.

Our first appointmnt was today.  I’ve been anxious about it all week, worrying that something would be wrong, then worrying that we just wouldn’t know– that we wouldn’t have an ultrasound, that it would be too early to hear the heartbeat on the doppler, that we would leave with no more information than we had going in.  In fact, we did have an ultrasound, and were able to both see and hear that incredible little heartbeat– perfect and strong at 168 beats per minute.  Our official due date is December 29, 2012.  I am completely ecstatic.

Some of my worry before the appointment was due to what I can now look at as a good thing– Trouble is feeling pretty good.  She’s tired, and has some different preferences in terms of food, but that’s basically it.  The pain in her boobs has subsided (although the increase in size remains), and she has had pretty much no nausea.  Now that I know everything is moving along as it’s supposed to be in there, I can just be happy about her being one of the lucky ones!  Not that I’m naive enough to think this is a guarantee that things are going to be fine, but…one more hurdle completed.

In other life events…I’m currenly between jobs until the beginning of August, which is wonderful– I’ve been working 6 days a week since January 2011, except of course for those lovely weeks when I couldn’t walk.  We have some trips planned– I’m going to see my parents and some friends on the East coast, then we’re going to drive around Lake Michigan next month, and then a cousin is getting married in Colorado in July– which I’m now looking forward to even more, knowing they will likely be our last real couple-vacations for awhile.  I have been seeing a therapist to deal with the PTSD issues from the accident, and I think she (OK, and the anti-anxiety medication she put me on) have really been helping.  The civil case against the bar is settled, and the criminal trial is moving along and will hopefully be settled this summer.  I’m actually seeing closure on this in the nearish future, which, as we move into this next chapter of our lives, is pretty comforting.

I didn’t want to be one of the people who started a TTC blog and then, once those two lines showed up, stopped writing.  I’m determined to keep as much of a record of Trouble’s pregnancy and our parenting adventures as I can.  But every time I’ve sat down to write in the past week or so, I find myself with nothing to say.  We are just…waiting.  Our first doctor’s appointment is scheduled for May 24.  Until then, I’m afraid to write too much, to say too much, to feel too much.  I am already so completely in love with this tiny little unknown being who saps Trouble’s energy and makes her boobs hurt and changes her mind about what sounds good for breakfast…but it is SO EARLY.  So much time, still, for things to go wrong as the mulberry grows from the size of a sesame seed to the size of a lentil to the size of a blueberry.  At 6 1/2 weeks, Trouble still has no morning sickness, and I go back and forth between feeling grateful and wondering if that means something is horribly wrong.  When I get a text at work that her nipples hurt, I smile, and then feel guilty for being glad she’s in pain.  It’s such a roller-coaster of feelings.  My parents were visiting over the past few days, and not saying anything was incredibly difficult.  They talked about plans in November and December and I bit my tongue.  My mother mentioned that her best friend is going to be a grandmother for the first time around Thanksgiving, and I nearly drew blood.  I’m going to visit them at the end of the month, and if that first appointment goes well, I’m hoping to tell them in person then.  I catch myself fantasizing about exactly how to do it, how they’ll react, and have to remind myself to just wait.  Wait. 

“A kid on the way…a family on my mind.”

Last year on my birthday, I wished for Trouble to be pregnant by the time my next birthday rolled around.

Yesterday, I wished for our “mulberry” to be sticky and healthy.

I am so grateful that last year’s wish came true (with a week to spare!). It still doesn’t seem entirely real.  Trouble does seem more tired than usual, but it’s hard to tell if that’s actually true or if she’s just giving herself permission to go to sleep as early as she wants to, now that there’s a good reason.  Her boobs seems a little bigger, a little more “dense,” and sometimes they hurt.  She has some definite, unusual preferences for kit-kats and tomato sauce (not together!) but I’m not sure you could call them “cravings.”  If we were a straight couple who hadn’t been actively TTC, I don’t think we would necessarily even suspect she was pregnant.  The problem with the fact that I’ve been so obsessive about the baby thing for such a long time means that I’m hyper-aware of how much can go wrong.  When you’re TTC (or waiting to TTC, for that matter.  I almost feel like I shouldn’t even talk about actually TTC since our experience was so blessedly short), the goal is seeing those two pink lines, or blue cross, or the little “pregnant,” or whatever your test of choice is.  It’s easy to forget that after you see that  (which, don’t get me wrong, is absolutely AMAZING), the anxiety is only going to go away for, I don’t know, maybe a few hours, before you realize that while yes, you’ve achieved your goal, you’re still what feels like an eternity away from achieving the next goal…from having that “positive” manifest itself in a living, breathing, screaming child.  I’m sure that once the baby arrives and you realize that, while you’ve reached the goal of birthing it, you still need to actually raise it, is much the same feeling.  In short, I guess this is really just the beginning of the whole parenting thing, in which worry never goes away. 

Yup, I went for the expensive kind only after I knew what it would say.

Friday, April 20.  Approximately 13 DPO.  The line came up almost immediately and, obviously, no squinting required.  I am alternating between over-the-moon euphoric and completely disbelieving.  Trouble is pregnant.  This is amazing.

We had our second insemination for this cycle bright and early this morning. Afterwards, Trouble and I were lying around talking about the fact that, should this cycle be the lucky one, this baby would be quite the Holiday Baby. Conceived on Easter/Passover weekend. We’ll find out if if worked shortly before my birthday. Due date would fall between Christmas and New Years. And connected to Valentine’s Day, too. How, you ask? Because the date on yesterday’s vial of baby juice was “February 14, 2009.” So…Valentine’s Day three years ago. It was a Saturday. I have no idea exactly what Trouble and I did, though I might be able to dig out an old calendar and find out, but I know I had to work. So my guess is that we went out for brunch before I had to be in. And while we were eating and being lovey and even my obsessive brain probably wasn’t thinking about babies, around 2,000 miles away a young Jewish guy with brown hair and eyes was…uh, depositing into a plastic cup. And that deposit could end up creating our baby, years later. It’s so weird. Not the Valentine’s Day sperm, specifically, although something about that being his activity on that particular day is amusing to me. Just the realization that, whenever our baby is conceived, this cycle or next or sometime down the line, half of the genetic material involved was collected hundreds of days beforehand. It makes me feel strangely good, and sitting here writing I finally figured out why. The donor, the facet of this process that people who really don’t “get it” always seem to focus on and ask about, is just so far removed from the actual creation of this baby. I mean, obviously we couldn’t do it without that key genetic material, and I’m grateful to the scientists who developed this technology and all the men who donate the sperm that allows couples like us to create families. But when we look back on our baby’s conception, it will have nothing to do with the donor. His contribution ended years ago. We’ll remember being together. We’ll remember that I asked for the extra pillow for Trouble, that I held her hand and rubbed her tummy and forehead and pushed the plunger on the syringe. We will be the ones who created that baby, in that moment. And that feels good.

Trouble was inseminated again this afternoon.  It went smoothly, although she’s not feeling well and is also in the midst of finals.  She’s such a trooper.  This past week was an exercise in trying to hold on to the shreds of my sanity…largely due to continuing drama with my surgeon and insurance company, courtesy of the accident.  I’ll spare myself the rising blood pressure that would be sure to happen if I wrote it all out, and spare you the boredom of reading the gory details, but…adulthood sure is over-rated sometimes.  Work has also been stressful.  Happily, in the past day, both of these major stressors seem to be calming down a little.  Here’s hoping.  And then, of course, these pesky “dealing with real life” issues were compounded by the life inside my head, where TTC reigns supreme.  I somehow managed to convince myself about 15 times that we were out this cycle before we even started…Trouble started using opks in the evening of CD 10 instead of the morning, plus her temp was super low that morning…cue worrying that she was already ovulating and we had missed it.  Wednesday was CD 12, the day we’ve seen a +opk for the past three months…the morning’s first test gave an “error” reading.  I stayed awake worrying until Trouble got up and did another test.  Negative, as were two more tests later in the day…cue more worrying, this time focusing on the fact that this was a new box of tests and perhaps they were defective.  Yesterday, CD 13.  opks still negative in the morning and afternoon…cue obsessive worrying that Trouble will never ovulate again.  8:30 last night…positive opk.  Cue a small semblance of relaxation, followed by the usual worry that the clinic will somehow not get or respond to my message.  Which, of course, they got and responded to promptly this morning.  Inseminations were scheduled, after which I looked at Trouble’s temp from this morning and it was super high.  Never mind that the radiator in our bedroom is insane, never mind that she’s not feeling well, never mind that her temps tend to jump around a fair amount…cue worry that between 8:30 last night and 7:00 this morning she managed to have her full LH surge, ovulate, and have time for it to manifest in a thermal shift.  After I talked myself down from that one and managed to be vaguely productive for a few hours, I headed to the clinic…cue worry that something will be wrong with the sperm.  Good God.  This is only month two.  I’m going to give myself an ulcer.

All that worrying was, of course, for nothing.  I mean, the +opk ONE DAY LATER than usual is still a level of “regular” that many in the TTC world would kill for.  The sperm was, in fact, “a very active sample” according to the clinician (or as Trouble said, “Ew, they look like gnats flying around.  I just want to swat them.”)  Everything with the actual insemination went swimmingly, pardon the terrible pun.  Today, in fact, has been a day with all sorts of “good signs,” was I the type to look for the positives instead of worry obsessively about the negatives…someone on the GLBT fertility board is pregnant, which I read about as I was on my way to the clinic.  My sister got into graduate school.  My friend/assistant put an offer down on a condo.  Good things everywhere, so maybe for us too.  Yeah.  Thinking positive.  Maybe I should try that for a change.

 

 

Trouble got her period right on schedule today. Which is good, in one sense– if it had been late this month of all months, my hopes would have gone through the roof and the disappointment would have been all the more crushing. As it is, although I am, of course, sad and disappointed, I’m also not surprised. While beginner’s luck would have been awesome, I didn’t really expect this first cycle to work. On to next month, and although I actually did better than I would have guessed at keeping the second-guessing and over-analyzing down to a minimum, I may ask the clinic if we shouldn’t tweak the timing just a bit. We shall see….

Well, we’re halfway through the two week wait.  As I mentioned, I had a pretty busy week work-wise, so I haven’t been as obsessive as I could have been.  Not to say that I haven’t obsessed.  Our inseminations were Friday and Saturday and then Trouble’s temp didn’t rise on Monday, so only a couple days in I convinced myself that it was a wasted cycle.  Then she had a big spike on Tuesday, so I thought
“Hmm, might still be OK, maybe she ovulated later on Sunday and some sperm might have still been hanging on…” Then Wednesday her temp was low again so I was back to the whole “We have no chance this cycle” mode.  That day I vented on a GLBT fertility discussion board and quite a few women who have been at this far longer than I told me to just hide the damn thermometer in the two week wait.  So Trouble stopped temping, and it actually has seemed to help. Not that I’ve stopped thinking about it, of course, but I’m trying to think from a more Zen perspective– what’s done is done, we can’t change it now, what will be will be, etc.  Yeah, it works about as well as you might expect.  And I hear the second week is even worse.

To be honest, with the other thoughts that have been occupying my mind this weekend, obsessing about maybe-baby is almost a welcome relief.  Yesterday was Saint Patrick’s Day, you see.  On a Saturday.  In Chicago.  In unseasonably warm weather.  The combination of all those things meant that, from Thursday night through this morning, my lovely city (or at least the neighborhoods that my home and my workplace are in) resembled a frat house during pledge week (OK, disclaimer.  I went to an all-women’s college with no “Greek” life, so my knowledge of frat houses and the like is actually a bit lacking.  But I’ve seen plenty of movies).  Whether the comparison is totally accurate or not, imagine hundreds of loud, drunk, obnoxious people swarming the streets, sidewalks, and public transportation.  It’s awful, and I hate it every year.  But this year…well, the accident that suspended my life for a few months took place on Halloween weekend.  Another holiday that, in my neighborhood, has become an excuse to get extremely drunk and make an ass of yourself in public.  And while I don’t know if the drunk woman who plowed her car into me had been engaging in Halloween-specific activities…well, being out and about on a weekend like this proved difficult, to say the least (New Year’s Eve would be the third in the list of “holidays as excuses to drink,” but at that point I was still mostly home-bound.  Trouble and I ordered pizza and had a Harry Potter movie marathon.  There was no venturing into the outside world).  I would have stayed home all this weekend if I could get away with it, but unfortunately I had to work…which also meant I had to get home.  On Saturday night at 10:30pm, through one of the worst neighborhoods for all this madness.  Also, I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this or not, but my workplace is about half a block south of the intersection where the accident took place.  So I crossed the street right there to try to catch a cab, which I’ve done a dozen times in the past few months, but not with the amount of car horns honking and general screaming that was going on in the neighborhood last night.  Add that to several drunk people attempting to get in the cab with me at various traffic lights, the three different ambulances that roared through the streets in my 10-minute cab ride, and the numerous people being complete idiots and trying to run across streets while cars swerved around them, and it’s really no wonder that I limped into my house and practically fell into Trouble’s arms, starting to sob and hyperventilate at the same time.  She calmed me down, as she does, and we talked about everything…the upshot of the conversation being that perhaps I should stop staring at the phone number for a therapist that a friend recommended to me weeks ago and actually, I don’t know, maybe call it and make an appointment. 

I’ve always been 100% clear about the fact that I’m not quite myself physically yet, and the fact is that I’m not quite there psychologically either.  Car accidents, drunkenness, hospitals, biking…all kind of things can trigger an emotional response in me right now, so right now is a good time to deal with that.  It’s related to the baby thing in a lot of ways, actually…I don’t want to be That Mom who wants to wrap her kids in bubble wrap before they are allowed to play outside, and while I do think that time will continue to help, some coping tips from a professional can’t possibly hurt.  So…add that to my list for this week.