back among the blogging

Yes, I’m still here. Coming off the Christmas madness with my whole family (well, one sister and her family couldn’t make it due to the crazy weather and all the airline delays) and trying to soak up the precious moments of solitude. We always say, my family and I, that when we are all together we are going to take it easy and not do too much, and we can take time on our own and just relax. But we never do it, and it always turns into this whole togetherstravaganza that I both love and find completely exhausting.

Where to begin on everything else that’s been rattling around my brain these last weeks is a whole nother thing. Many deep thoughts on the solstice/advent as they relate to IF, insights into family dynamics with which I will not trouble you, a complete abandonment of all my food restrictions over the holidays which surprisingly didn’t leave me feeling too shithouse and not surprisingly at all was extremely pleasant (I think the high point was the 1/4 lb. of asiago I made sweet love to at our party on the 28th), a fiendishly difficult jigsaw puzzle of Machu Pichu that has, once and for all, exposed my poor choices of jigsaw puzzles (better a hideous watercolour of an English country garden than a panoramic view of a world wonder that is mostly sky, I have learned), the mad emotions of doing a Christmas with children who are not one’s own, but close enough to stir up the hormones in a way that is both marvelous and hideously uncomfortable.

I may expand on some of the above at some point, but for now will leave you with wishes for a joyful, peaceful 2009. May it be the year that brings you the healing you most need, the desires your heart holds most dear, and happiness beyond measure.

Oh, and if you haven’t checked out the Creme de la Creme 2008, I urge you to do so. I spent most of yesterday reading, weeping, laughing and thinking to myself that the Creme is simply the BEST. THING. EVER. Thank you, Lolly, for this most amazing gift.

Protected: hungry, tired, happy

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me me me me meme

Thanks, Kate, for tagging me. As I was reading her answers to this awesome meme, I was just wishing to get tagged and wanting to do it myself. So I was well and truly chuffed when I got to the bottom and found my name there. Woot!

4 things I did 10 years ago:

1. I finished my degree (BA Hons in Philosophy) and won the prize for the top Faculty of Arts graduate at the Fall Convocation. Yes, I am proud to be a brainiac.
2. I moved to Vancouver for 3 months and lived with my friend, Dave, in a great apartment in a great area which has now become very hip. Main Street’s star was rising in 1998, but it was nothing like it is now. However, the Locus had just opened and Dave and I spent an absurd amount of time and money eating and drinking there. I spent a lot of time crushing on the hottest chef there, nicknamed Serpico for his awesomely sexy sideburns. Although Serpico and I played a lot of eye hockey, I never got to nail him the way I so desparately wanted. Alas.
3. I floundered around a lot in Vancouver. It was a fun time, but I was pretty lost in some ways. I worked in a bakery, which was an ass-sucky job, and tried to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. Mostly I hung out and slacked. In retrospect, it was actually quite good for me – I’d never spent that much time at loose ends before, and thinking of it now, it really helped me to see that I could survive not being a superstar at life. That working for minimum wage and not being on anyone’s radar was not the end of the world. (However, I did move back home and in with my parents after 3 months of that.)
4. I saw Modest Mouse and Built to Spill on a double bill. That was sweet.

4 things I did 5 years ago:

1. I said goodbye to Japan and moved home. It was so hard to do – to leave behind so many amazing friends and colleagues and students and come back to my hometown after changing so much after being there for 3 years. The reverse culture shock was so difficult – way harder than the culture shock of moving there in the first place. I came back with no clue what I was going to do for work, no clear sense of what our life would be like, no idea whether I would still connect with the few friends who hadn’t moved away, not knowing if I would even want to live here anymore. Really I had no idea who I was in relation to the place I had lived for the vast majority of my life. If I was lost when I lived in Vancouver, I was completely desolate when I moved back here in 2003.
2. On the way home from Japan, I did a road trip with two amazing friends up the coast from San Francisco to Vancouver. We camped and hiked in the redwood forests, in the sand dunes on the Oregon coast, at Mount Rainier. It was beautiful and a good way to transition from Japanese life to North American life. Unfortunately, I was quite sullen the whole trip because they were both going back to Japan and I wasn’t and because the reality of all of that was starting to hit me. The other notable thing about that trip is that I had never really spent any time in the States before, and it was really interesting. I spent a week with my sister outside San Francisco, and then another week travelling up the coast. There are certain things that are very different between the US and Canada, but so many things that are the same. So I was kind of tuned into that, but also just flooded with the weirdness of being back in North America again. I distinctly remember going to Whole Foods with my sister and just feeling like I was in paradise – so many things I had missed while living abroad were just there in ridiculous abundance. Real bread, good cheese, particular fruits and vegetables.
3. I started working in the job that has forever soured me on jobs. (Maybe not forever, but I’m definitely still in recovery.) In 2003, though, it was fun and exciting. I worked for a cool, young, politician and got to travel and be involved in high-level policy discussions. Little did I know that my eventual rising through the ranks would inversely mirror my descent into workaholism and debilitating stress. Never mind – in 2003, I had a good job that was interesting and new and paid well enough for me to start building a pretty awesome clothes arsenal.
4. We bought our awesome house in 2003. A few weeks after we moved in, my husband threw me a huge surprise party for my 30th birthday. We were so freshly moved in at that time that Manny had tacked up blankets for curtains and we still had boxes of stuff piled up all over the place. My dad had flown in as a surprise a few days earlier, and he and I went out for supper. When we came back home with a bottle of wine to continue our visit, I opened the door and saw about 40 pairs of shoes. I was completely surprised and it was so beautiful to feel so loved.

4 things I did yesterday:

1. Took my grandad grocery shopping. My grandma is laid up right now with a sore leg and she has trouble getting around at the best of times, so grandad is tagged with the shopping duties. When I was growing up, my grandad was very uptight and I never felt close to him at all, and that brought a lot of anger sometimes. I realized recently that he was likely depressed for much of my life and that’s probably why he seemed so shut down. In the last few years, since they’ve moved into an apartment, he has really blossomed and become much happier. I am so blessed to get to spend time with him now – I can see how alike we are, and really enjoy that connection that is starting to grow between us. We did some running around yesterday, and on the way home, we stopped at Dairy Queen so he could get some Dilly Bars for my grandma to cheer her up. He wanted to buy me a box, too. Even though I can’t really eat them (ok, I ate one yesterday and felt kind of gross afterwards and now I have 11 sitting in my freezer and I don’t know what to do with them other than pawn them off on kids who come to my house, which I should make happen soon, because I really do like Dilly Bars and they will call to me as long as they’re in there), I accepted his offer because it was so sweet and generous and I could tell he had planned it all along, even before I picked him up. Just by the way he asked me if I liked them earlier in the trip, and then with his offer as we were standing there in front of the cooler. I never thought I’d say this, but I wouldn’t trade the grandad I have now for the grandad I used to want. Not for the world.
2. Walked with my dog in the sunshine, and enjoyed his company. Also swelled with pride as he played with a little puppy and acted like the mature dog he is, instead of like the shithead he was being for a while when he was going through his macho, dominant phase and didn’t know when to stop. When he was playing with the puppy yesterday, they’d chase and wrestle, but then he’d stop and lie down and give her a chance to initiate things and build up her confidence. I just couldn’t have been prouder of him, seeing him be all grown up and generous like that.
3. Made a veggie pad thai-type thing for supper using brown rice vermicelli, which are super delicious and I just found by accident in the Asian food section of Superstore. Realized I need to keep fish sauce on hand for further experiments of the Southeast Asian cooking variety. But it worked out quite well despite the lack of fish sauce.
4. Intended to do the following, but never got to it: meditate, work on the garden, do housework, do laundry, have sex with Manny (I fell asleep! I feel so bad! Sorry Manny!).

4 shows I love to watch:

1. Law & Order – any flavour. I love them all.
2. What Not to Wear – my fashion experiements of yesteryear are mostly behind me, thanks to Clinton and Stacey. Why did I ever think that flood pants were just the coolest of the cool?
3. House – sexy. curmudgeon.
4. Trailer Park Boys – just started watching this one, but how can you not love a show that contains lines like “He’s just a shit-leopard that won’t change his spots”?

4 things I love to do:

1. Bird-watch
2. Garden
3. Dance
4. Be with my nephews

There you have it, friends. I’m going to tag Spicy Sister , First Comes Love, shinejil at Sluggish Butterfly, and PJ at Infertility on the Brain. As well as my usual tag of anyone who reads this – just leave me a comment and/or a link so I can read your responses. What fun!

mmm, toast…

I’ve been thinking about how my posts have changed a lot since I started posting. I’ve been doing way more “fact-y” updates and fewer “deep thoughts” posts. I’m not entirely sure why that is. Maybe because in the beginning I was so thrilled to find this community, and I was all full of pent-up deep thoughts, and then I let them all out and my brain got all quiet and boring inside.

It’s still pretty quiet in there. I have some things starting to rumble around, but mostly it’s a big fog that just wants to eat toast and watch Simply Ballroom. So I think that’s what I’ll do for right now. Maybe the rumblings will turn into deep thoughts, and maybe they won’t and you’ll be stuck with updates on my slow garden growth.

*Update of the dullest variety:
Yes, Io is right. It is actually Strictly Ballroom I plan to watch. Oh, the fog, the FOGGGGGGGG! It is particularly dense today.

day one

I am all a-flutter, friends. Yesterday was CD 1, which means that in a couple weeks, I will have a minimum of 10 million motile thawed sperm swimming around my lady parts. Right now, though, I am sipping a cup of raspberry leaf tea to tone my ute and banish the cramps. And cuddling a very cozy little dog, who seems to have won the war about being allowed on the couch with us.

I spoke to my clinic today about the possibility of changing my treatment plan to do IUI instead of ICI (just to make our samples last longer as they’re the more expensive washed samples and I ordered all 5 available units. Apparently our donor (who needs a nickname, but I haven’t thought of one yet) has some more units in quarantine that should be out in June, but I’m hoping we don’t need them.) God, my parenthetical asides are long and convoluted. Maybe I should start using footnotes, a la David Foster Wallace.

Anyway, the clinic says I need to talk to Dr. Rational about that, but he doesn’t have any appointments for this cycle, so we’re going to go with plan A (ICI) for this cycle, and then discuss. That is really fine with me – in the midst of my torturing myself over this very question last week, it occurred to me that this was a perfectly acceptable compromise – and I feel in some ways that I had already accepted this in my heart, so I guess the Universe is just telling me that this is the right way to go for now. It doesn’t make me love my clinic to be told that Dr. Rational won’t make time for me within the next two weeks, but I don’t have to love them. They are really a means to an end for me, and as long as they sensitively and competently do what I need them to do, I could give a monkey’s whether they are willing to accomodate my sudden mind-changes. Plus the fertility nurse told me this morning, “And if you get pregnant this cycle, you can just cancel that appointment.” Which naturally made me feel good, hearing from someone else that it was a distinct possibility. (Statistically around 10-12%, but built up in my mind to be both a certainty and a treacherous journey frought with difficulty and highly unlikely to end in success of any kind.)

My garden has stalled a bit as last week was very cold for this time of year and quite a few days we had snow. But it’s meant to warm up a lot this week, so I’ll need to get out there and get things prepared. I have $20 in Canadian Tire money burning a hole in my pocket, and I think I’ll spend it on a whole shitpile of seeds. (For those unfortunate ones unfamiliar with the wondrous Canadian Tire, they give you actual paper “money” when you buy something and then you get to spend it like cash the next time you come in. Way better than those dumb cards and their stupid points I can never be bothered to check the value of.)

I went to my best friend’s baptism yesterday. It was amazing and beautiful and I’m so grateful I got to be there. I woke up at 6 to drive out there, got in a bit early, helped her get ready and stuff. We went to church and sat down in the front row, at which point she tells me that I’m supposed to go up with all of them to be part of the service and be a godparent to the 3 of her 4 kids who were getting baptized at the same time. Umm….yes, of course….but a heads up would have been nice! We had a huge laugh about it – she had been remarking earlier that she’s not good at planning things ahead, saying should have checked littlest daughter’s outfit as it was a bit grungy. I told her to take it easy on herself on that one, but remembering to check your kid’s tights for pills and stains and asking your best friend to be a godparent to your kids are pretty different things! But I was really happy she asked me and so glad I got to be there to share in the experience. I cried a lot, of course, but I came prepared with one of my beautiful Japanese hankies. The hanky selection in Japan is great because people use them to mop sweat in the summer or as a portable hand towel – lots of public washrooms don’t have hand towels provided. Just one of many ways in which living in Japan is like living in the 1950s.

I am so unorganized in my brain today, as I’m sure you can tell, having just survived a tangent about Japanese handkerchiefs. I’m still exhausted from yesterday and all the travelling I’ve been doing in the past few weeks. I’m planning on staying home as much as possible in the next while, and doing everything I can to prepare my body and my heart and my mind for this cycle. I was saying to my sister yesterday that I need to start thinking a little further ahead, that it’s safe now to do that. I tend to just focus on things up to a certain point, and then when I get beyond that point, I feel lost and freaked out because I haven’t prepared myself. And for the past 5 years, the point has changed somewhat in the details, but it’s really been all about getting to start to try to get pregnant. And that point is pretty much here. So what next? When do we tell, who do we tell first, what happens if it doesn’t work in the first few cycles, what happens if it does work, and eeek and eeek and eeek!

It feels good to be here, mostly at peace, pondering the possibilities.

And you?