catching up

Dudes, I seriously need to set aside a specific time each week to write. So much to say, so many thoughts and observations, so much I want to remember – all evaporated because I can’t seem to settle down enough to actually put the words together and record them. It is frustrating to be so flighty. And also so sleepy by the end of the day that I just immerse myself in TV or books or phone calls to my family.

However, next Wednesday is my last day of work, so hopefully having my days free will help me make the time. I really, really hope so.

Where to start – perhaps a list of pregnancy stuff that I want to remember? Because I know you are all just wetting yourselves to hear about the minutiae.

• Still feeling good, mostly. Have battled some crazy insomnia but it seems to have settled down the past week or so. It is horrible to be awake in the middle of the night for three hours and then have to go to work and pretend to be a normal human. I know it is just a harbinger of things to come, but it really, really sucks when you miss out on sleep. The worst part for me is just feeling like my entire body aches, even my eyeballs.
• I am amazed at my belly and I am in love with it. I could stare at myself in the mirror all day, truly. Manny must be getting tired of my nightly exclamations of how big my belly has gotten, but I am not. I’m trying to enjoy this time because I am in serious denial about what’s going to happen to my body afterwards – I don’t have a single stretch mark yet even though my skin is prone to them, and this helps feed the denial. Like, “Maybe I just won’t get stretch marks and my belly will just spring back to normal after a few weeks. I’ve seen it happen!” I have seen it happen, but it is absurd to think I might be one of those women. I normally wear a B-cup and I have stretch marks on my boobs from when they first sprouted – doesn’t bode well for the belly, which is significantly larger than a B-cup.
• At my doctor’s the other day I was measuring 30 cm even though I was at 34 weeks at the time. He told me not to worry as he said the baby’s head is very low in my pelvis and that some babies just engage in deep pelvic diving expeditions earlier than usual. So I’m trusting him and not worrying. Mostly. I’ve definitely been feeling twinges and jolts in my pelvis which I think is stretching and loosening, and there has been a lot of sensation way down low where he said the head is.
• My weight gain is good (i.e. right on the average) overall, although it has slowed in the third trimester, I think. It was during the second when I was constantly starving that I packed on the most pounds – now I can’t eat as much at once so that helps control things quite a bit.
• Fruit – how I love thee! Truly, I’ve never eaten this much fruit in my entire life. I tend to be fairly picky about fruit and only like what’s really in season – in the winter here, that means basically nothing other than tropical fruits. So I generally don’t eat much of it. But the BC fruit this year has been amazing – peaches, nectarines, apricots, pears, apples, cherries. I’ve frozen a lot of things for use over the winter – Manny was given a vacuum-sealer food thingy for his birthday and I am in love with it. I froze a case of peaches, a bunch of plums, and the few nectarines I managed not to eat.  It will be wonderful to be able to have peaches on my waffles in the middle of winter, or make a plum kuchen to munch on while I nurse my baby.
• I was starting to worry that Manny was freaked out by the presence of a moving, living human in my midsection because we hadn’t had sex in quite some time. But, uh, the other night dispelled all worry. And how!
• Have had some episodes of what I think are low blood pressure – no fainting, but feeling dizzy, woozy, weak and slightly nauseous. My blood pressure is always on the low side but a few weekends back I was really feeling like crap. What clued me in that it might be my BP was that I was insatiably thirsty. And I really mean insatiably – I generally drink at least 2 liters of water a day, and that day I was pretty much drinking constantly, downing pint glass after pint glass and never feeling satisfied. So I did some googling and found that it can be a symptom of low BP- essentially, dehydration and heat (it has finally been summer here this month) can cause your pressure to drop. For me I’m guessing that it just dropped slightly but it was enough to give me symptoms – when I checked it, it was 99/68 which is just slightly lower than it usually is. An interesting piece of information to have about my body, though, and I’ve read that epidurals are not tolerated well by people with low BP so, yet another reason to try to avoid one.
• Blah, blah, blah. Bored yet? Not me.
• We have hired a doula and have our first official meeting with her next week. She is awesome.
• I have attended a La Le.che League meeting – it was sort of weird and sort of great. I didn’t learn too much because my mom was a LLL leader when I was growing up, so I’ve been around this info my whole life and much of it has just sunk in. But it is great to know where to go for both general support and very specific questions and suggestions. If you are hoping to breastfeed and haven’t connected with your local LLL chapter, I highly recommend it. I was a bit worried about feeling like the lone infertile in the room, but then again I always worry about that when delving into that mommy world, and really, I’m kind of used to it. I shared my standard line that it took us a long time to get pregnant and a woman with a baby afterwards actually brought it up when we were chatting after the meeting. Not in a nosy way – she just asked whether we had difficulty conceiving. I said yes and left it at that – I need to prepare the next more detailed response because I tend to get flustered when I think people are pressing me for details, and I don’t want to spill the entire story. Sometimes I good at giving a vague but truthful answer, and sometimes I just don’t know what to say. I guess I’ll get lots of practice – I really do like to be open about the fact that it was not a simple process for us. People need to know that it happens, you know?
• We are taking prenatal classes and have been to two of them now. They are really great – based on the book “Birth.ing Fr.om Wi.thin,” which I cannot recommend highly enough. It’s probably not for everyone, but for me the focus on mindfulness and trusting my own instincts really feels right to me. I’m just not a planner or rehearser – more information often overwhelms me, and since I have a fair bit of experience (through yoga and meditation) with just working with whatever happens in the moment and moving towards those things, even if they are uncomfortable or painful, this approach just fits with me. Manny has rocked my world with his openness and participation in the class – it has been a really good way to connect on this stuff, which I’ve really struggled with throughout the pregnancy. Partly because he was away for 4 weeks this summer, and partly because we just sometimes struggle to find ways to connect and understand each other, and I get to feeling alienated and worried. Having a bit of structure around how we connect is good for us. Must remember that.

There is more, but I’m going to just hit publish now instead of saving this to work on it later. It is nearly time for me to leave work – my boss left a bit early and although I was slightly irritated at that decision, it meant I had the opportunity to write this post, so ultimately, I suppose I must thank him.

I hope to write more about this in future posts, but for now I will just say that I really, really love you, my dear readers. This community has been so good to me and even when I’m not writing, I am reading and commenting (although I am shamefully behind on things this week) and thinking of you all every single day. And it sustains me, knowing you all. So thanks.

where to even begin?

Yeah, I know. I’m a bad, bad blogger. I linger around, commenting on the details of everyone else’s life, but with me, it’s only borscht and surface details once or twice a month. Pathetic. 

Well, it’s not for lack of interesting things going on. I’m not quite sure why I haven’t been posting lately – partly that things were going pretty well for a while and I was busy and distracted and therefore less in need of pouring my guts out, and partly that I had procrastinated for so long and felt so guilty and ashamed and at a loss as to where to jump back in again that it was just too daunting to start writing again. 

Lucky for you, internets, the craptacular-ness has returned. Nothing really serious, just feeling blue and vulnerable and scared and all that.  So let’s bullet, shall we?  There are lots of little things I need to catch you up on. 

• Got my period today and start Clomid tomorrow. Am freaked and excited. Am also dreading possible hormonal nightmare during our first joint family Thanksgiving – Manny’s parents, sister, and BIL and my grandparents, uncle, cousin and her boyfriend. Could be good, could be ugly – 2 old ladies with dementia! Yay! As long as I don’t have a hot flash or crying jag in the middle of it, it will be bearable. I think. 
• Got my period today after a week of hormonal weepiness. Feeling so raw and sad all the time sucks. Especially when I was expecting my period last weekend and kept having crazy pregnant fantasies.”Maybe just one sperm jumped the turnstiles and made it to my egg the one time in the past month we actually had sex! It’s possible, right? Right? RIGHT??????????????”
• Fuck, I hate my mind and her stupid tricks. 
• Read some blog by a donor conceived guy in Australia who used to be totally fine with being donor conceived until he had his own child and now he’s totally against it. Fucking great. Why do I read those things? I have this idea that I need to be compassionate and open my heart to all possibilities and try to hold them all with love and tenderness, but all it really does it make me circle the bowl of doubt and freak out that I might be dooming my future child to a life of torment and anguish. Ugh.
• Support group has first meeting next Tuesday and is going AWESOMELY! I’ve talked to 3 women now and everyone is so happy I’ve made this happen. It’s so good to get that kind of validation from others who are in or have been through the trenches, hearing that they need it and are grateful for the work I’ve done so far. I still haven’t found anyone to facilitate the group, but I’m still trying. I think it’ll be ok either way, but will take a lot of pressure off me if I’m not the one doing it. Must remember to take care of self…
• Women’s circle is also coming together. I met with two women who have been involved in another circle for many years, and they are going to help me create a new one. I’m excited about this and am feeling way more at peace with the uncertainty of it all. It’s all very wide open, which is not something I really excel at, but I’m learning to trust the process. Slowly, though. 
• It’s really fall here – leaves are mostly off the trees, it’s getting colder and colder every day. We might even get snow over the weekend. I like fall but the fact that it precedes a long and miserably cold winter seriously puts a damper on my enjoyment of it. 
• We have tickets to see Neil Young in a couple weeks, and I might go see Feist the night after that, too. There is an absurd amount of good music coming these next few weeks – Bob Dylan is coming in November, I think, but we were planning to be away for that weekend. Too many choices…
• All I want to do right now is drink tea, cuddle my dog, and weep. But I’ll probably get up soon and start cleaning up my house and also hiding all the copies of “Creating Families” and IF books I have lying around. The last thing I need during Thanksgiving dinner is a slightly batty old lady asking me what’s up with that. 

I heart you all. Thank you for not abaondoning me completely. My blog stats are oddly busy considering my totaly flakiness in posting. Will seriously attempt more regular posting in near future. Truly. 

ETA: One more thing – it’s my wedding anniversary today. Four years ago today, Manny and I got married to each other for the second time. The first time was seven years ago last Sunday. Go us! Although I am super lame and can’t find any wedding photos in this computer…

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what do you do after the best meal of your life?

This is the question I must now confront. I feel a little bit at loose ends and not quite sure what to do with myself. I wish I could experience that pleasure forever, and at the same time feel a bit exhausted with deliciousness. Maybe I’ll just eat toast for a few days to let my palate recover from the magnificence of that food.

Last night it was Manny’s birthday and we went out to a new restaurant and had one of the best meals of my entire life. The restaurant is beer-centred, meaning they have a huge selection of beer from around the world, and they cook with beer in pretty much everything, and they have put a lot of thought into beer pairings, much as most good restaurants do with wine. To be honest, I didn’t have super high expectations, even though this is the second venture of a very well-loved local restaurant that is supposed to have amazing food. I’ve never been there, though, so can’t vouch for it. Although I’m pretty much non-drinking these days, I decided to make this my last hurrah and just enjoy it. And holy mackerel, did we enjoy it! So here’s what we had:

Beer #1 – an organic amber ale from Olympia, Washington but I forget the name of the brewery. It was really nice and malty but had a big burst of hops to start off – delish.

Manny’s beer – well, it was his birthday, so he had 4 different ones, including Samuel Smith’s IPA, a nut brown ale from the BC interior somewhere, Pike Ale (another IPA, I think), and an Okanagan Springs Pale Ale. Suffice it to say that he had enough beer throughout the night that he actually voluntarily talked about his feelings by the end of the evening, and didn’t seem to mind that I seized the opportunity to run with that and really get into some stuff.

Appetizer – mussels with Stella Artois, cream, tomatoes and leeks. These were incredible and the broth alone was almost enough to bring me to tears of pure joy. I could have just eaten about 3 orders of mussels and called it a day. Thankfully, I didn’t, and went on to have…

Main – lamb shanks braised in a dark beer (again, I forget which one), and cooked so slowly that I just had to nudge it with my fork and the meat gently tumbled off the bone, on top of a bed of green lentils, topped with roasted tomatoes. This was truly sublime. I love lamb always, but this had to be one of the best lamb dishes I’ve ever had. The amazing part was how the flavours had combined to an incredibly rich complex taste, but I could still taste each distinct flavour – lamb, lentils, tomato, rosemary. I was pretty much in awe by this point. But wait! There’s more!

Manny’s main – he opted for the steak frites, which could have been boring if it wasn’t so amazing. The mushrooms were braised in a blonde ale, which was then reduced to a beautiful rich sauce. The steak was perfectly cooked and surrounded with a generous portion of a sauce that wasn’t described on the menu, but tasted to me like a heavenly combination of butter, leeks and a hint of blue cheese. It was dreamy. The fries were hand cut and amazingly light, and served with mayo and their homemade mango ketchup. But I mostly dipped the fries in the sauce of my main dish, because it was like the gravy that they serve in Heaven on Sundays when they have a giant roast beef dinner, and also the butter/leek sauce that came with Manny’s steak.

Desert – this is where I started to lose my mind completely. I ordered the cheesecake that was made with porter and chocolate, but just a bit of chocolate – just enough to balance the tanginess of the cheese and the bite of the porter. It came with what was described on the menu as a coulis made with a cherry lambic, but tasted and looked like honey and the lambic reduced down to the clearest, palest pink nectar of the gods.

Beer # 2 – They recommended I order the Belgian lambic to go with desert, which was called Belle Vue Kriek and according to the menu is brewed with “wild yeast” and “undergoes a second fermentation with Morello cherry and elderberry juices.” I don’t know what all that means, but I know it produces one of the most delicious drinks I’ve ever had, an incredible beverage that combines the light fizziness of beer, the complex flavours of wine, and the sweet tanginess of sour cherries, which is one of my favorite flavours in the world. Eating a bite of cheesecake and taking a sip of beer brought the kind of joy that leaves me speechless and slightly vulnerable, all my ideas about what “delicious” really means suddenly in flux and up for debate. At this point, I was staring at the cheesecake in wonder, and Manny piped up, “You look at that thing like you look at the dog!” And he was so right. I look at my dog, and I am overcome with how much I love him, and I can’t believe how much I love him. And I feel the same way about that cheesecake. It was fucking incredible.

So, friends, should you ever find yourself travelling across the Canadian prairie and desiring a meal to end all meals, please let me know and I will point you in the direction of this fine establishment. It was the most we had ever spent on a meal for the two of us, but I regret nothing. It was perfection.

Eat anything fantastic lately?

no, i haven’t been abducted by aliens, or terrorists, or handsome medical students with sperm to spare…

Well that was a crazy week! Went up to see my sister and my nephews and my mom who was in the province for a week. Drove back home Friday with my mom, hosted a little party for her on Saturday, Sunday drove out to my best friend’s because her oldest son is really struggling in life right now and she was in serious crisis and needed help with her 3 younger kids and with life in general. Came home yesterday and am absolutely knackered. So I spent the morning watching Coronation Street and lounging around. Feeling much better but I never want to drive again. My sister and best friend both live over 2 hours away, in opposite directions. Unfortunately, I’ll be heading out to my best friend’s again on Sunday because she’s getting baptized along with her kids. That’s the kind of thing I’d feel really bad about missing, even though the thought of leaving my house just makes me exhausted.

So I’m sorry, dear internets, for neglecting you all and for not posting. Kate is right – it has been a bit quiet on some fronts lately. Good thing she has been providing us all with fabulous questions to ponder and tales of hospital stays and ugly pictures. Otherwise life would be dull indeed.

I’m having a bit of a mini-freak out about the impending start of really trying. Because I’m thinking about having a child, and how hard it is, and how my relationship with Manny needs some serious work. I struggle with a lot of resentment towards him for not responding to me the way I want him to, and for not really sharing what he’s going through. And I feel like adding a baby into this is just going to make it worse. Like the dog – I’m the one that wanted the dog, and I’m the one that takes care of the dog 99% of the time. But he did want the dog, too, and he gets to enjoy the dog and play with him. It’s just that I am the one doing all the walking and feeding and bathing and stuff. And I have a terrible feeling it’s going to be the same with a baby – if I want him to do stuff with the baby, I’m going to have to ask and spell it all out for him really clearly. That’s how everything is in our relationship. I know it’s stupid to think he should be able to ever read my mind, and I really know that I need to work harder at asking for what I need. But sometimes I just get so tired. I just want him to see what needs to be done and to do it. And to see that I need help, without me having to ask.

I worry that the baby is going to be the same way, and I think deep down I am afraid that he doesn’t really want the baby. Even though he’s assured me that he does, even though he’s really excited that the sperm is ordered (yes, we picked a donor – more on that in a bit), even though he has undergone painful ball surgery to try to get me knocked up the easy way. When we met, he didn’t want any more kids. He’d had the snip and that’s where he was at. And as we got more in love, and started thinking about a future together, he changed his mind. There is a part of me that has a real hard time accepting this – that I have a man who will pretty much do whatever will make me happy. I want a baby – he changes his plan for no more kids, he has surgery, he accepts using a donor because I don’t feel IVF is right for me. I know that if I ask him for help – around the house, with the dog, with a baby – he’ll try to do it. I guess I just feel sometimes that it is really difficult to have that responsibility. I could abuse it so easily, his willingness to do what I ask of him. And it also means I need to be really clear about my own desires, or else it’s not fair to him.

I don’t know, this all seems like rambling right now. I know this will get better – the intensity of these feelings come and go in me – and I also know that I am still learning how to take care of myself and be clear about what I need. It’s not something I learned to do as a child, so I’m learning now. And that’s ok, even though it’s frustrating sometimes. Or all the time. I just wish things were easy, you know?

Ok – the donor. I’m not telling anyone any details about the donor for sure. It seems like it’s really something that should be private between me and Manny and our future child(ren) and for the kid(s) to share with people if they decide to do that. I have to say it was incredibly fun choosing the donor, and way easier than I thought. Our pool was limited by a number of factors – there was really only 1 bank to choose from (there is one in Canada but they don’t do open ID for some reason, and that was non-negotiable for me), so we went with Xytex, which has a Canadian subsidiary. That was important because my clinic is only licensed as a sperm distributor, not a sperm importer, so I couldn’t just order from any US or international sperm bank, cause they are not interested in jumping through all the Health Canada hoops to change their licensing status. And then the Canadian distributor only has the Canadian compliant donors, which are tested to a different (I think higher) standard than the larger pool of donors available for use in the US. So once we put in our physical characteristics into the mix (and we were a bit flexible on this, but really, as I’ve mentioned before, curly hair would really not work for us) it was quite a manageable number.

The best part was that Manny and I agreed right away which donor we liked the best, and we liked him WAY more than anyone else. We made a shortlist, but we really were attached to this particular donor. Everything – from his interests, his physical characteristics (there was a kid photo and an adult photo), his essay, his reasons for donating – all of it really spoke to us.

As an aside, if you have $165 to burn for 6 months of entertainment, consider getting access to donor profiles. It is hilarious, although I suppose much more so if you’re trying to consider these guys as your potential donor and bio dad of your children. The interests are sometimes so random – modern dance, anyone? And that was from a guy that looked a bit lumberjack-y and totally un-modern dance-y. Weird. And lots and lots of bowlers. I take it that bowling must be big in the South? (Xytex is headquartered in Georgia.) Then there’s a spot on the profile for “celebrity look-alike.” And one guy actually put “John Tesh.” He was actually pretty handsome and seemed alright in other respects, too, and made it into the top 3, but I’m glad to report that I won’t be trying to have John Tesh’s baby next month.

Then the photos. There were 2 or 3 where the guys were shirtless, and at least one that looked like it had been taken by a professional gay porn producer trying to get a new boy into the business after supplying him with a full torso waxing and a few joints. You know, jeans, workboots, flannel shirt tied around the waist, reclining in a barn doorway with one arm draped over a bended knee, looking knowingly at the camera. What the hell? Only one of us needs to masturbate to make this baby, and it’s not me.

Anyway, it was easy. One evening of looking at profiles, talking it over a bit, and that was it. I called the next day and talked to the most AMAZING woman at the Canadian distributor. She rocks so hard – we made jokes, she told me info, and generally totally ruled. Hopefully I won’t have to talk to her again now that I’ve ordered 5 vials of sperm. Unfortunately, they only had washed samples from this donor right now, and although I’m planning to do ICI where you can use unwashed and save some money, this donor is totally worth it. I need to discuss with my doctor a bit more about this – they said they can do ICI with washed sperm, it’s just more expensive cause the samples cost more and then you do 2 tries as opposed to just one with IUI. I need to ask them whether they’d be willing to do unmedicated IUI with me so I can make the samples last longer and have better chance of success. Anytime I’ve discussed it with them, they just seem to see ICI as unmedicated and IUI as medicated. I guess that’s just the way they do things. But I don’t see any reason to not try unmedicated IUI. I’ll try to give my doctor a call in the next week or so to ask about that. Might as well.

So that’s my updates for now. I’m still madly in love with my dog, whose name is going to stay Lucky. I actually sort of like the classic dog names as opposed to the trendier people names that so many dogs have now. Plus he’s the only Lucky at the dog park. So he stands out for his cuteness and his name. He is madly in love with me, too, and cries everytime I leave him with someone else. I need to take him to school and work with him on that – he doesn’t destroy anything in the house if he’s alone, but I feel bad leaving him at all if he gets distressed. I tied him up outside a shop last week and he chewed through his leash in about 3 minutes! Fortunately a friend was there and caught him for me – he was just headed to the door of the shop to find me, but who knows if he would have stayed around. I had left him outside places before and he seemed fine, so maybe something just spooked him. Anyway, we just need to work on his confidence a bit and teach him how to listen a bit better. I know he can be the kind of dog that doesn’t tug on his leash and who always comes when I call, it’ll just take some work to get there. And although Lucky can’t talk, I know he was very happy and relieved about the return of Charlie. We all were.

My tulips have pushed up a few inches in spite of it being cold here again, the cranesbill I put in last year is starting to come in, the rhubarb has little curled up leaves under the dead ones from last year, and my yarrow is already greening up. It’s splendid. How does your garden grow, internets?