June 27, 2009

CHARLIE WANTS A BABY

When Charlie was acting all depressed, he trudged out of our room like Eeyore.  "Where are you going?" I asked him.  "What's wrong."  My husband followed him and then chuckled.  "Oh, I get it, Charlie is sad because he wants a baby."



Yes, that's our spare bedroom.  Yes, it's looked like that for over a year.  Yes, it's absurd.  But leaving it up seemed less weird to me than taking it all down and leaving the room completely empty.  (OK, mildly less weird.  Also I'm just lazy.)

But apparently what Charlie wants, Charlie gets.  After a week of doing everything wrong -- lots of booze, sitting in hot tubs, eating sushi, taking large doses of NyQuil -- it turns out that I am pregnant again.

We laughed that this is our "unplanned" pregnancy.  My friend's mother, an OB nurse, asked me what my doctor's plan was now.  Plan?  There isn't one this time around!  This was our Hail Mary.  This was me looking at my husband one night and saying, "We could try this and potentially save $12,000...whaddya think?" and then completely putting it out of my head because, seriously, neither of us thought it would work.

I took a pregnancy test to confirm that I was not pregnant, before I contacted the IVF doctor to get my PGD bloodwork started.

I took a second one because I didn't believe the result of the first one.

We have no plan.  I ran and hurried to take a prenatal vitamin because, let's face it, after two and a half unsuccessful years I had gotten pretty lax about remembering to do that.

Anyway, I'm just putting it out here because, well, this is where I cash chips.

I told my husband that my feelings about the miracle of life have actually regressed, gotten creepier.  I was always a life-starts-at-conception person.  And now, now I feel like we have to wait around and see if this becomes a baby.  It has a 50% chance of being a baby or a 50% chance of being...a lump of mutated cells.  I hate that this is what this process has done to me, that it's made me detach myself so much.  That I'm like some gross abortion advocate who only sees a lump of cells.  But that's where I'm at these days.  It doesn't become a baby until it has a heartbeat.  And even then...Baby #2 had one of those...

I'm just hanging back for the next three weeks or so.  Hey, three weeks, that's when my husband deploys.  How convenient.

So one of two things will happen.  1) This will be a baby, in which case my husband will already be deployed by the time a heartbeat can be detected and will still be deployed when the baby is born.  What marvelous timing.  Or 2) It will be a lump of cells, in which case there will be no heartbeat, I will take care of business because I am now a pro at miscarriage, and then I will start the bloodwork for the PGD and proceed as planned, only a month or two behind schedule.

Either way, whatever.

I know no one knows how to react to this news.  I told AWTM over the phone and her reaction was like "Um, yay?, er, right? Hooray! er..."  so I just decided to put it here instead.  If you don't read my blog, I'm not telling you.

You can feel however you want about the news.  I'd prefer if you didn't get too excited, or tell me that the fourth time's a charm or something.  But happy's OK.  And hopeful is good too.  (Note: Do not tell me that this happened because I "relaxed" or I will ban you from my blog.  Or I would if I knew how to do that.  Even though this is our "unplanned" pregnancy, there was nothing haphazard about it.  The day was specifically chosen to maximize success.  We just didn't plan for it to work.  Hence the booze and hot tubs.  This is as close to a whoopsie as the Groks can get.)

At this point, I don't know if I'll talk about it anymore, at least not until Heartbeat Week.  Not until I know anything for certain.

But let's see if we can get Charlie that baby he wants...

Actually, I'm pretty sure Charlie just wants to play with all the baby's toys.

And my husband says that if this baby lives, he wants to name it John Elway.  (Now that's a bit of guy trivia that I didn't get: three Superbowl losses before a win.)  AWTM says we should name it Bellagio if it's a girl.  We got jokes.

My husband says he just really doesn't want a Jim Kelly baby.

(How does that man remember how many Super Bowls every quarterback lost but can't remember where anything is located in our kitchen?)

Posted by: Sarah at 12:59 PM | Comments (37) | Add Comment
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June 26, 2009

FULLY CONVINCED?

When you don't have children, you spend a lot of time convincing yourself of all the silver linings about not having children.  For example, you can go to Vegas for a week and watch naughty shows and do whatever you want.  And when you're sick, as I have been since we got home, you can sleep until 9:00 and take naps in the afternoon and remind yourself that it would be so much worse to be sick and have to take care of children.

And I've done such a darned good job of convincing myself of all the silver linings that I am afraid I might have trouble switching my brain back someday...

Posted by: Sarah at 08:35 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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June 05, 2009

LUDICROUS

Mary Katharine Ham wrote an article about oversharing online.  Guilty as charged.  The thoughts in my previous post were weeks in the making, but they prompted people to check on me and make sure I'm not depressed.  For the record, I'm fine.  I am so burnt out on the whole issue that it mostly doesn't register as sadness anymore.  The fact that I have a baby stroller, a dresser full of baby and maternity clothes, and a even most of a nursery set up, complete with crib filled with handmade stuffed animals, is no longer sad to me; it's just absurd.  It's so ludicrous I can't begin to be sad over it anymore.  It makes me laugh.  When we go to sell our house, that spare bedroom will be a nursery whether we have a baby or not.  I don't care who you are, that's funny.

So really, I'm not even thinking about this anymore.  The IVF is less concrete than the dentist visit I have scheduled for September.  I don't want to do it, so I have pushed it out of my mind.  I haven't even called the doctor back in over a week.  Don't care.  I'm done thinking about it.

But I still like laughing at the Johnny Jump Up in my garage.

Posted by: Sarah at 06:26 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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June 04, 2009

ONLY SLIGHTLY BIZARRELY UNLUCKY

CaliValleyBoy's first birthday is this weekend, and it's a sad reminder of my own fate.  If our first baby had lived, that baby would also be celebrating a first birthday soon.  I imagine we would already be thinking about trying for Baby #2 in that alternate reality.

We would have a one-year-old child instead of a vial of frozen sperm and a prayer.

Yesterday I stumbled across the first post I wrote about preparing for baby:

Of course, anyone who knows me well is probably laughing, because they know there's no way on earth I'll get pregnant until I've read both books cover to cover and used different highlighters to color-code important information within. My husband and I are the ultimate planners. We spent months researching the type of dog we wanted, for pete's sake. My husband did so much research on our Mazda5 that he knew more about it than the salesman (an advantage which helped him get it at invoice). Right now he's been spending all his free time making intricate spreadsheets comparing different mortgages and the time value of our money to see how we can save $300 over the next five years. We're pretty intense people when it comes to Decisions That Affect Our Future, but heck, we even consult Consumer Reports to decide which dishwasher soap to buy. So while it might've seemed funny to the girls at Goodwill, those who know us aren't shocked that I bought pregnancy books for the baby we'll probably have in 2008.

"The baby we'll probably have in 2008."  Sniff.

I had a bit of a freak-out on Facebook the other day when I was hit yet again with how frozen in time I am.  Back in early 2007, one of those darling boys from middle school passed through town and met me for dinner.  He was thrilled about his new son and wanted his wife to start trying for another baby right away.  She was resisting.  I had just started trying too, and he said it was the greatest thing in the whole world.  He wanted another one right away, but he was losing the debate.

It seems like he finally triumphed, because his wife just had their second baby.  And that conversation came flooding back to me: his life has moved forward and mine has not.

I got interviewed this week for an article in a local paper about prenatal genetic screening.  The writer said I sound remarkably upbeat and positive and full of perspective.  And I am like that, most of the time, at least outwardly.  But other days I threaten to set everyone else on fire.

At least I'm not one of these people.

Posted by: Sarah at 08:41 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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