what's in a name?

A very brief post...

My husband and I have a gift of giving our animals trendy names, years in advance. So...if anyone out there wants to know what NOT to name their child, you can run it past us :)

A sampling: Evelyn, Chloe, and Bella

All beautiful names, but trendy as all get out. None of them were trendy when we used them, however. The youngest pet in this menagerie is 12.

Happy...and starting to get excited.

Yesterday our beautiful cat Evelyn returned from whatever rock she had been hiding under for the past 4 days. We have three cats, and normally we do a head count every night, get them inside and fed. On Saturday, my husband asked me if I had seen Evie at all that day, and I could only remember seeing her Friday night. We called, and searched, and listened and called again...but no Evie. Monday I could have sworn I heard her crying, but more calling and searching just made me feel like I was slowly losing my mind. By Tuesday night, both my husband and I were resigned to the fact that she probably wasn't coming home. It is very unusual for our cats to wander, and if they are gone for more than a day we know something bad has happened. Once, Bella got locked in a neighbor's garage, another time Evie was trapped under our porch, severely dehydrated and close to death. I was sure that something terrible had happened to her, and so I began to mourn her in my heart. Until around 5 yesterday...

It was a beautiful evening. There was a sun-shower, and I was walking around the house looking to see if I could see a rainbow. I looked up, into the trees...the sun was shining through the raindrops and the world was glowing with a beautiful golden afternoon light, and I remember thinking "everything is going to be ok." I was filled with a wonderful sense of calm and peace...and then I felt a tickling sensation around my ankle. There she was! Gaunt looking, but none the worse for wear, appearing out of nowhere. Right now she is curled up sleeping on my bedroom floor, recovering from whatever misadventure she got herself into. Crazy cat, she probably has about 4 lives left, but she just took about 10 years off of mine :)

As for the FET of '11, I'm finally starting to feel some excitement. I had my third day blood work and ultrasound today, and my schedule for blood work, estrogen patches, and transfer. Everything looks good internally, no cysts, fibroids or other problems, I even have some follicles! The intern who gave the ultrasound said "you must produce a lot of eggs" I agreed, then told her that my eggs had never been the problem. The nurse who overlooked my chart and went over the FET schedule gave me a handful of undated Quest lab slips that I would need for "when I got pregnant" so I could run in and get my progesterone checked. I said "Boy, you are really optimistic about this" and she just gave me a really amused look and said "You DO have a really good track record." And I do. I am probably the most fertile infertile in that place.

In any case...I'm starting to feel that old familiar feeling. Like this cycle might actually go someplace. At the very least, I have my cat back.

It Feels Like the First Time. (well....not exactly)

Finally, I have a transfer date. August 2. Tomorrow is my baseline ultrasound, day 1, and I get to drop the dreaded Lu.pron down to 5. Which is a giant relief, because the headaches and the constant draggy feeling is driving me crazy. That's just how it is, though, the minute you can't stand it anymore you get to move one to....yippee....estrogen patches!!!! woo. hoo.

Can you tell that I am...shall we say....underwhelmed? unenthusiastic? under...something. I can remember that first time my husband and I "flew without a net". How excited I was! I couldn't sleep. I just lay there in the dark thinking...This could be it. I could be pregnant. We could have a BABY. O my frickin G.od we could have a BABY!!!

Well, not so much. If you have any of the handful of posts I've written you know that it didn't work out that way. But I was enthusiastic about my first round of IVF. I had that wonderful feeling of butterflies in my chest. What joy that was. What a wonderful feeling to have that hope back. I had just about forgotten that feeling entirely after having spent two years trying with nothing to show for it...not even a moment where I thought "maybe I could be pregnant". But, then that cycle didn't work...or the next one... and somewhere along the line I stopped having that loving feeling. I would have hope, but it was polluted with a huge pile of skepticism. Then I had the miscarriage and I totally didn't care anymore...

This cycle is a total bonus for me. It is a total freebie. It is the strangest feeling in the world, going through IVF as if it is happening to someone else. I'm not afraid....but I'm also not skeptical. I don't feel anger, or longing, or jealousy. But I also don't feel hopeful. I wasn't giddy when I got my big box of meds. There were no jitters when I gave myself that first shot. I am so glad that I have this chance...to try and conceive free and clear of doubts or expectations, like it's the very first time. But man, what I wouldn't give to have some of those first time butterflies back.

Chickenpig makes a bold decision...damn the consequences

First off, before I write this I want both of the people who read my blog to know that my husband and I are not independently wealthy but that we are incredibly lucky. Well...to qualify that...we are lucky in some things. We both had very bad luck in the father department. We apparently had terrible luck when it came to buying a house...until recently. And we did have the bad luck of having infertility, hubby with his crappy sperm and me with my gigantic fibroid. Where we do have the luck is with our insurance. And with my body's amazing ability to produce many healthy eggs in one go. We also have been very lucky to have two healthy pregnancies that resulted in three wonderful, healthy children. Very, very lucky.

I also am lucky enough to have frozen embryos. Four of the little totsicles. The only reason we have the totsicles is because in 2007 we thought our insurance luck had run out. We wanted to transfer the two remaining embryos we had in storage, and when we began the process we got a letter from our insurance company telling us that the meds we had ordered were not covered because we exceeded our lifetime quota for infertility. We knew that wasn't right because our insurance had no cap. With a little research and a lot of calls to HR we figured out that the company would be switching over to a lifetime cap of 3 cycles for IF in 2008, just a few months away, and that the insurance ppl had been getting ahead of themselves. The FET ended in a chemical pregnancy, and more than anything I wanted to try again, and I knew that it was now or never. We could scrape and afford the 3,550 price tag for a FET, but there was no way we would go into debt to do a fresh cycle when the insurance changed. So we bit the bullet and did a fresh cycle right before year's end....and got pregnant.

Now it is three years later, and I have been agonizing about what to do with them since AK was still a baby. Should I put them up for embryo adoption? Dispose of them? Donate them to science? And the storage fees are piling up. My husband is no help, either. I think he feels if he just ignores them the clinic will just dispose of them...no harm no foul. But he doesn't face the fact that he will still have to pay. And like I mentioned earlier...we're not independently wealthy.

I would like to be able to let go of these embryos, but I just can't. I hold my kids and I can't imagine having a brother or sister of theirs and giving it up.(Not that anyone would want them, considering the things that run in the family, like autism, mental illness, and addiction) I can't imagine destroying them, or giving them up for science. I am pro choice, and I have never believed that life begins at conception, and I would never dream of telling someone else what to do with her body. But I have had to admit to myself since my twins were thawed, transferred, and grown into babies before my eyes....there is something there. It is a potential something, four somethings, and I can't look myself in the eye and lie about it. I just can't. So I'm doing the only thing I can do, I'm going to transfer them.

I admit it is selfish. I admit that it's greedy. I admit that I'm crazy. But at least I am lucky. My husband's workplace dropped our insurance in 2008 for a plan that costs us more and gives us less coverage. But what it also gives us....that's right....three more cycles covered by insurance. 90% covered, after our deductible, not to exceed $750.

So...how much do you hate me now? Not completely, I hope, because I don't want to do this alone. My husband, the understanding soul that he is, has agreed to my logic, and bent before the sometimes overwhelming power of my will, but he is not happy about it. Perhaps he will relish the act of shooting hormones into the upper quadrant of my ample buttocks, and so enact his revenge? I don't know. What I do know is that my future has split into two distinct paths, one where I get pregnant and one where I don't...and I am incredibly over the moon excited about just having the chance.

Tonight, I will be injecting myself with 10 units of Lupron, for the 5th day in a row, and I'm loving every minute of it.

What a year (or three) it was!

Thank you everyone who has been reading and commenting. I haven't posted in a while...hardly at all actually, but it's not for lack of material. Life got so busy and complicated that I couldn't boil down everything that I wanted to say into a post. And then so much time had passed that I didn't know how to wrap things up to the present. Call it blogger inexperience, or just say that I was to shell shocked by life as it was happening to write about it. I will try and make amends now and bring everyone up to speed so I can actually blog in real time. I'll break it down this way:

The house situation: OYE the house situation. The short of it is, as all of you know, is that my husband and I bought a lovely, but small, house way back in 2002, not thinking that we would ever need more than 2 bedrooms. With the birth of our twins, and then the birth of our daughter, we exceeded our house's capacity and needed to move on. So began over 2 years of agony and heartbreak. We fell in love with a beautiful, giant of a Victorian house. Then we lost it to a buyer who came in with a cash offer. We couldn't compete with that, and I was heartbroken. Words can't describe how terribly miserable I was. So we continued looking, and looking...and looking. Then we went back and revisited a house we seen just prior to the one we lost. We liked it, a lot, although I wouldn't allow myself to fall in love with it. My husband on the other hand was smitten. It was a spacious, but not overwhelming, Colonial built in 1804. The asking price was good, so we decided to give it a go. So began our time in short sale hell. Back and forth with the bank, months of waiting, more back and forth with the bank, more waiting...and finally a closing date. Two days before closing while I was online making sure we had all the paperwork in order I noticed that there was FHA paperwork in the file. OH NO....Our loan officer had set us up with an FHA loan, that we couldn't have because our existing first home loan was an FHA, and you can't carry two at once. For this purchase to happen we would have to sell our first house IN TWO DAYS. Obviously, that wasn't going to happen. We had intended to buy the other house first, move, and then sell our other house. (Good thing, too, because we didn't want to be in homeless limbo.) Crappity craptastic. Back to the drawing board.

Hoping that the colonial wouldn't sell...or go into foreclosure...by the time we sold our home, we put it our existing home on the market. In the time we had been looking we had slapped a lot of lipstick on that pig. We had painted the kitchen cabinets and redone the hardware, bought a new fridge and hood and re done the floor. We painted and tiled the shower surround, and painted the dining room and made into an ad hoc bedroom for the twins. Then we put in on the market, right at the end of June beginning of July 2010. We were asking rock bottom for our house, we just wanted it sold so we could move on, and it worked. By labor day our house was sold. Yeah! Not so yeah was the condition of the colonial we wanted. Over a year of not being lived in had left it sad, dirty, and with a broken heating system. And, much to our horror, the bank had given the house to a new banker who hadn't kept up on anything, and wouldn't respond to our new offer to buy it. Here we were with three really little kids, and soon we would have nowhere to live! And to make a rough situation even worse, we were trying to be proactive about the boys going into kindergarten and we had no idea where they would be going. Closing was October 29th. Sooo....

I began looking for another house. Our realtor wanted us to look at rentals while we continued trying to purchase the colonial, I told her to go shove it. I started researching houses like mad. Then one evening in bed, going through yet another long search, I saw it. My dream home. It was big, old, and beautiful, and in excellent condition. It was also out of our price range, by a lot. I saw that the price had dropped dramatically already a couple of times, and a little voice began whispering "you can do it, you know you want to, it's meant to be". But our realtor didn't want to show it to me! She told my husband it would just break my heart. Grrrr...... I pushed and she finally agreed to show me the place. I loved it, naturally, lovey lovey looooooved it. I then had to convince my husband to see it, and he liked it. To make a veeerrrry long story short, we put in a ridiculously low offer, the seller took it (hey, times are rough, and we lucked out BIG time) and after a furious whirlwind of packing and moving, we are here. More than 6 months later and I still hug and kiss various parts of it on a regular basis. :)

next time I will tackle NB's frightening mystery illness and autism diagnosis, my husband the traveling engineer, and other catch up stuff.

D Day

This is it. The day my twins were born. Four years ago today, at 5:45 and 5:46 to be exact, our long journey through infertility had finally ended, and the crazy journey of parenthood had begun. I know how differently it could have all have gone. I may never have gotten pregnant, we might not have had the luck to have insurance to try IVF in the first place. One out of four pregnancies end in the first trimester, roughly one third of twin pregnancies reduce to a singleton pregnancy. I could have developed any number of pregnancy complications, or I could have lost one or both of them during delivery. I was certainly at high risk. I was 35, pregnant with twins, and I had intensive uterine surgery to remove a fibroid a year earlier, leaving me at a much higher risk for uterine rupture. In my mind I didn't believe that I would be bringing them home, let alone full term and full size at 38 weeks gestation.

I have never had the opportunity to tell their birth story in full. Among our family and friends it has become more about my husband and his crazy running around that night than about the twins arrival. Granted, his part of the story is upbeat and funny, the kind of thing that would fit right into a modern romantic comedy. My story is different, it is passive and filled with sudden fear and turmoil...a lot of things being done to me and around me without having the full picture of what was going on.

I went in to my OB at 1:30 in the afternoon for a routine appointment. It was a Tuesday, and it was unseasonably warm and rainy. After my appointment, I had a routine non stress test for the twins in the maternity ward of the hospital at 4:30. I remember waddling from my OB to the ward thinking about going home and what I would have for dinner. It was starting to get dark. I had no idea that it would be four days before I stepped outside again, and that it would be the last hour I was pregnant. My scheduled C section wasn't for another week, and my due date was the week after that.

I got to the ward, joked with the ladies at the desk, and then went through the usual routine. The room set aside for NST's was little more than a closet. It had three beds crammed in it, a TV, and an attached bath. It also had a bunch of old IV stands and stuff gathering dust, and a tiny ultrasound machine and fetal monitor. I used the bathroom and put on the stretchy belly band and got "comfortable" on one of the beds. Then the fun began. The nurses put on a blood pressure cuff and monitor for contractions, and then started to track the twins heartbeats. First they found one, then the other, but they couldn't catch both of them at the same time. Then their heartbeats weren't accelerating, so they had me drink ice water and banged metal bed pans. All of this was a normal NST for me. Then alarms began to go off. The nurses ran in and made me turn onto my left side. They said my blood pressure had spiked. Then they started staring at one of the monitors. "Did you feel that?" they asked. "What???". "How about THAT?!" they asked. Nope and nope. Apparently I was having whopping contractions but couldn't feel them. Then the nurses turned me back onto my back, and lost twin B's heartbeat. Then the blood pressure monitor began to wail again. There was a lot of rushing of nurses back and forth. Everyone had on their serious faces. The very young nurse told me not to worry, that she was sure the baby was fine, they just couldn't find him. I laughed. "You can't find him" I said "But I can". They were both very active and kicking like crazy.

Then the doctor came in. You can wait, he said, until your pre op appointment on Thursday....OR...we can take them now. Huh? All the hustle and bustle was beginning to make sense to me then. I could tell they didn't want me to go home. I had a feeling I would be right back there in a few hours anyway, and maybe not in very good shape. I said "Sure...take them now." I expected to be able to go home, grab my bag, and come back...it wasn't an emergency. But oh no. The nurses went into overdrive and I began to quietly panic. I needed to contact my husband. They handed me the hospital phone, but it wasn't plugged in. Finally after ten minutes or so, one of the nurses plugged it in for me. Then if was off to the races. I don't remember much of what happened next. I don't recall if I walked to the OR, or if I was on a gurney. I only vaguely remember taking off my clothes to put on a johnny, leaving my clothes and purse in a messy pile. I remember sitting on the bed to get the epidural, and that it was VERY hot in the OR...stifling even, and that the doctors and nurses were all complaining about it and fiddling with the thermostat. I remember asking over and over about my husband, and them telling me that he had gone to get the camera and he would be there any minute. The camera?? WTF?

Then my husband showed up and they started cutting. He tells me that there was already a lot of blood on the floor, they must have already started. Within minutes I heard DA's cries, and then NB"S. I felt sick and I couldn't breath...I remember that. But everything is pretty much a blur until I woke up in my hospital room.

My husband's part of the story involves him leaving work and speeding to the hospital, he put on a set of scrubs, then he went to the OR. The doctor asked him about the camera, and he told them he didn't have it. Then he said that we live right across the street. He put his street clothes on over his scrubs, ran to get the camera, came back, and put yet another set of scrubs on over his clothes...and scrubs...and almost dropped from heat exhaustion because it was 90 in the OR.

Scary. Funny. Ordinary everyday miracle. My boys. Five years of trying, four rounds of IVF, one major abdominal surgery and one miscarriage later. Thirty eight weeks gestation...6 lbs 9 oz and 7lbs 1 oz of healthy, bouncy baby boy. And totally worth every penny, every heartache, every shot, all the fear and hope....my everything.

Home is Where the Heart Is

Memorial Day my husband and marked our 7th year living in our house. I remember that day like it was yesterday. All our friends and relatives that could come were here helping us pack up and empty the truck. D and my sister went out for pizzas and didn't come back...for hours. The pizza parlor's ovens were broken and they didn't want to tell us, so they stalled because they wanted the huge order. They ended up going across town to another place while I held down the fort keeping everyone happy with beer.
After my hubby and sister came back victorious with pizzas in hand, everyone ate and sat on our beautiful wrap around porch watching my BIL try and get the moving van out of our driveway and turned around. It was an impossible task, it turned out, but amusing to watch. Because our street is so narrow the van couldn't be turned enough without driving onto someone's lawn. The road is also not in the best shape, there is a bit of a hump in the middle of it, which (now) has got some permanent, huge grooves in it from the truck's tailgate. BIL then went down the street asking our soon to be neighbors if he could pull the truck in THEIR driveways and see if he could pull the turnaround. No dice. Low wires and cars parked in the street thwarted all attempts. There were many guys in the street waving him on and guiding him. It was quite the entertainment. Eventually we all gave up. D and I ended up waking up at 4 in the morning so that we could back the truck all the way down our street and into the busy road at the end of it. It is the only time the road has no traffic, it turns out. I followed him to the local mini mall where D left the giant truck in the parking lot and then I brought him back so we could crash for a few more hours. We spent the rest of the day returning the truck, setting up our living room so that it was livable, and finally retrieving our pets from our old home and introducing them to the new one. On Wednesday I would drive D to the airport so he could go back to work in Virginia. He wouldn't be back in our new home for months.

Apart from having to unpack everything myself, I enjoyed the months alone to putter about our new house and yard. It gave me time to put my mental house in order along with the physical one. Our search for the perfect house for us had been one fraught with hope and compromises, a great deal of stress and more than a few tears shed. It didn't help that our search for a home was tangled up in the process of trying to start a family.

While trying to buy a house we were heartbroken and thwarted in our attempts several times. The most painful attempt was a fairly large and broken down Victorian, that in spite of its ugliness and awkward placement had become my heart's desire. Unfortunately, it was not to be. While walking through the house I had been able to see with my mind's eye what our children would look like, I could practically hear them running around upstairs, I could see their shoes, knee pads, and back packs lined up on the back stairway. The tiny room off of the master bedroom would make the perfect nursery. I had to have this place, because to not have it would be to accept that that family I saw wasn't to be...I had to do what I could to make that house ours so our family could come into being.

But no amount of hoping, wishing, and begging the Universe was going to make it mine. The house was in much too need of repair, and our lender wouldn't agree to let us burden ourselves with a (possibly) collapsing money pit. It was our second set back, and it wasn't going to be our last. We sank into despair for awhile and gave up looking. On the family building front, we were also at a stand still. After two years of trying, we had gone to specialists to figure out what was holding us back, and issues seemed to be twofold. I had a large fibroid that had taken up residence, which may or may not be affecting matters, and D's sperm was total, complete, garbage. The crappy sperm was blamed for our infertility, and we were told, that without a doubt, moving onto IVF was our only option. But before we could do that, we had to go to meeting upon meeting...with doctors, psychologists, money and insurance people, shot training and genetic counseling, blood work, and visits to an Ob/Gyn for me and a Urologist for D. The Infertility Circus would set us back another year before we could get started.

During that time we found the house that would be our home. It had all the lovely historic touches we craved, including a beautiful working fireplace...and it was in perfect shape. It was situated on a quiet, dead end street, with a 1/4 acre back yard...wooded and private. As we walked through the house we could hear kids playing in the street. But, it was small. Quaint, cute, adorable, cozy, whatever our real estate agent wanted to call it, it was small. Two bedrooms one bath, dining room, living room, kitchen...that was it. Tried as I might I couldn't picture a family living here. The sellers had two young children and needed to move on. This was a place for empty nesters, newly weds, a twenty-something just starting out. Buying this place was admitting to ourselves that we couldn't see the whole family thing working out for us, not for a long time, at any rate. We walked around the back and pointed to where a new addition could maybe, possibly be added, "when the time came". But I could tell by my husband's face that we were kidding ourselves. We would live in this place until our old age, with the sounds of other people's kids all around us, entertaining our families in the dining room with it's lovely built-ins, enjoying a cocktail in front of a roaring, non child-friendly fire with cats on our laps. It was a fine house, it would be a fine life, it just wasn't the one I wanted.

I suppose, that by the title of this blog, anyone can tell that things worked out differently than I expected. After major surgery to remove the fibroid, 4 rounds of IVF, and one heartbreaking miscarriage, we had twin boys. We started having fires only after the boys went to sleep, and the laundry in the basement drove me crazy. Then we started to potty train, and the 1 bathroom all the way on the second floor pushed us to have a potty chair in the living room 24/7. Then, in what may appear to be total madness, we decided to try for a third child. Understand...we didn't think it would work. We certainly didn't think it would happen quickly. We would have all the time in the world to reasses our housing situation. But it did work, quickly, after one failed FET attempt and one fresh IVF cycle a couple of months later, we were pregnant. Nearly fertile, of us, I have to say.

Now we are crammed...stuffed...full to bursting in our little house. Thankfully, joyfully, sadly full.