Sick and tired

Yet another lovely Friday in the chickenpen. This week our house has been taken over by the plague. It started on Wednesday night with my husband feeling poorly. Then early Thursday morning it spread to me, and last night poor NB fell ill. He's been such a brave, little trooper. AK has been wearing pull ups all day, poor thing, although she seems to be her chipper self. Only DA appears to be unaffected so far (knock on wood).

I was supposed to go to the clinic on Thursday, but for obvious reasons, it wasn't happening. The nurse told me to keep taking the Lupron and to call today if I couldn't make it. Well, I feel worse today than yesterday. According to the nurse everything is fine and I can keep taking the Lupron until Monday. I hope I can make it. I just feel so tired. I can't help but wonder if this is a sign that I should just give up. My heart already feels heavy. To be honest, I just don't have any hope that this cycle will work. I just want to dig a hole and crawl inside. I feel so shaky on my feet already, and I just know that the next wind is going to knock me down. I guess that all I can do is to keep putting one foot in front of the other and hope I'm wrong.

Just another Friday

This week sucked. It still sucks. Tuesday morning I found a tick imbedded in my daughter's neck. My husband had to bring her to urgent care to have it removed. They told us to be on the lookout for symptoms of tick born illness, and today she is mildly feverish, weepy, and all together out of sorts.

Tuesday night I had my sleep study to look forward to. Because I went to the walk in clinic weeks ago for experiencing bouts of shortness of breath, and my dodo husband mentioned that I snored OCCASIONALLY, the doctor decided I had anxiety due to a sleep disorder. WTH? So I had to pack my bag and sleep in a strange place for a night. It shouldn't have been a big deal...but it was. First off, the only small overnight bag I have is the one I purchased as my hospital bag when I was pregnant with the twins. I have only used it for overnight trips since their birth twice, and one of those was another trip to the hospital to have my daughter. Packing the bag with my sleepwear, robe and slippers, my Kindle, and my toiletries slowly filled me with sadness. Walking into the building with my pillow under my arm was so strangely like going into the hospital the day my daughter was born it was like deja vu. All the straps and monitors were very similar to baby monitors and stuff, all I needed was an IV and blood pressure cuff to make the ensemble complete. It sank me into a funk the whole next day.

Yesterday at parent teacher conferences NB's teacher and special education coordinator informed my husband and myself that they would be holding NB back in first grade because he wasn't attending in class and was spending most of his day whining for the last two weeks. This is in spite of the fact that he is on or above grade level academically. I have a communication notebook that goes back and forth to school every day. Do you think they would have mentioned this trend? Or mention that they wanted to review the possibility of holding him back in there even once? No...of course not. So now my husband and I have to go all angry mama bear on their asses and try to figure out if it is what is really best for my son.

On top of this, my poor husband has an infected tooth, and I have a wicked, splitting, Lupron headache. At least I'm not thinking about how many weeks I would have been...much.

Yeah! Baby hats! *UPDATED*

Kristen at Buck up Buttercup has had her twins! I'm so happy and excited for her :)

I finished her baby hats, but I don't have her address yet. I took a couple of pictures, but my computer is being cranky and I'm having trouble uploading them.

So.....Whose next? I promise that this time I'll be a little more punctual. Baby hats are free to all followers. I make them in newborn size, but if you are in need of a larger size I can do that.

*UPDATE*

Hubby fixed the worm that attacked my computer, so now I have pictures! That is Baby Doll X modeling the hats. 

Drain on the main brain...a parent complains.

        * WARNING* If you can't handle hearing a parent complain, THIS IS NOT FOR YOU* (you totally rock if you hear Eddie Vedder in your head when you read THIS IS NOT FOR YOU!) I have about four or five different posts in the queue that I would like to write. But writing a thought provoking post requires actual THOUGHT...and I've got nothing. Well, not exactly nothing. I've had lots of thoughts on various issues, I thought about responses to the questions I was tagged with, but they flew out of my head somewhere. I've had lots of thoughts on PAIL vrs the ALI community, and when I've had a minute to read other people's blogs and comment I've done so. I had a blog post for PAIL about breastfeeding just about written in my head, but I think I've missed the deadline now. I'm not sure...but my thoughts are gone anyway. 

The truth is that I have a small window in the evening when I normally write. It was from around 6 or so until 7:30 ish most weekdays.  My husband has been coming home from work, bathing the kids and making them dinner. I usually do homework with the boys and clean the bathtub before quietly retreating the relatively peaceful quiet of our bedroom. But for some unknown reason, this time has started to shrink and decay. Yesterday my DH didn't make it home from work until almost 7. When I finally got upstairs, my brain was too fried and I ended up knitting instead for about 15 minutes. Not only has the amount of time shrunk, but the quality of the time as well. More often than not, my husband has had at least one kid 'slip under the radar' and end up in our bed keeping me company.Don't get me wrong, more often than not it is a nice time to connect with the boys, but sometimes I just need my space. It happened tonight, but when NB started to pester me about what I was writing I kindly brought him downstairs and put on Thomas. I'm going to have to find some other time, or some other place, to blog if I'm ever going to write anything interesting again.

The truth is, I feel burnt out. The boredom of the daily routine is grinding me down. The weariness of being repeatedly sad is grinding me down. These past couple of weeks I have been having a hard time hearing my inner voice. This is the part about parenting that really sucks. Being a parent doesn't suck, and the kids never do. It's all the brain/time/soul sucking stuff around it that does. It is the same brain/time/soul sucking stuff that kills you when you're not a parent...but you can't put it off because it's not for you. When we didn't have kids, I didn't cook, because my husband likes to. I didn't have to step into a grocery store. If my husband didn't feel like shopping or cooking, we just went out to eat. I would eat peanut butter and sandwiches every day if there was nothing in the house. Now I'm always cooking and grocery shopping...and I can't put into words how much I hate it. But...the kids need to eat well. My boys also can't aim worth a damn. Seriously. I have to clean both toilets almost every single day. That's ok...I write a lot of blog posts in my head while cleaning toilets. It's just that by the time I get to sit down and actually write.? Well....you've all seen the result. To make a crappy post short, my brain needs a vacation. It isn't that I can't make the time, it's just that I don't have the mental space.

On the ttc front, for anyone that's still following along: I had to go back to the lab on Monday because I hadn't ovulated on Friday. I was told Monday afternoon that I had ovulated too recently to start the Lupron yet, but I have been scheduled to start it on Saturday. Just the first hiccup in this cycle, and probably not the last.

Quicky *updated*

AAArg I never have time to post anymore. Things have been up, and things have been down. Today has been pretty 'up'.

I drove in to the city today in a snowstorm to go to the clinic. I was actually 15 minutes early, for once, but that is only because I gave myself 2 hrs to get there. I had a sonohystogram, or saline ultrasound, to check my uterus. Everything looks great. It looks like I may have some small fibroids in my uterine wall, but nothing that would hurt an IVF cycle. My ovaries look good, and they can tell that my right one will be the one producing an egg this month. On March 9th I go in for a blood test to see if I've ovulated. If I have, I'll be starting the Lupron. The meds have already been ordered, and will be arriving on the 6th. It looks like we're a go!

My RE seems to thing that the reason the bean didn't make it was genetic. I totally agree, since all my hormone levels were very good, and that even early on the fetus seemed to have an odd shape to it. We talked for a long time about what my protocol would be (the same, since I got pregnant, and had a good amount of eggs that fertilized) and how many embryos we would transfer. On this point, I'm stuck. For women in my age range, the suggest transferring 5. (5?!) I told him that since my last cycle produced 3 good ones, and two that were put in culture but didn't make it to freeze, that maybe I should have transferred all 5? At the end of our talk we agreed to look at the quality. What optimism, heh? :)  *update* My doctor's opinion on this is that the best that could have happened is that I would have gotten pregnant with twins and one would have survived. Well YEAH. That would have been cool. Still being pregnant right now and not having to do this again, even if I still lost one, would be better than the alternative.

*updated*  I won't be looking at transferring 5 this upcoming cycle. My thought was that if the embryos don't look good enough to transfer, and aren't good enough to make it out of culture, I would rather transfer them and give them their best chance. So...it's more of a quality thing. All 3 of the embryos I transferred last time looked good enough, although not perfect 8 cell beauties. We don't have another cycle after this, and I don't want the dilemma I've had in the past with what to do with frozen embryos...so I will probably put back more than 3 if there is a straggler or two. BUT if there are more good ones than that to freeze, I will freeze them. I think it's crazy at my age to be thinking I could possibly have that many good embryos. HA.

I'm standing in the starting gate, and itching to run.

Wordless Wednesday

in mourning 

a scrap of mourning fabric that my great-great grandmother pressed between the pages of her Bible

purchased in 1880  upon the death of her daughter, Catherine Louisa, at the age of 4

For Mo

and everyone else I know who has lost a child, of any age

and for those who are still trying, and mourn every cycle

Do you believe?

• Fridays still suck. I would have been 18 weeks last Friday. I have now officially been not pregnant as long as I was pregnant. 
• No progress has been made on my dining room. We need to purchase wall paper and to see if the paint color I have chosen will actually work. The ceiling needs to be put in primer. Since my husband agreed to prime/paint the ceiling because my mother is very short, and I can't purchase wallpaper without an infusion of cash, it is completely out of my hands at the moment. This bums me out. I think I will pick up the roller extension and or brush and paint something tonight. I can't paint while the kids are home and awake, which is why my mother is doing the painting. 
• Pablo decided to clean the pool early this month. No doubt he is being spiteful because I kicked him out from October until January. He should probably be cleaning someone ELSE'S pool right now. Jerk. 
• I am knitting baby hats. I hope to have both of them done by the end of this week. If they don't suck and I take them apart, grumbling under my breath all the while, and have to start over. I blame Downton Abby. I usually knit during football, because I can follow a game with less than half my attention. DA is far too engrossing. I am not the best knitter in the world, so I have to give more attention to my knitting than really good knitters do. 
• There have been some BFNs out there that have really made me sad. Sad because I really want everyone's cycle to work...even though I know it's not statistically possible. And sad because it reminds me how low my chances really are of getting, and staying, pregnant are at my age. It drives me crazy that I'm upset about a cycle failing that hasn't even gotten the chance to get underway yet. I have always taken IF one step at a time so I'm not wallowing in it. I know it is because in my heart of hearts I feel like I should be pregnant right now and should never have to do this again. Instead of focusing on all the great BFPs and growing bellies out there, it's only the negatives I see. That's just not ME and it's never BEEN me. 
• I have been able to knit baby hats, (which involves measuring baby doll Xs head for accuracy and using a baby hat one of my boys was given in the hospital as a model) play dolls with my daughter, and even walk around Target all without feeling miserable and sorry for myself. There are still times where I'm still sad, but I haven't cried in at least a couple of weeks. That feels great! Like I'm getting over the worst of the 'grief flu'. 
• I got a wonderful fortune cookie when we got Chinese take out this weekend. "Do you believe? Endurance and persistence will be rewarded." :)