Day 27... Day 1 :(

alright. well, i got my period today. disappointed, yes. but not crushed. i enjoyed having a couple of drinks tonight, and will look forward to trying again in a couple of weeks!

Day 24

UGH, I'M SO STUPID!

I took a pregnancy test this morning. Damn that stupid ept box for tempting me with its early results... I KNOW I shouldn't have and, of course, it was negative. On the bright side, at least I won't be tempted to take another one... I'm sure now, slightly deflated, I can just wait until my period comes or doesn't come. Wednesday should be the day. But I'm still pissed at myself.

Day 21

ok, today i feel almost completely fine. and my special friends, in the inner circle of my TTC processes, tell me i'm probably nuts to think that i was experiencing symptoms this early, if i even am pregnant. so. we'll see. at least it's easier to keep my mind off of the waiting game when i can eat and function normally.

Day 20

what were cramps (much like period cramps) for two mornings in a row turned into full-blown nausea by yesterday afternoon. now, i'm trying to think objectively here, because for the past several months i've had a couple of menstrual cycles during which i felt like crap for the whole week before i got my period. the first time this happened, in january, i was convinced i was pregnant. obviously i wasn't. and then it happened again, not as badly, another time. so now i'm trying to remember how that feeling compared to what i've been feeling the past couple of days, and whether or not i'm exaggerating how i'm feeling now because i already suspect (and am inwardly hopin) that i am pregnant. i definitely think i'm more physically nauseated than i was on those other occasions. i remember feeling "odd" in my stomach and having some aversions to food then, but this is different. yesterday afternoon when my husband and i were shopping i was so light-headed i had to leave the store, and last night i had nausea coming in waves that made me actually think i might vomit. folks, i don't vomit. the last time was in 2001, when i was on muscle relaxers after surgery. prior to that it was in 1998, when i mixed some disagreeable alcoholic beverages at a party. even when i get a stomach virus, it comes out the other end.

when i first woke up early this morning i still felt sick, but now i feel fine. so... yeah. i'm not doing the best job not thinking about this.

Day 18

So yesterday a bird pooed on me, which has never happened to me before. While I think the "good luck" thing is just what they say to make you feel a little less gross, I didn't argue.

This a.m. I woke up with cramps, which was a little weird but probably too early to pay attention to on Day 18, right? Sure. So I went about my business, and then a little while later -- still crampy -- I went to the bathroom and when wiping noticed a little bit of... color with the pee. I can't even say blood, but it was certainly a little brownish. Of COURSE the first thought that pops into my head: implantation bleeding.

And I'm freaking out. But it's too early, right? Right???

cycle 1

today is day 15/16 of my cycle (my period started in the late afternoon... i know, confusing, right?), which means that our "trying" is about done for this cycle. i'll double-check fluids tomorrow (SO bizarre that this is now a huge part of my life), but i'm fairly certain that the door of opportunity has closed. i'm going to say this is day 15, just to make things easier (and because most charting guides say to call Day 1 the first full day of your period when in doubt). but really, more numbers just equals more confusion for me.

so where do we stand? well, i'm not sure how well we did this first round. it's been a super busy and tiring week. work plus prepping our apartment to sell (open houses this weekend!) on top of our usual vastly differing sleep schedule and the little emotional stumbling block we had over the weekend, we ended up having sex four times out of the seven days i think we had to work with. not bad odds, true, but not as sure-fire as i had hoped.

so here's what we've got for round 1...
ovulation estimation: day 12-14
attempts: day 9, day 10, day 12, day 15

seems like day 12 was probably our best shot, unless i ovulated near the end of my suspected window, in which case today wasn't bad either. in sum... meh. not sure. don't think this was our best effort at due diligence. but it wasn't a typical week, that's for sure. hopefully by next cycle things will be quieter and we'll be more used to this new routine. and in the meantime, i guess we just sit back and wait. you never know.

Midwifery

I am a planner. Often I enjoy planning an event more than the event itself. While I certainly hope this won't be the case for my (fingers crossed) impending parenthood, part of the beginnings of this process has included thinking about the logistics. I've had the same gynecologist since I moved to the city nearly seven years ago, referred to me by a former colleague mostly because his office was in my neighborhood. And I like him. He's calm and cool, which works well for me, his office staff is great, he's taken all of the various insurances I've gone through. I don't have any complaints about him at all, yet I can't imagine going through childbirth with him.

All of my friends have had babies in hospitals with doctors. I am not so hippie-inclined that I think that's bad, but I do question the medicalization of childbirth. I'm a history buff, and I've seen enough episodes of Little House on the Prairie -- not to mention Gone with the Wind more times than I can count -- to know that women have been having babies for a really long time, often at home with only the help of relatives. The natural-ness of this seems lovely to me. Of course things go wrong, but things always go wrong. I'm not saying I want to have a baby at home without a trained professional. But I knew that I did want to explore my options.

The mother of one of my former students was a doula for many years before she went to nursing school. In the two years that I taught her daughter and the years since that we have ket in touch, I've learned a lot about the other side of childbirth, the part that is often blown off as being crazy. Traditional hospital births are seen as the norm, just as huge, expensive extravaganzas have become the standard for weddings. I didn't go that route, either. Not my style. It just made sense for me to question what many women take as a given.

Working with a traditional gynecologist/obstetrician during childbirth tends to mean getting through labor and delivery as quickly as possible, and surgical procedures are often used unnecessarily. Midwives, in contrast, aim to help women through "typical" pregnancies and births as naturally as possible, including offering support for the first six weeks of the baby's life (breastfeeding, etc.). They do not interfere with the labor process unless necessary, and of course refer problematic issues to specialists. Many of them do home births, but many also deliver babies in hospitals. All of this sounds right up my alley.

So I've made an appointment for an orientation meeting with a midwife in my neighborhood. I know it's early, but I figure the more I can sort out now, the less I have to stress me out later. I feel good about this decision, and even better because my husband didn't think it was as nuts as I thought he might. In the meantime, I have one last appointment with my gynecologist -- my yearly check-up and a final check-in with him. He's a great doctor. Just not my style.

boys have feelings, too

so it turns out that demanding sex every day doesn't endear men or women to their partners.

had to have a long talk with the husband last night/early this morning about how, after 2.5 days of trying to conceive, we were already pissed off at each other. he was feeling the pressure of being asked to "perform" every day in some sort of high stakes environment; i was feeling betrayed that he wasn't as devoted to our cause as i am. alas, we skipped a day. i know some people operate on an every-other-day schedule as it is, so it shouldn't be a big deal... but i panicked. i just didn't want to feel like this whole cycle was a wash because we missed a day that could have been THE day. but i got things back into perspective... his feelings obviously matter. (although secretly i think it's kind of interesting for him to get a sense of the piece of meat sensation that we women endure throughout our entire lives. but i didn't tell him that.) in any case, i think we've sorted things out (back on track today, at least!), but it was an important lesson to learn at a very early point in the process. who knew?

and so it begins...

my husband and i are trying to have a baby. as of... yesterday.

before i say anything else, i should say that for many, many years i didn't think that i'd ever be in this position. not because i thought there was any reason i couldn't get pregnant, or because i didn't have a partner, but because i didn't want to have children. i realize this isn't an anomaly... i know other people who don't want kids. but i love kids. i've worked with kids since i was a teenager, as a camp counselor, day care worker, and as a teacher and educational consultant as an adult. my friends and family laughed at me when i said i didn't want to be a parent. everyone said i'd change my mind. but i remained adamant until about three years ago that i absolutely didn't want to have kids of my own. i have a cat and a dog that have given me a lot of perspective on the demands of caring for other living beings. i wasn't sure i could (or wanted to) take on any more responsibility than that. i wasn't sure this world was a place i wanted to bring more humans into. i just didn't see it happening for me.

what changed? i'm not entirely sure. partly it was my friends starting to have children, and my participating in the joy and wonder that have accompanied their parenthood. a more optimistic outlook on life than possessed by my younger, wild and often angry self has helped. finding someone i wanted to marry (another thing i was never sure i'd do), someone who definitely wanted kids, put the glimmer of possibility into my mind. at that point i thought i'd be willing to adopt, but that i didn't want or need to have my own kids. (it's like adopting rescue dogs and cats, right? there are so many out there already.) and then the biological clock kicked in and did the rest. suddenly i became obsessed with babies. where i used to fawn over puppies on the street and ignore whatever was sitting in the nearby stroller, i found myself cooing at and offering to hold any kid i came into contact with. i thought i was going insane.

and then it got worse. although my partner and i weren't even thinking about having kids, i started to fantasize about it. and cross my fingers every month that i'd somehow end up pregnant. and often get depressed (temporarily, but noticeably) when i got my period. and i started to think... i'm 33. not old, but not getting any younger. if not now...

so we started talking about it. we did some math. (mostly him. i'm terrible at math.) we figured out when i'd need to be pregnant in order to have a kid with time to reasonably think about having a second, if we want to. and we realized that the time was, well... now. the goal is to have a baby by next spring, so i started reading and researching around the new year. (and trying to wean myself off coffee. sigh.) our original plan was to start trying this summer, but after two of my close friends had miscarriages in the past few months, i decided sooner was definitely better than later. after all, we have no idea how long it may take us or what possible problems we may encounter. in the past five years or so, a number of friends and family members have started families. we've heard more than our fair share of trials and tribulations, and while we certainly could find ourselves in the same situation, it would be better for all of that to happen before i start to panic about drying up or whatever.

i've been off of the pill for nearly three years and have become pretty familiar with my cycle and the way that my body actually functions, which was super fascinating after years of being hormonally regulated. i'm fairly confident that i know about when i ovulate, and have done a lot of studying of the best book ever: Taking Charge of Your Fertility by Toni Weschler. this week, i let my partner know that he'd better be prepared to have a lot more sex than we've had in awhile... and we started trying, officially, yesterday.

so far i'm just amazed at how all-consuming it has been. i counted down repeatedly all week, making sure i had the timing correct. i stopped drinking coffee and alcohol as soon as my period ended. i started taking Mucinex, which i read helps create some necessary mucus. ahem. and now, well... it's just sex every day for a week or so -- which is not the easiest thing to accomplish given our wildly different sleeping schedules, busy work and social lives, and the fact that we're simultaneously trying to sell our apartment (and just not as young and passionate as we used to be. although... this process so far has been kinda hot, i have to say). it's a bit strange, too, to be actively trying to do what i spent so long trying not to let happen. and i'm not naive enough to think that we're guaranteed success on the first try, but i am prepared to be disappointed if we're not. disappointed, but hopefully still optimistic. so far, the novelty and the relative nonchalance has been pretty fun.