I’m back…

I started this blog a thousand times in my head and I could come up with a thousand excuses as why haven’t been blogging for the past two months. To be honest, I needed a break. Mentally. From all things that I felt I “needed” to do. We spent a lot of time in January skiing and spending time with our little family. And relaxing. After all the running of the holidays, it was much needed. Especially when I knew what was coming up.

Last November we started the process to start using the last embryo from the IVF treatments (I talked about them a bit here) we did before we had M. I had to go through all the testing again and even had some of the results come back badly and required further testing. However, when it all came down to it they told me I was fine and everything was more than okay to try to use our final frozen embryo. Due to many factors we decided to wait until late January/early February to start the process. So I started daily meds in February and we began our journey. I continued doing testing and added more my meds throughout the month. Everything was going as planned. The embryo thawed successfully and started growing as it was supposed to. I had acupuncture before and after the transfer because we wanted to give this embryo every chance we could. I rested like I was supposed to for the next 48 hours and didn’t lift M for the next two weeks.   I was the perfect patient. I will admit, starting in the middle of the second week I started taking pregnancy tests. They were all coming back negative, but I was still positive and looking forward to the next day hoping that the results would change. My monthly friend never showed up and even though the test kept coming back negative I hoped and prayed when I went in for my blood test it would come back positive. I tried to remember that with Maddy my hCG levels were lower than they would normally be at first, but still had a pretty healthy pregnancy with her.

I try to keep most of my hard-core complaining to my blog and let Facebook for the whining about traffic, tough workdays, colds and stupid whining. Not that I won’t post this on my page because I will, but if you don’t want to read my story…don’t click. During this whole process I prayed to God, at times I felt frustrated with God, and even once or twice tried to bargain with him…sometimes all within the same day. I asked friends and family to pray, cross fingers, or talk to whoever they believe in.

A lot of friends and family have asked what is our next step…Will we try again with the doctors…will we keep trying on our own…would we adopt…or will we just move on? I felt a loss with this one, more than the two failed IVFs before M. It’s a lot of money, stress, and takes a toll on my physical and mental state. I’m pretty sure that why I currently have a horrible cold. My body has said enough. I will say I’m tired of “babysitting” my monthly schedule. We were so very blessed with one beautiful healthy sweet little girl, so who knows what’s meant to be. I was an only child and I turned out semi-okay right? (No comments from the peanut gallery!) I want to enjoy my family and let what may be, may be.

Again, I know we were blessed. We have one. It hurts my heart to know there are others out there with no children and that they want them badly but can’t have children, have had miscarriages, have gone through what we went through, or other similar situations.

I promise to try to keep future blogs little more up-to-date and a little bit more upbeat. Facebook/WordPress keeps making changes that makes updating my page not as easy from my phone but I will try to do better…promise.

Loss

Happy Mother’s Day!

No “C”lues, “L”inks this week…just some thoughts that I wanted to get out of my head in honor of Mother’s Day…

Some of you may know that on fall day in November 2012 I gave birth to our beautiful baby girl 5 weeks early. She was a healthy miracle at 6lbs 3ozs. She was everything I had hoped and dreamed of for years. When I was little, I wanted to get married and have a baby…what most little girls dream of. I babysat every chance I got, spent lots of time with my younger cousins (even making my boyfriends at the time take them to movies and to the park with us), and at the time even thought I wanted to be a teacher as well. I loved kids…all ages…well those teenage years are iffy…

What you might not know, when we started trying to have kids; it wasn’t working. We tried everything including two IVF cycles that failed. It was hard, and trying, and pretty much awful. I cried, and stressed, and was depressed. I cried after seeing the infertility doctors, I cried the first time I gave myself the first shot (not from pain, but from relief that I could do it), I cried the mornings that I had a reaction to one of the meds and had to have Dan take me to Magee to make sure the reaction didn’t get worse. I cried a lot. After some exploratory surgery, which to this day I still believe helped fix my issues…I ended up pregnant 5 months later. Our little miracle.

And I knew Motherhood was hard (as was the getting here for me), but it is also rewarding. And everyone tells you it’s hard, and everyone gives you advice. But as a mom you need to take everything you know and everything you have learned and follow your own path. Being a working mother is hard. Being a stay at mom is hard. It’s hard if you have help, it’s hard if you don’t. The nights are hard when she gets up at 1am, the mornings are scary when they sleep through the night for the first time because you panic something is wrong. But I wouldn’t change it for anything in this entire world. As my girlfriend said at lunch this week…Nothing good is easy right???

I’m blessed to have a wonderful husband and family that helps all the time. And I probably don’t thank them as much as I should. To all you Mom’s out there (especially mine!) Happy Mother’s Day. I hope you all have a beautiful day with your families.

On this Mother’s Day as in every other day…I’m blessed to be M’s mommy.

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