Drum roll please...

It's a boy. :)  Everything looks good, other than not getting the greatest view of his heart because of his position.  They'll take another look at my next appointment next month just to make sure everything is ok.  The husband, the kid and I are headed to Mexico next week.  My boss keeps calling it, much to my chagrin, as "The Last Vacation."  Whether that's true or not, we're certainly looking forward to it!

Yes, I suck

I really do suck at this blogging thing.  To be fair, work has been crazy busy.   But, this is beginning to remind me a bit of several of my college Sunday mornings.  You know those - you're hanging your head over the porcelain god, repenting of your sins from the night before, and swearing you'll never drink that much again, only deep down you realize you will.  So, as much as I would like to promise I'll never ignore the blog again, I'll refrain.

You know, I'm beginning to suspect that I am pregnant, a mere 14 weeks after my positive pregnancy test.   The pregnancy has been good as of late.  I'm fully into the "golden trimester," where the morning sickness and fatigue are mainly gone. I have a small baby belly, but I'm not so huge that mobility and simple tasks are trying.  I've also started wearing and buying maternity clothes.  Can I just say how much I love Gap Maternity?  Gap Maternity is what the Gap used to be...simple, moderately priced pieces that can serve as your wardrobe's foundation.  There's only one store in the DC metro area and it's not that close, but it was totally worth the drive.  So many good finds!

And finally, we have a date for the "big ultrasound" October 28.  Can't wait to find out whether we're having a little Chevy or an Astird! (don't worry, it's an Office reference, not our actual choice of names)

My assignment

So Laura and Paige sent me the same assignment. Here is the C&P:

The Rules:

1. Link to the person who tagged you. Check

2. Post the rules to your blog. Rules? My blog is supposed to have rules? I'm so bad at this.

3. Write 6 random things about yourself. See below. Check.

4. Tag 6 people at the end of your post and link to them. Here's the thing - when you procrastinate on these tagging assignments it leaves no one else to tag. I plead the impossibility defense. If I happen to find a blog that has remained untagged I'll edit.

5. Let each peron you have tagged know by leaving a comment on their blog. See my response to 4.

6. Let the tagger know when your entry is posted. Seems easy enough.

6 random things about me:
1. I have no uvula. Ok, technically I do, but it is just a teeny tiny little bump in the back of my throat that doesn't hang down at all.
2. I am an excellent juggler. This is particularly amazing because I exhibit zero hand-eye coordination in all other facets of life.
3. When I was a child (circa age 7), my advice to friends who told me how mean or unfair their parents were being was, "You can sue them, you know." (Yes, my father is an attorney too. He didn't train me to say it, but it cracked him up nonetheless.)
4. I hate bananas.
5. I spent a year in France my junior year of college.
6. When I was a teenager, I spent my clothing allowance on books.

Umm, the dog ate my blog posts?

So, it has been pointed out to me that I really, really need to update the blog. This has actually been bothering me for a few weeks, but yet I couldn't motivate myself to post. So, for anyone still actually checking this, I'll try to articulate the reasons why. First, the first trimester has been really, really tiring. For the past month or so, all I've wanted to do from the moment I've returned from work lie down on the couch, veg a bit, and then hit the sack. And since I can't blog from work, that doesn't leave much time for blogging. Fortunately, as the end of first trimester approaches (one more week!), this has been getting better. I actually met some friends for dinner last night, which was a big step for me. ;)

But explaining that brings me to my second reason why I think I haven't been blogging. Knowing that my main audience is mainly composed of others going through infertility, it never really felt right to blog about fatigue, or morning sickness, or any of the other aspects of the first trimester. Believe me, I am grateful to be going through it, and that's why it felt weird to write about it - I just didn't have the confidence to write about how I was feeling without coming across as whiny or ungrateful. I think fear had something to do with it, too. I told myself that the statistics were on my side and that I couldn't do much about a possible miscarriage anyway, so I should just enjoy myself. Nonetheless, this has been a pretty anxious couple of months for me, and writing about the future was pretty hard to do.

So, enough with the self psychoanalysis. All is going well. I am 12 weeks 4 days today. My husband and I got to see the baby again during an NT scan on Thursday. The ultrasound part of the test was normal, but we still have to wait for the bloodwork results. I decided it was finally time to spread the news a bit. Close friends and family already knew, but now I've told work and a few more people.

It's so weird that it's public now, after keeping it a secret for two months, and especially in the networked world we lived in. As soon as a friend of mine knew we were public, she sent me pregnant-related "flair" on Facebook. Not sure how I feel about that. I remember many a bad day when I saw yet another status update concerning yet another pregnancy from some random person on my friends list. I can only assume that several of my Facebook friends who aren't really current friends - just old acquaintances from the past - are going through infertility as well, and that "yet another" pregnancy announcement from me would just be rubbing salt in the wound. It's hard to know what to do.

So, I guess this is a decent comeback post. I have been told I have blogging assignments, so hopefully I will get to those today as well.

I'm still here!

Things have been crazy lately.  We had our first ultrasound this week, at around 5 1/2 weeks.  One gestational sack and one yolk sac.  We go in again on Wednesday to see if there's a heartbeat.

And I tell my parents tonight, who are coming into town.  So exciting.

Inconceivable...no more!

Most people who read this blog probably know this by now, but I'm pregnant! I tested last Monday, but couldn't get in for betas until Thursday because I was out of town. The one both Thursday and today looked solid, with today's number at 540-something, up from 226 on Thursday. It's high enough that I'm done with betas and just need to call the office on Monday to schedule a sonogram. It doesn't feel real yet, especially to my husband. He just keeps repeating, "I can't believe you're pregnant."

I never thought I could feel so happy and so anxious at the same time. I really think that my happiest state is one of mild nausea - just enough to know that everything's still progressing. I know that so much can happen at this point. I just have to keep in mind that just because it can doesn't mean that it will.

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride

Beba's wish

Beba is my husband's grandmother. She is a 90-something year-old Spanish woman (no one knows her real age, including Beba) who fled to South America during the Spanish Civil War, eventually settling in Venezuela. She lost her husband relatively young, and came to the States when her daughter, my mother-in-law, moved here as an economist, and she helped raise my husband and his siblings. Although she has lived here for 30 years and took many classes, she has never truly become comfortable with the English language, speaking to her daughter and grandsons primarily in Spanish. Her English, however, is still better than my Spanish, and we manage to find a way to communicate.

My husband and I got engaged shortly before the holidays in 2004. That coincided with the birth of a niece on my husband's side, which made for an extra special Christmas celebration. During the celebration, Beba joined me sitting on the hearth, where we both had a view of the newborn baby girl.

She turns to me, points to my niece, and says, "Do you want?"

"Oh, yes, Beba. I love kids. We definitely want kids," I reply.

"I want you to have two."

"Yes, Beba, I do too. I definitely want at least two children."

This is the point where she gives me the look I know so well - the look where she knows something has not translated, and she's searching for the words to help me understand what she means. Finally, she finds them:

"How...do you say...two...at the same time?"

What?

"Two at the same time - what is the word?"

Gulp. "Twins?"

"Yes!!" she says, patting me on the knee. "You - have twins."

After giving this command, she stood up and walked away.

As you might imagine, my family, friends, and I have laughed about this story for several years. And, of course, the story always ended, "Wouldn't it be funny if you ended up having twins?"

If anyone had known how prescient that story seems now - no, I'm currently not pregnant with one, much less two. However, we're now in the stage of fertility treatments where one doesn't just "end up" having twins - it is no longer a spontaneous, unlikely event. I think I saw somewhere that something like 30% of all pregnancies that result from IUIs using injectable medications (as opposed to clomid) are twin pregnancies. Granted, only a certain percentage of IUIs result in pregnancies at all, so the odds of getting twins (or more) out of the deal is still pretty low.

In the infertility world, this is often a welcome idea. After all of the pain of infertility, the idea that you could get "two for one" and be done with it all has its perks. But twins come with risks, and while I would be overjoyed at the news of twins, the concept still concerns me. And, unfortunately, my current protocol could potentially result in more than twins - triplets, quads, quints. And that is the scenario that keeps me up at night - a scenario that comes with impossible, life-altering choices. Choices I hope I never have to make.

So, we'll see. Given my current record, my empty uterus and I will probably look back on this post a few weeks from now and laugh at the fact that I was worried about too many babies. Then again, when a 90-something year-old Spanish woman declares that something will be so, you can't help wondering if she knows something that you don't.

p.s. After writing this entry, but before publishing it, my husband and I went out for Chinese food (P.F. Chang's lettuce wraps rule, by the way). I opened my fortune, and it said, "Your present plans are going to succeed." Pretty good fortune, right? Then, I turned to the back to see what my Chinese word was. It was - I shit you not - "plenty." Good thing I'm not superstitious (not even a little stitious). ;)