Travel

  I really like these letters; I'm kinda into typography and I adore maps.  I would love to have big maps up when we get a house.  Perhaps in a hallway on thin cork so that we could place pins in it.

We travel quite a bit since Jason's family is so spread out.  We've been to all our nieces and nephews high school graduations and one college graduation.  I'm hoping we'll be able to go to the next college graduation but our finances aren't all that great and I just realized we have a high school graduation next year as well.

We are trying to plan a big vacation for 2015 that would include family and possibly friends.  We're going to go to South Dakota for Sturgis!  It's the 75th anniversary so hopefully there will be lots of cool things going on.  I'm toying with the idea of putting together a slide show or presentation of some sort that will give people an idea of what's in the area as well as travel arrangements, dates and costs.  I figure the longer in advance people have notice the better they will be able to save for the trip.

Pinterest

So of course since I'm a big ol' joiner I'm on pinterest.  I had been avoiding it because I didn't want to become obsessed.  The more I think about it though, it's really perfect for me. I'm big on favorites links and this is just another way of organizing it but visually - you know, with pictures!  It's also easier to view than a list of links.

The only problem I've discovered is that you can't put your boards into other boards. I really like to have things very organized on my computer so normally I'd have a folder titled Travel with my various travel plans inside, but you can't do that on pintrest so instead I have boards titled Travel-Montana Summer 2013, Travel-New York Summer 2014, and so on.

Anyways, the whole reason I'm making this post is that I tried to pin something the other day and it wouldn't let me because it said the pin was linked to spam or some such thing.  I figured I'd just save the picture to my computer and then pin it from there but then realized I couldn't do that, I also can't pin from facebook which is where I would normally put a picture.  Then my "aha!" lightbulb went off and I remembered I could put the picture on my blog.

Okay, that took awhile to figure out but I've got it up now.  Anyways, I love these in wall storage ideas.  I was thinking that one this size would be perfect in a hallway for linen storage.  We lived in my grandparents home for a year and there was very little storage space.  Something like this in the hallway would've been super great for linen storage.  Oooh, I just had an idea!  This would be awesome in a family room for game storage!  It would work really well at my mom's house on the wall that adjoins the garage.  It would be a little different because it would extend into the garage but it would be nice unobtrusive storage.

Thoughts

I hate having to sign in to make comments on blogger.com blogs, so I usually don't do it.  But today I found myself wanting to connect with someone and I decided to bite the bullet and just sign in.  Then I realized I hadn't written on this blog in over a year.  Oh well, it's not like anyone reads this.  In fact I just saw a timeline with how often my blog has been viewed and the high point was 1.

I think I might occasionally start blogging again, especially since I am wanting to do a little homeschool preschool with my little guy.  His name is Jeffrey, I don't get all these bloggers who don't name their children in their posts and instead give them cutesy nicknames.  Seriously you are showing us their faces in photographs and if someone really wanted to stalk you they would already be doing it.  It's like these idiot women I was reading about a few years ago who were worried about kidnappers and child molesters and someone pointed out that these same women have bumper stickers proclaiming their kid's star student status and those little stick people on their back windows.

Also I might blog about travelling with Jeff Jeff.  We love to travel and mostly do road trips and it was hard to find good resources about travelling in a car for an extended period with a little one.  We're planning a trip this summer in which one of the main things we'll be doing is travelling all over the state of Montana.  We'll be going to Glacier National Park (driving in from North East Washigton) and then, well that's as far as I've gotten in the planning.  Not quite sure where we'll go after that but I know we want to drive to eastern Montana and then south to visit Little Bighorn.  I've toyed with the idea of then driving south through Wyoming at that point but I'm not sold on that idea.

Constantly reminded

So many of our friends are struggling with infertility and recently a friend posted on facebook about how the clock is ticking.  Of our friends we only know one couple that did not have trouble conceiving within a year. Everyone else is struggling.

One of the problems is, no one talks about infertility. We only told our parents and my best friend, we know the pain of trying to conceive and having nothing happen. That struggle does not need monthly reminders from friends, we get that in the form of blood.

I didn't really think about life with baby once we got pregnant; I think it's some sort of protective measure for my heart. My heart grieves for our friends that have lost children, such pain and sorrow after the feeling of jubilation. I made plans for how to deal with my dysthymia, how to combat potential post-natal depression; but nothing concrete. Of course prior to even trying we talked about what we wanted to give our children, how many we wanted to have and how we wanted to adopt or do foster care.

Once you enter the minefield of fertility treatment though you have to slow down and consider your options, there are only so many rounds of drugs you can take so timed intercourse and IUI are somewhat limited. You can find someone to carry your baby for you or use someone's eggs or sperm. You can spend money for IVF or adoption. This all weighs heavily. At some point in our journey to parenthood, while lying in our bed at night, I up and announced to my husband that if we couldn't have biological children I didn't want children at all. That was a hard realization to come to.

We were very lucky to get pregnant the first time we did IUI. Three blood tests later I was realizing that this was actually happening. I remember our first ultrasound at six weeks, I wished the nurse would've printed a picture of tiny Guster. I was afraid that that might be the only picture we would get, especially given what happened next. I complained about some pain and after a blood draw we found that my hormone levels were very low, the nurse ordered medication and a more detailed ultrasound. The next day we sat in the waiting room of the imaging department waiting for my name to be called, the tech came and told Jason he couldn't come in with me. She had a lot of trouble finding the baby and getting good images, but she finally gave me some peace when she said that she found the heart and that it was beating. Later the nurse called to say everything looked fine with Guster.

When sharing the news of our pregnancy we called some people because I wanted them to be able to process the news privately. I remember being at church when the pastor announced yet another woman was pregnant and I couldn't contain my tears. The feelings of unfairness and inadequacy. I wanted to spare people the pain of having to hide their emotions.

So, moral of the story and your take away:

• Fertility starts to decline at age 30 and once you hit 35 you only need to wait six months instead of twelve to seek out infertility treatment.



• Talk with a specialist.



• Consider your options and realize your plans are going to have to change, you may no longer be able to have the four or more children you planned on.



• Don't be afraid to ask your doctor what Plan B is, at the insemination I asked a whole bunch of questions about what we would be trying next.



• Don't be afraid to share your story, lots of people are struggling and sometimes it's nice to read the success stories (especially if they share a diagnosis), let's you know someone is experiencing this too - you are not alone.

Surrounded by two computers and a messy desk

So, I'm posting on my blog basically because I wanted to leave a comment on Melinda's and I realized I hadn't written on here all year. Maybe when our baby is born I will use it to post pictures and stuff. Melinda asked if I was going to do that and I was thinking, yeah, I'll do it a few times and then I'll just forget about it.

Still like the title of my blog though. Still in therapy (like that's ever going to change).

No longer dealing with trying to get pregnant as you can (not) see, we ended up doing IUI and it worked on the first try. I think I was in shock that it worked the first time out. Jason doesn't really feel comfortable discussing the IUI, but I don't really care if people know. I just don't want to hear anyone's story about how they know someone who was trying and then a) started/finished the adoption process and just got pregnant b) tried for a long time and then stopped and got pregnant c) some other story that I really don't give a **** about. It's not your story, it's what you saw happen, these mysterious people have no bearing on my life and regardless of all that, infertility is like a minefield. It could be the woman, it could be the man, it could be both, it could be unexplainable; each of those situations require different treatments and procedures and just because pregnancy happened to someone you sort of know about doesn't mean that it will happen for us. It is not somehow uplifting or inspiring for you to tell me this "miracle story", it's pointless because by this point in the game people we've heard all the stories! We could really care less that it ended up happening somehow to someone you sort of know. Now if it was you personally that made it through this voyage then sure, go ahead and share. I know it feels good to be able to say "Hey, we did it and it worked", to say "It happened to us and it can happen to you" to sort of see the light at the end of the tunnel. I know I would've appreciated someone telling us "Look, we were dealing with infertility as well and this is the good thing that happened".

Worst daughter EVER!

So today I was to wake up and be ready for my mom at 5am, Jason turned the alarm off and I woke up at 5:44, I ran to the front door where my mom had been beating at the door for 15 minutes. She woke up the neighbors, I feel so bad about that. Mom drove fast to the airport, I kept telling her to step on the gas and "GO!" Luckily Mom and Louise got to the airport about 6:40ish and right now I am checking SFO's website and it says that they are still boarding - hopefully everything worked out okay.

I have a therapy appointment today, just kind of thinking about what I'm going to talk about, I was thinking about my parent's divorce and realized that today is the date of their marriage. I think it kind of funny, as in odd funny, not ha ha funny, that they are both on vacation today. I wonder if that was intentional or not. Probably not in my mom's case, she's going on a cruise, but my dad planned a trip to Disneyland; either way I hope they both are having a good time.

I've got some of the day mapped out, therapy at 10am and then I've got to go to the teacher supply store and then to Target to get a gift card as an apology to my neighbors (this is the second time that they have been disturbed by my family trying to bang my door down). Jason will be home around 4:30 and then he said he had to check to see if he has an evening client, but he went last week so he should be free this week. Maybe I'll make dinner again, I do have mom's car so I could go buy anything I need. Speaking of mom's car, she wanted to know what I'd be doing with it and I said I had a doctor's appointment today and tomorrow and then she was all "Well (sigh), okay, I just don't want anything to happen to it." thanks, I'm going to be all paranoid now.

I've been cooking dinner!

So far I've cooked dinner twice this week. Today my whole meal was made from scratch; I made a Cherry Tomato Onion Tart because we had so many cherry tomatoes from our CSA box and udon noodles in a peanut sauce. Yes, I'm well aware that these two items don't go together, but they were both tasty and aside from the actual noodles I made everything! The only thing that went wrong was that I read the oven temp direction wrong, it was 200 but it was Celsisus and I forgot to convert it, oh well, it took a little longer and the tomatoes weren't quite as wrinkly as I was going for but the crust was cooked which is what I was mainly concerned with.