Not wine

Minute Maid Pomegranate Blueberry blend. I've been drinking this in the evenings out of my favorite stemless wine glasses. It's the right color at least! And it has pomegranate juice and DHA, so it's much healthier than a glass of Shiraz. Not quite as much fun, but definitely a little more exciting than yet another glass of ice water.

Plus, I love their commercials. The one with the dude on the escalator? "Aren't you the father of one of my children?" I die a little bit laughing every time that one comes one. And bunny CPR with the static electricity that comes from rubbing a balloon on your head? That's pure advertising genius.

This is one case where I will buy the product solely because I love their ads. Oh, and J is in full agreement. I believe he will tell you the pomegranate tea blend is the bomb. I never thought I'd see my husband excited about juice.

Good job, Minute Maid!

2317

The number's going up! It appears to be doubling every 43 hours at this point, which means we've got a little overachiever in there! (Or overachievers, but we'll cross that bridge when we get to it. And apparently we'll get to that bridge next Monday at our first ultrasound.)

We opened a show at J's theater Friday night. I did the set design for this one, which means I had to be at tech rehearsals last week with him. Which meant our dog spent a lot of time at home alone and J and I hardly had a meaningful conversation all week.

So, we celebrated getting the show up by staying in bed all day Saturday and watching True Blood Season 1. Gotta love the vampires!

All in all, it was a great weekend. Now I'm off to research how soon you can see a heartbeat on ultrasound, because between my husband, my parents and my MIL, I'm not sure how long I can keep them from telling everyone in the free world that we're knocked up.

Holy crap. We're knocked up!

What's your favorite number?

For a long time, my favorite/lucky numbers have been four and 42. I don't know why, they just are.

When I met J, we realized we have a lucky number together. It's 31. There are reasons behind it, but that's not the point of this post.

A couple of weeks ago, seven became popular in our household. That was the number of eggs the RE retrieved.

The next day it became five. That was the number of eggs that fertilized.

Then I was back to four. The number of embryos that were thriving.

Then two. That's how many we put back.

What's my favorite number today?
496.
Our first beta at 11dp6dt.

I guess the big question now is whether our new favorite number will be one or two!

Thank you all for your support through these whole IVF shennanigans. When I said I was trading one kind of roller coaster for another, I had NO IDEA how true that would be!

The week for awards!

Thanks to bbjoys and LOVEDBYD for this one!

The rules:

List 10 things that make you happy.

Pass it on to 10 bloggers that make your day a better one!

1. The way the air smells right before it rains.
2. The way my husband looks at me when he thinks I'm not looking.
3. The way my pupper dog greets me every time I come home to her.
4. A pot full of chili on the stove.
5. The feel of bare feet in the sand.
6. The feel of bare feet in the grass.
7. Hugs.
8. Clean sheets.
9. A new book.
10. Two lines on a little plastic test.

I could list a bajillion women who impact my life every day. I'm going to add a random ten from my favorites so as to be impartial!

1. Growing up Petzold
2. gringa78's blog
3. Lets Make A Baby, How Hard Could It Be...?
4. A Bella Dream
5. The Holcombs Hideaway
6. Cookin' a Goonie
7. mrsh
8. The things in my life...
9. Ro is me!
10. Baking BabyLovf

• 
  
• 
  

Would you look at that?

There's a unicorn in my backyard.

Thanks, Lyse! Apparently I'm blunt enough in my blog postings to warrant an award for honestly. I'll take that as a compliment, since I still struggle every time I post with just how much information I'm willing to put out here on the world wide webz. Check out Lyse's blog. She's cute, sassy, and has two of the most gorgeous dogs you'll ever set eyes on.

So, now I have to tell you ten honest things about myself. That shouldn't be too difficult, given the level of information we've been trading around here lately.

1. I peed on an OPK at 4:30 this morning. I don't know why. I couldn't sleep, and was laying there thinking about how I really should have tested out my trigger shot, and thought it would be beneficial to go pee on something. Well, all I have are a few OPKs, so I peed on one of those. And got a very faint line, which tells me absolutely nothing.

2. I still haven't put away all of my Christmas decorations. They're all down, but my guest room looks like the holiday clearance aisle at Marshall's.

3. I frequently put off peeing at work. I know it's not good for my bladder to be forced to hold it. It's just such a long walk to the bathroom that I try to put it off as long as possible sometimes.

4. A lot of my posts lately have been about my bladder. I apologize for that, and will make an honest effort to focus on other, more attractive parts of my anatomy from now on.

5. How's this? I like my ankles. I think they're the only part of my body that's always skinny, no matter how much I weigh.

6. I need to paint the fence outside our house. It's only one, short section, and I've been finding reasons not to do it for at least five months now. That's just ridiculous, I have the supplies and everything. Maybe Sunday.

7. I'm a deplorable housekeeper. I really try to keep on top of things, but I don't. Then it reaches the point where I can't stand it anymore, and I get it all looking nice, and it immediately starts to degenerate again. Vicious cycle.

8. I miss having a glass or two of wine when I get home from work. It's not the alcohol that I miss so much, it's the sitting down and unwinding with my husband, chatting about our days. I know, we could still do that with another beverage, but it's just not the same.

9. I don't think this IVF cycle worked, and I'm not sure when I'm going to be ready to try again. I'm fairly certain I don't want to turn around and cycle again immediately. And I'm not sure why I feel that way.

10. I contemplated skipping #7 and moving right along to #8, hoping no one would notice. But then I realized that would be really sad in a post devoted to honesty. So, they're all there. You can go back and count.

Reality check

So, I had my progesterone checked this morning, and it's too low. It should be over 15 on a medicated cycle, and I'm at 10.5. There are some technical reasons why this may be okay (PIO injections vs. Endometrin), but what it boils down to is -- it's a reality check.

The nurse is telling me not to worry, some girls I know who have gone through this are telling me not to worry, but I reserve the right to worry all I want to. There are plenty of studies online that show that an early low progesterone level can indicate no pregnancy at all, or one that isn't going to be viable.

Honestly, this has been going entirely too smoothly, and it's not bad to get a little slap to bring me back to the here and now. After all, we had a 40% chance going in to this. It would be a freakin' miracle for this to work on the first try.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not giving up hope, I'm just reminded that sometimes all the hope and positivity in the world can't change an outcome.

I also learned yesterday that our two other blastocysts did not make it to freeze, so if we do this again, it will have to be another fresh cycle.

For such a short 2ww, it's now feeling like an eternity.

One for the baby book

So, should this process actually work, we have the first picture for the baby book! I would like to introduce you to blastocysts 4BB and 3BB, the cutest little things I think I've ever seen.

For those of you who were worried about me, my bladder ended up not being a problem during the transfer. Mainly because I was too busy having a migraine to worry about whether or not I had to pee. Fortunately, the valium kicked in just in time so it never went full blown (meaning I wasn't puking like I was from the one I got on Saturday), but it was still less than pleasant.

Oh, and I love my RE. I had a one in five chance of him actually doing my transfer (all the docs in the practice rotate), but of course he was there when we got there. He's such a fun mix of scary smart, crazy good, slightly arrogant and at the same time goofy as all hell. As I'm getting strapped into the stirrups, he walks out of the OR telling J and me that he has to go pee or he won't be able to concentrate. Um, okay? Good thing I wasn't obsessing about my own bladder at that point, or I might have been upset with him flaunting his ability to urinate at will!

The transfer went smoothly, and now we wait. One upside to having a six-day transfer is my two week wait has gotten noticeably shorter. So, beta on 1/20. A week from tomorrow.

Wow.

And still waiting

I thought I would be in the process of having my transfer right about now, but the nurse called ten minutes before we left the house and told us we were moving to a six-day transfer.

I've spent the last hour Googling, and am choosing to believe the nurse when she said this isn't a bad thing. At least we've got four embryos in early blastocyst stage. That's a good thing. I'm going to hold on to that and not worry about egg quality or why all four of them are a day behind where they'd like them to be.

At least this way I'll be able to take down the Christmas tree today.

That should keep me busy for at least half an hour or so. Sigh.

Can't sleep

I keep waking up between 2:30 and 3:30 in the morning. And once I'm awake, I'm thinking. How are the embies doing? Is this going to work? What if it doesn't work? Will there be any to freeze? How on earth am I going to go through the transfer with a full bladder?

This last one is the one that's really getting me. I've had two surgical procedures in the last six months, and the worst part is my bladder. This summer during pre-op I was hooked up to an IV wearing nothing but a hospital gown and made my way to the bathroom about five times in an hour, pulling my little tower behind me. You see, I not only have a nervous bladder, I have a weak bladder. Thank you, endometriosis.

Waiting for my egg retrieval on Tuesday (again hooked up to an IV and wearing only slightly more than nothing), I felt like I had to pee constantly. Two minutes after getting back in bed, my bladder was telling me I had to go again. Now, I hadn't had any liquids since midnight the night before, so I didn't actually have to go. But you try to tell my bladder that!

So, Sunday I'm supposed to have a full bladder for the procedure. I'm honestly more worried about that than the entire rest of the process.

For now, I guess I'll continue waking up in the middle of the night to think. And pee.

Apparently we have rock stars!

As of this morning, all of our embryos are looking so good they're telling us to anticipate a five-day transfer. Of course, they could always call tomorrow morning and tell us to get in there pronto for a three-day, but as of now they're doing so well they want to let them continue to grow so they can transfer the best of the best.

I've done entirely too much reading on three-day vs. five-day transfers today, but most of what I've found is encouraging. Basically the thought process is that if the embies can make it to the blastocyst stage (which usually occurs on day five in a natural pregnancy), they are genetically normal enough to produce a pregnancy. There also seems to be evidence that blastocysts are more likely to implant, because day five is usually when the embryo arrives naturally in the uterus. Prior to that, the embryo is normally still in the fallopian tube.

There's always the chance that they won't make it to the blast stage, but according to everything I'm reading that means they wouldn't have been viable had we transferred them on day three, anyway.

So, more waiting. And wondering. I can't imagine what this two week wait is going to be like. I can't concentrate on anything right now and there's nothing in my uterus! Well, I'm focused very clearly on what those five little dudes are doing hanging out in the lab. But that's not getting my work done, I'm afraid.

Two hours left in the work day. I wonder if I can cram five hours worth of work in before I go home?

Not a bad report card

So, they got seven eggs yesterday, which is twice what the doctor thought they would get. Of course I was ecstatic, but also worried about how many of them would be mature, and whether or not the quality would be good enough to fertilize. After all, I was expected to be a poor responder, so I prepared for them to tell me my eggs were all ugly and dusty.

Well, I just got a call from the nurse and of the seven retrieved, six were mature and five fertilized! Right now we're looking at a three-day transfer, which would be Friday. If four or more of our little zygotes turn out to be rock stars, they will look at a five-day transfer. Personally I think that may be a little too much to hope for, but this whole process has been blowing me away each step along the way.

Holy cow. Right now in a lab in Florida, there are little bitty things that are technically, biologically, mine and my husbands. Together. No matter what happens tomorrow or the next day, it doesn't get any better than that today.

Holy Guacamole

Apparently I'm triggering tonight! I honestly can't believe this process has gone so smoothly, considering all the roadblocks we've had this summer. No crazy mood swings, no bloating, nothing but a slightly sore tummy from the pincushion action over the last week and a half. My numbers seem good, and it's totally freaking me out that I am going to (hopefully) have some embies floating around in there in less than a week.

Retrieval is Tuesday morning, so I'm breaking in the new year by cashing in at least one sick day my first week back. That's what they're there for, right? At least the cool boss is understanding. The one who's actually in control? Not so much, but I'm rarely on his radar, so hopefully this whole process will go without him noticing.

I'm excited to only have to do one shot tonight. Granted, it's a fair size needle going into my bum, but it's better than three a day! Now I just have to hope those eggs aren't too dusty and will be in good shape for fertilization. If you're only as old as you feel, I figure my eggs can't be more than 29.

It appears as though this is really happening. This is way better than the roller coasters at Universal!

New Year at the RE

Well, since we had so much fun spending Christmas morning at the RE's office, I thought I'd start 2010 off right with another 7:15 appointment today. I did manage to watch the ball drop last night, but then dragged my happy butt off to bed thanks to an alarm set for 6 a.m.

I'm on day eight of stimming, and I suppose it's going as well as can be expected. My biggest follie is up to 16mm, and there appear to be seven total. My RE's ultrasound techs vary in their chattiness, and I couldn't get details out of the one this morning. (Although she was plenty talkative about my inability to empty my bladder. I tried, hun. Really I did. It's not like I'd do anything to intentionally cause you to spend more time up there with your little friend.) Anyway, hopefully the four smaller follies are catching up with the leaders.

My meds have been upped for the next few days, and I go back on Sunday morning. Fingers crossed that everything keeps going the way it has been and I'll be having my egg retrieval early next week!