Thank you Robert G. Edwards

The nobel prize for medicine was awarded this year to the doctor who developed IVF. Without the work of doctors like him millions babies wouldn’t have been born, including our son.

S is now 9 months. He has 5 teeth, he can crawl as fast as the wind especially towards everything forbidden, like electric appliances and cds. He also just learned how to stand up holding to furniture. He’s such a big boy that he doesn’t feel like a baby at all! When he’s on a good mood he is a smiling and laughing little sunshine and when he’s cranky everyone will definetely hear it.

Our little whirlwind

About this pregnancy, I’m 6w1days today and still have to wait one week for my u/s. The spotting didn’t return so I’m feeling a little more optimistic. I’m not having too much symptoms though and that makes me worry a little of course. Symptoms now:

• Tiredness, I could sleep the whole day
• Pizza face
• Yucky feeling in the mornings, but not too bad
• Some cramps and twinges every now and then
• Breasts hurt mildly when walking etc.
• Pregnancy brain, I forget everything. Even the fact that I’m pregnant.
• Everything even slightly emotional on tv makes me cry

Not over yet

I seriously thought that this time it would be different; no worries about betas and I would just smoothly end up with a baby. Honestly, a second after I said to DH how nice it is not to worry so much this time the spotting started. Like a punishment from the universe for taking this too light-heartedly.

I’m not giving up hope though. Spotting ceased yesterday after the morning and today I’ve only had a little and it’s light. And I had terrible cramps with some light brown spotting last time too. But what worries me is that last time it was very light and yesterday it was dark brown with a hint of blood. To reassure myself  I did one of the digital hpts that tell you how far your pregnancy is and got pregnant 3+ (means 5 weeks and more). So that helped for a little while, at least my hcg levels are where they should be at this point.

The first u/s feels like lightyears away, it’s on 13th October. I hope we get that far without any further drama. And I hope so much to see that flickering heartbeat.

Of course

Of course this couldn’t be too easy.

I started brown spotting last night, accompanied with mild back and stomach pain.

TTC round 2

It’s so hot in here I would give my right arm for a normal Finnish summer. +30C (86F) the whole month is too much for us eskimos. People go crazy and drown in masses. Sure it’s nothing compared to Spain last summer. But enough is enough thank you very much. I’m not going outside anymore.

The first ttc#2 cycle is over. And guess what, I’m not pregnant. What a surprise!

This cycle was weird for many ways. CD1 started when I had forgotten to take one bcp and decided to throw the pack away even though I was on day 10 or something and hadn’t finished it yet. So I’m not even sure if I ovulated this month. Usually it’s really easy to pinpoint my ovulation even without OPKs; the pain is recognizable and sharp. Now I had a totally different kind of dull pain on several days so I have no clue whether I really ovulated or not.

And on top of that, AF totally caught me by surprise and arrived yesterday without any notice. Usually I know her coming a week beforehand from all lovely endo symptoms.

I have to admit that I am a little disappointed. Secretly I still wish for a magical natural pregnancy although I know that the odds are not on our side. A friend whose baby is now 8 months old got preggo right after starting ttc#2. I can’t even imagine how that must feel, to have your dreams fulfilled so easily.

I want to get preggo really badly. I want to be able to travel through that experience again. Unlike many other women, I enjoyed being pregnant a lot. I wasn’t too nauseous, too tired or too ill. I was thriving and loving my belly and kicking baby from the bottom of my heart. And of course the main reason is that we want to have a sibling for S. Another screaming, pooping and tantrum throwing lovely little monster that will drive us crazy.

I guess we’ll see for a couple of cycles if the natural miracle would fall on us. When If it doesn’t, we’ll move on to medicated IUI. And after that we have the chance for one FET. And after that it would be another fresh IVF cycle we honestly can’t afford since I spent all of granny’s inheritance on a new work computer.

bcps, why do you hate me?

From the moment we met after my 16th birthday me and bcps used to be best of friends. No endo pain (though I didn’t even know I had endo back then), no acne, no mood swings. Everything was just peachy between us two.

Now after last AF (or chemical pg?) I wanted to refresh our friendship again to keep endo away. But obviously bcps hold a grudge against me for ditching her and getting preggo because I ended up bleeding for 5 WEEKS IN A ROW, my face exploded and I was feeling like shit. Must say that’s one hell of an effective contraceptive since who wants to have sex when AF is visiting permanently and you are constantly snapping on DH?

I popped the first round of pills (while enjoying AF for the whole fucking month) and started the second one. Bleeding stopped finally. Then 10 days after I forgot to take one pill (nothing to get excited about) and 2 days later I’m BLEEDING AGAIN. During the 10 years I was on bcps there were many times I forgot to take one pill and this never happened. Obviously, bcps and I aren’t friends anymore. So I threw them away. And guess we are now on the ttc-train again. As scary as it is, yet strangely exciting at the same time.

One year ago

One year ago was one of the best days of my life so far. I still remember vividly the amazement and disbelief. Little did I know that the anxiety only would begin on getting a bfp. But we are now here so the rollercoaster was worth it.

I had the appointment with our RE and since me and dildocam haven’t been close for a while she did an u/s check on my ovaries. Turned out I had ovulated a little while ago and so dear AF visited me 10 days later for 9 DAYS. Biiatch! I wanted her to stay away longer as AF=endo growing back too. Someway I knew I’d be getting AF despite of breastfeeding. I admit, there was a small (crazy) spark of hope she wouldn’t arrive and I would be magically naturally pregnant again after one time of unprotected sex.. But no.

I guess I ovulated again last wednesday (kind of hard to ignore your body after numerous cycles of close surveillance) so at next CD1 I’ll start bcps once again to keep endo away.  This means breastfeeding will end in two weeks completely. It’s kind of sad since it has been one of the most intimate and close things I’ve shared with my son but he does appreciate the bottle much more than my milk machines and most times I try to breastfeed end up in him screaming his lungs off with anger.

We are thinking about cycling again next autumn since endo damage will be still low at that point and we’d love to have our children with a small age difference. Knowing our history it’s quite sure it’ll take some time for me to get preggo again although RE said she had a feeling I’m gonna be naturally preggo in no time…Hah!

S is almost 8kg already, he’s a happy, chatty, smiling and laughing baby and he loves his naps. I’ve got a lot of time for myself during the days as he sleeps happily 3 hours in a row, twice a day. Unfortunately he also likes to wake up at 5-6AM. And he wakes up several times during the nights so some days I’m tired as hell. He just learned how to grasp things with his hands and my hair is one of his favourite things to pull.

Posters

I came across to this great blog; posters about infertility. The author writes to the same Finnish ttc-board I used to. Since the posters are in English I thought my readers would appreciate them too.

(c) Jadekivi at impatientfemale.blogspot.com

Everybody else is pregnant too

In my very first post for this blog I wrote about how everyone in the world except me was pregnant. Now that I am finally pregnant, it again feels that so is everyone else too. The amount of baby news popping this autumn is ridiculous. If I wasn’t preggo I would have lost my mind for good. At my workplace my boss and one workmate are pregnant. One of my cousins is pregnant. My godmother’s daughter is preggo. DH’s godson’s mother (the one pregnancy I cried over here) has her due date 2 weeks before us. A wife of DH’s childhood friend is about to give birth any second now. I keep hearing about acquintances and friends of friends who are expecting too. And a little voice in my head is saying still: it must have been so easy for them.

I’ve kind of pushed somewhat unconsciously all memories of last autumn and spring to the back and tried to concentrate on the situation I’m enjoying now despite our rough and very uncertain beginning. But as I sat on the couch watching bbc’s documentary series ( “make me a baby”) about conception and pregnancy and seeing some couples going through ivf and icsi I became very emotional and it all came back to me very strong. How the disappointments crushed my world every month and how all hope seemed to have deserted me at times. I consider myself extremely lucky to be here and sometimes feel we really got pregnant easily comparing to many others. But then again it took, 4iuis, one ivf and one fet to make this baby whereas majority of people only need to have sex once in a while so the word easy isn’t quite applicable to this baby’s conception after all.

This pregnancy however could be described as easy. I didn’t have a lot of nausea in the beginning, I haven’t had much pains, I haven’t been a hormonal raging bitch (so far). After the first 3 months as mrs pizza-face my skin and hair have been in better condition than ever. I’ve even gotten the breasts I’ve always wanted, at least for a while.

I chose to get the vaccination after consulting our RE who strongly suggested it. On the same evening my arm got really sore and was like that for almost two days. I also felt a little sick and tired. My two pregnant workmates had it harder; they both got fever over 38C after taking the shot. The epidemic is starting to rise in Finland at the moment and some people are getting overly hysterical about it. I pondered first about the risks of the shot but now I’ve stopped worrying over it since I got it and that’s it. There are risks both ways.

Today I had again visit with my maternity nurse. Hemoglobine was 130, blood pressure 110/70, baby’s heartbeat 150. My results for gestational diabetes test (which was horrible btw, I was so close to throwing up) came back normal but the 2 hour value was on the border line so they are keeping closer watch on me. Especially since there’s a history of big babies in my family. I’ve gained 11 kilos from the beginning. My belly isn’t huge but according to nurse tall women tend to have smaller looking bellies. The baby is moving and changing position all the time and now we can feel him/her quite well through my belly. I still don’t have a feeling if it’s a boy or a girl but I’ve started to have dreams about the baby being born and me taking care of it. I’m actually quite scared about that part.  What if I’m going to be the suckiest mother on earth and drop the baby on it’s head? I don’t have any experience of taking care of small babies. Do they give you instructions when leaving the hospital?

 

Growing belly (with a picture)

All through this pregnancy I’ve been waiting eagerly for my belly to grow. And now when it finally has started to happen, it feels weird. The fact that strangers can see that I’m pregnant.  One of my sisters friends even congratulated me on facebook after seeing our photos from Spain there. And I thought it wasn’t showing! Yesterday I was shopping with my cousin who has lost a lot of weight after breastfeeding and is now maybe European size 34 (XS). I looked huge next to her, even though I’ve only gained 2 kilos during these 14 weeks. But I love my belly and can’t wait for it to get even bigger.

Here’s the picture (with no head because I looked like a complete moron). It doesn’t look so big here but it’s definetely showing.

I also had my monthly visit to the maternity counseling yesterday, everything was in order (though my hemoglobine had dropped to 124) and I got to hear the heartbeat too Next month we’ll have the second ultrasound, after that there are no u/s appointments unless we’ll go to a private doctor. That sucks.

We visited DH’s friend couple on Wednesday, they are the ones whose pregnancy drove me to tears just before getting our bfp. Apparantely they don’t know about our struggles, although majority of our friends do, and when the preggo lady joked how we both couples have been active in the bedroom around the same time I felt a bit uneasy. I felt I should have told them that actually in our case it was the doctors who were active, but for some reason I couldn’t open my mouth. And afterwards felt like a cheater. Sometimes it feels like too much work to explain all about IVF and why we can’t have babies like normal people, especialyl when the audience isn’t someone close to me.

One of our cats was missing for almost 3 weeks. He disappeared from our balcony and although we searched the forest near us several times we couldn’t find him. We put posters in the neighborhood and this week two people called they had seen him, which gave us some hope. Other of them offered to borrow a trap to catch him, and we set it up last evening just 100 meters away from our balcony. This morning I went to check the trap and couldn’t believe my eyes, our cat was there ! He had lost a lot of weight and had some mites but otherwise was ok. We took him to the vet for check up and he was given some antibiotics and medicine for worms and now he’s been sleeping almost the whole day. We are so happy he’s home again

Something good came out of his disappearance though; we found a treasure of mushrooms just a few hundred meters away from home. We never thought that this suburbian small forest could be the home of hunderds of chanterelles, and apparantely nobody else thought so too. I’m going mushroom hunting this evening too, chanterelles are the best mushrooms in the world if you ask me and you have to pay like 20 euros a kilo if you buy them in a shop. Now they cost nothing

Midsummer pics

We celebrated midsummer in Finland last weekend. It was freaking cold of course. But the cottage at the island by the sea was awesome. Me and DH stayed in a small sauna cabin just 10 meters from the sea and could hear the waves inside. Very relaxing, as was the whole weekend. Just going to sauna, swimming (the water was ice-cold), eating and chilling. I loved every second of it, even though the weather was cold and windy. There were 2 other preggo ladies (DH’s friend’s wife and DH’s friend’s sister) with me so if I hadn’t been pregnant myself the weekend would have been horrible, continuous stabs in the heart. Even still I really can’t identify myself within the “pregnant” group. And if I share my news with a friend who doesn’t know about our struggles I feel I need to tell them I’ve had if-treatments. I just can’t pretend to have been knocked up “normally”.

But here are some pics from the weekend:

Me in the boat

Boys barbequing

View to the sea

In front of the sauna cabin

Me and the sea

Watching the bonfire

The bonfire closer

After last weekend the weather changed totally. Now it’s real summer! This week has been great; for once I’ve been able to do all summerish stuff I’ve always wanted to. First I spent Tuesday with my friend M at the flea market selling our old stuff, me gaining 100 euros. On wednesday me, M and two other friends went to Suomenlinna which is an old fortress in an island just outside Helsinki (very popular with the tourists) and had a picnic (that lasted 4 hours). Today I’m going swimming to an outside pool with a friend and in the afternoon I’ll drive to my parents as tomorrow me and sis will be selling jewelry at a small rock festival near them. This is how summers should always be. I’ve been even able to wear my cute summer dresses

On Monday I had the first visit at the maternity counseling. They took my blood pressure (which was surprisingly ok, usually I have high figures), Hemoglobin (great 140!) and some pee tests. I was also weighed and so far I’ve only gained one kilo. My nurse was a bit goofy and didn’t understand anything about if-treatments. I also got all kinds of brochures about pregnancy and the list of foods I’m not allowed to eat now like blue cheese, roe and liver.

We had the NT-scan yesterday and everything seemed to be in order. The baby was so stubborn though that he/she didn’t want to have his profile picture taken and turn into right position  so the nurse had hard time measuring the nuchal translucency but somehow succeeded, it was 1.0mm which is fine. He/she measured now 4,7cm and again I was a few days ahead the previous schedule, so now my due date would be 10th January which is actually the due date I should have had originally compared to my treatment schedule.

My face still looks like a disgusting pizza and pretty much all acne medication is a big no-no when you are preggo. The morning sickness is more of evening sickness these days. And my belly gets ridiculously swollen after eating anything; yesterday after having salad I looked 5 months pregnant. I even had to buy myself new capri-pants from the flea market as the ones I had before don’t fit anymore. Today I’m either 11 weeks 2 days or 11 weeks 5 days, depending on which schedule I’m looking.

Next Tuesday we’ll leave for Spain! I reserved an apartment for us so we’ll be living in a real Andalusian house! The only problem is that the proprietor doesn’t really speak English and we don’t speak Spanish. Well, I hope we’ll manage somehow. After the trip I think I’ll come out of the closet and tell all my friends about the baby.

Have a great, sunny weekend everyone