La dee da

I know I promised more frequent blog posts due to this whole transparency thing, but our re-enrollment appointment isn't until June 15th so I have no news to share!

Which is fine since I was hoping to have the next kid be 2 1/2-3 years younger than Nate. Only thing is that we'll probably have to rush a little with the first one since I'll ovulate the week right after our appointment. Not bad rushing, necessarily, we'll just have to order the spermies quickly and get them to the clinic right away. Then if that insemination doesn't stick, we won't be able to try until after our vacation to Maine in July since the week we're up there is the week I'll ovulate (yes, I know when I'll ovulate! I'm REALLY regular).

I've gone way anticipatory and already plugged potential conception days into the pregnancy calculator to see what possible due dates might be, haha. If we got pregnant in June the due date would be around March 16th. If we were able to inseminate in July (which we won't because we'll be on vacation) the due date would be April 12 (which is my brother's birthday, so maybe it's best) and if we were to get pregnant in August the due date would be around May 8.

Yes, I know. I'm getting WAAAAYYY ahead of myself. That's what I do. And now you all get to share it with me instead of just Jen. Lucky you!

Also, we've started our own bit of superstition. See, the first time we got pregnant, we happened to buy a new car the day we inseminated (which was our fourth attempt after a month off following 3 attempts in a row). The second time we got pregnant, we happened to inseminate the same day we got our dog, Ella (our second attempt after a month off following the first attempt). So what large purchase/addition to the family are we going to do this time? We already bought a new house; totally not getting another new house by June or August. I suppose we could replace one of the cars, but we're not really thinking about doing that in the near future (maybe another couple years -- or sooner if my friend Shell wants to buy Jen's car). We're already getting a kitten in the next 4 or 5 weeks. I suppose we could get yet another (we were thinking about two kittens anyway). :D Or we won't do anything and we'll get pregnant anyway...

Also both times we got pregnant was after taking a month off between inseminations. So now I'm setting us up to not get pregnant until August (because we'll have that month off), and on the same day we buy something big and/or new. We're like baseball players who have to wear the same socks and do an elaborate ritual of spitting, tapping shoes and tugging on their hat rim before they go up to bat.

But I hope instead we'll get pregnant right away.

And I think I want it to be a boy. Or a girl. :) Though I still think I want another boy. Then I guess we'll have to have a third kid to have the girl. And her older brothers can beat up any boys that look at her so that she won't get pregnant. Because girls get pregnant when boys look at them.

Legos upstairs are a bad idea.

Just waitin...

So, usually the clinic that we go through is really good about getting back to me but for some reason it has taken them almost a week to get back to me with our re-enrollment appointments. I have all the bloodwork and other tests done so we're really just waiting on those appointments (and then for the right time -- when I'm ovulating) to get started.

And oh yeah, we'll have to choose a new donor. As I mentioned in the comments on my other post, Nate was literally from the last vial of sperm from his donor. The donor's donations were in 2004 (at least the vials we saw were from then) and since then he has unenrolled from the sperm bank's program so they won't contact him. Which is fine. I was an egg donor twice and at this point I wouldn't want to be contacted to be a donor again, I'm busy having my own babies. :)

But that does mean that we have to choose a new one. And while it's sort of as simple as choosing a donor who has the characteristics that we want, there are a bunch of things to keep in mind. We like to choose someone who has a similar ethnicity to Jen but we focus first on Italian. So the first donor we tried was Italian and Irish, but after 3 tries with him, he was out for the time being so we tried a new one (Italian and Polish) and we got pregnant with Jonathan right away and then on the 2nd try with Nathaniel. We also can only choose donors who have IUI vials ready.

There are IUI vials and ICI vials. IUI is what we do because we do it at the doctors office so they use sterile equipment and can do intra-uterine inseminations. If we were doing home inseminations, we could choose someon with ICI (intra cervical insemination) vials because we would be inserting the sperm before the cervix. (Go ahead and Google those terms if I'm not being graphic enough; I know people from work sometimes read my blog so I'm trying to be sensitive to that).

Also, we have to pick a donor who is CMV negative because I am CMV negative. CMV is one of those things that doesn't matter if you get it when you're healthy and you probably wouldn't even notice, but if you get it when you're pregnant, it's a big deal. And if I'm negative and use a donor who is positive, there is a possibility that I could contract CMV from the spermies and that wouldn't be a good thing.

And finally, we chose a donor who was not a release of identity donor for Nathaniel so we want to choose another non-release of identity donor for any subsequent children.

So, until we hear back from the clinic (hopefully tomorrow) we can browse the donor catalog at the sperm bank and figure out which donors we may go with for our next tries.

Nate learned how to slurp spaghetti this weekend:

Full transparency this time around

So, first time we got pregnant we did what you're "supposed" to do and waited until the first 12 weeks were past and then told everyone we were pregnant. And then at 17 1/2 weeks we miscarried. One of the reasons you wait until the 12 weeks are past is that then you have a lower chance of miscarrying ... but having gone through it once, I don't think I would have waited longer because I tell everyone that I had one (when it's appropriate in the conversation ... I don't just offer it up "Hi nice to meet you I had a miscarriage once"). :) So second time around we still waited until 12 weeks but a lot more people knew beforehand because it's such an exciting thing that I couldn't wait to tell people. Also, coincidentally my 4th month was starting right around April 1st and I thought it would be funny to tell everyone at work that I was pregnant on April Fool's Day. And it was.

Now, before you go and get all excited, I'm not pregnant. Jen is! No, just kidding. That would be funny. Neither of us is pregnant.

The other thing we kept more of a secret from people was the fact that we were trying. We weren't offering the info up. Especially since it's so precise to use IUI to get pregnant. Heterosexual couples don't go around saying "hey we had sex last night, so we could be pregnant," so we didn't really go around saying, "hey Lauren got inseminated yesterday so we could be pregnant!" Sure family knew that we were trying, but especially with the first pregnancy and our first tries we were trying to keep it more of a surprise.

But you know what? Why? This time around, I thought about trying to keep it secret from the families even so that it could be more of a surprise, like it was with my sister-in-law. It wasn't a secret that they weren't "not trying" to get pregnant, but again, they didn't go around saying, "hey, last night we had sex so we might be pregnant!" But why am I trying to emulate a heterosexual couple when we're not? We do have to do it differently, people are interested an curious and sometimes feel embarrassed asking these questions so why not just offer it up from the very beginning. Plus we'll likely need someone to watch Nate when we go in for inseminations so it would be tough to keep that a secret. :)

Also it'll give me something to blog about.

Besides, the big reason for not telling people that you're pregnant before 12 weeks are past are so that if you miscarry, the whole world doesn't know. But you know what? If we miscarry, I'll probably tell the whole world anyway.

So. We are getting ready to start trying again. We do the inseminations through a clinic in Boston that has been doing them for Lesbians and single women (because it used to be VERY difficult to get sperm banks to give sperm to unmarried women) forever and they also know that health insurance does not usually cover IUI treatments unless there is a diagnosis of infertility (which you can get after 6 unsuccessful IUI attempts) so they keep the costs as low as possible and try to keep it as unclinical as possible.

Because we haven't been in their program within the last 6 months we have to go for re-enrollment visits to find out what (if anything) has changed and to get re-enrolled with the sperm bank. I had to get a slew of blood and other tests done from my doc to be passed along to the sperm bank. I'm happy to share that I do not have gonorrhea. :P

So once we have those appointments we'll be able to order up some spermies and get started! Yay!

And now, some cuteness:

Nate's first bubble bath. "Mommy, take away this white stuff!"