Trying Not to Obsess

So far, so good. The two peas still seem to be hanging out in the Nest’s pod. She said that she’s been a little tired the last few days. I’m not sure that she’d be tired this early into a pregnancy, but I’ll take that little nugget of info and run with it.

Honestly, I’ve been better than I thought about obsessing with the fact that this could actually be the time that works and that Jack Bauer and I could be parents in nine short months (after almost five years, nine months is nothing).

The most Jack and I have talked about the prospect of parenting this week is about potential boy names. If we have twin girls, we already have the names picked out, but the boy names have been harder. Our favorite name in the world has been given to our little boy in Vietnam (see end of posting for more details on that), so we need some new ones if these are XY embryos. But, I digress.

Monday was tough, but for some reason, every day has gotten a little bit easier not to completely obsess. I will admit though, it is a very surreal situation.

And, unlike my many blogging IF friends, the Nest will not be doing a home pregnancy test before her Beta which is still nine days away, though she did jokingly threaten that she was going to go to the Dollar Store and pick up ten tests and take one a day until she saw those magical two blue lines.

Perhaps a little known fact: those Dollar Store tests work. I only discovered them a year or so after a friend told me that the Dollar Store carries ovulation test kits. The ones I’ve used are much clunkier than the sleek and slender expensive brands (and they sometimes have instructions only in Spanish), but for me, if I was going to only see one line, I’d rather pay a dollar rather than $13. I figure I’ve taken no less than 20 HPTs in the last five years – think of the money I could’ve saved.

And, an update on our nonbio boy in Vietnam: Our hopefulness was short-lived. We received more troubling news this week that makes it less and less likely that we (or the 22 other families waiting for their babies) will get to ever bring him home. I’m about at my wit’s end on this situation, but that’s a whole other story.

After re-reading this posting, I realize that I should have titled it Random Thoughts. Sorry, I can blame lack of clarity due to lack of caffeine this morning – and a mind going in hundreds of directions.

Superstitious

I’ve been a little bit superstitious since I was a kid. Ever the athlete, I had lucky socks that I would wear for basketball games, lucky underwear (no, not that kind of lucky underwear – I was a kid) that I would wear on the days I had volleyball games or math tests, and a lucky pre-track meet meal of a Pizza Hut personal cheese pizza.

These pseudo-illogical ways disappeared for the most part during college and my twenties. My only momentary lapse was buying a plastic statue of St. Joseph, the patron saint of home and family, and plant him in the ground upside down next to your “for sale” sign. You then say a prayer to him every day for nine days and your house should sell more quickly. So, maybe it’s more religious than superstitious, but you get the idea. Anyway, Jack Bauer and I tried this method to sell our house in Atlanta and it worked.

And then I started trying to get pregnant.

Since I originally thought it would only take a few months, six max, to get pregnant, I started buying cute unisex onesies, décor for the nursery and other baby belongings. We’d buy baby souvenirs while we were on vacation, too.

When I started the hard core fertility treatments, I went into overdrive (maybe it was the fertility drugs), buying even more infant equipment because I was convinced that it would work and I’d soon need Diaper Genies and teething toys.

After three ovulation induction treatments didn’t work and the first IVF didn’t take, I started reverting back to those old superstitious ways, and wondered if buying all the baby stuff was actually inhibiting my ability to get pregnant. So, I went cold turkey and stopped the shopping spree. You would’ve thought I was a heroin addict, I’d get the shakes when I’d pass a Gymboree.

Then we got the call last July about Nate, and those baby buying tendencies picked right back up. My girlfriends almost had an intervention with me after one trip to an Outlet Mall – I tore threw Oshkosh B’gosh and Hartstrings like there was no tomorrow, estimating how big Nate would be when would get to bring him home. Then, as you know from the NonBio Baby post, all progress to get him home stopped.

So I had to go into withdrawal once again. But, I have stuck to my guns and haven’t bought any baby-related stuff for more than a year and a half, except for shower gifts for friends, which is incredibly hard to do.

Here’s hoping that I’ll have trips to Pottery Barn Kids in my near future.

Maybe Baby

I got one of those phone calls today that I thought only happened in movies. One of those where you think all is lost only to find out that there’s now hope. Over the weekend, I explained our plight in trying to adopt our baby boy waiting for us in Vietnam.

Things have gone from bad to worse over the course of the last ten months and in April we learned that because of the continued issues surrounding our case, we’d probably get a letter from the U.S. State Department that our case would be denied. So, every day we come home expecting to see a letter with a certain Washington D.C. address, but thus far we still haven’t gotten one.

But, in a turn of events that I can only liken to being as much a miracle as me actually getting pregnant, things have suddenly turned up.

Part of the reason for the pending denial was the fact that they could not locate Nate’s birth mom (a requirement of the U.S. is having DNA proof that the person who drops off the babies at the clinics are actually their birth mother). They’ve been searching for her since Oct. 08 with no luck.

But, today we learned that they not only located his birth mom, they matched her DNA to Nate. It may not seem like big news, but it’s a huge step forward.

There are still some major hurdles to get over, but we have achieved a huge milestone – hope.

Our non-bio baby - a world away

On a more serious note, I wanted to expand upon one of our efforts to bring a baby into our lives that I haven’t mentioned yet.

, We tried to get pregnant for several months “naturally,” then moved on to ovulation induction -- a fertility treatment where you’re pumped full of follicle-stimulating injections, your hormone levels are closely monitored, you have ultrasounds every few days to see how your follicles are growing. Once the follicles are large enough, you take a “trigger” shot to get them to drop and then ever-so-romantically your fertility doc tells you exactly when to have sex (also called “timed intercourse”).

When the OIs didn’t work, our next step was IVF, which we were kind of expecting, but we started wondering if we should “double down” our efforts and look into adoption, too.

After careful consideration, we decided to adopt a baby from Vietnam.

A side bar here before I get judgmental thoughts from those who think we should have tried to adopt domestically (and yes, I am hypersensitive to this because so many people ask me about this and offer not-asked-for commentary on the subject). Every couple makes their own personal decisions based on how their family gets made and it should be based on what they are most comfortable with and it’s no one’s business except your own. OK, I’ll step back off my soapbox.

So, while going through our IVF cycles, we were also filling out paperwork, getting physicals, having our backgrounds checked, unveiling our financial portfolio, having friends write recommendation letters and dreaming of having IVF twins AND a sweet bundle of joy from Vietnam.

In the meantime, none of my IVFs worked, and we waited and waited for the call that we had been placed with a baby in Vietnam. And, waited…what was supposed to be a 9-12 month wait turned into two years.

Finally, last July we got the phone call. A baby boy! We were ecstatic, and for the second time in our lives, we experienced love at first sight. Our agency sent us photos and we couldn’t take our eyes off of the sweet little boy with full cheeks and a black shock of hair sticking straight up off his head.

Jack Bauer got excited about giving him a faux hawk. We picked out his name. I went crazy buying him outfits, getting decorations for the nursery, and looking at the calendar for dates for baby showers (it was FINALLY my turn for one, darn it!).

Our adoption agency’s guess was that we could pick him up in January 09. There were still a few hurdles to get over, but they didn’t seem overly concerned.

Then the rug got pulled out from under us. In September we learned that there were some major issues with getting final approvals from Vietnam (Unfortunately, it wasn’t just us, it was also 22 other families adopting from the same orphanage). No kids were coming home any time soon and our agency wasn’t sure how to resolve the issues.

So, when the Nest offered her uterus as a temporary home for our last two embryos, once again, we had visions of a family with both bio baby(ies) and our non-bio boy.

Flash-forward to now and we still don’t have our darling boy and at this point, it is very likely that we won’t get him because of yet more issues and problems at the U.S. and Vietnam levels.

We’re OK, though, especially with the hope that our Nest can hatch those embryos into a baby or two.