Thalia's fertility journey: hopefully more comedy than tragedy

Something to celebrate

Thank you so much for all the thoughts on my last post. They've made me think a lot and I will get back to them, but I feel drawn to do something else in the meantime.

As most of you know, an expectant mother has recently chosen the lovely Flicka and Sarge to be parents for her baby boy, to be born in 2 weeks' time. Flicka hasn't shared the details but I'm guessing that the mother is very clear she will not decide to parent given the way Flicka is writing about things.

Flicka is away and hasn't had the chance to register properly, so I think we need to throw her a proper internet shower. Here is the link to what is on her registry, but there's other stuff they will need which isn't there yet. So please email me if you want to participate, and we can discuss how best to meet their needs.

How to add your bloglines lists to typepad

By popular demand, here's how I did it:

Go to bloglines. On the opening page after you've loaded your feeds down the left hand side, but before you've called up a blog on the right, there's that long list of things you can do with bloglines. Go down to 'publish, share and save' at the bottom, and click on 'share your blogroll'. In the space provided, type the name of the bloglines folder you want to share, then let it generate the html. You want to then copy the one that starts <script...

Now go to typepad. I found it easier to delete the whole typelist I was replacing. Create a new list with the name you want. Make it a 'links' list. Click on the button to add your first link. Don't put anything in the 'name' and 'url' space, but in the 'notes' space paste the <script... thing you copied from bloglines. Click to add the link. Typepad will then ask you if you want to display the list on your blog, say yes.

Then go back to the main list of typelists, and click on 'configure' for the one you've just made. Scroll down to the bottom of the page, and click 'display notes as text'. Magic! Your bloglines feeds are now displayed. Repeat as necessary for other bloglines folders - you will want to create a separate typelist for each. Or you can share all of them in one go by just 'exporting' your bloglines (link at the bottom of the bloglines column which has all your feeds in it) - but then you don't get any categories in what you show on typepad.

Contrary to what I wrote the other day, bloglines seems to be clever enough not to display password protected blogs on this list, so that adds a level of privacy for those who want it.

There you go, hope it works!

Just designed for your doctor's office

This should be installed in every RE's office, globally.

I was wondering about those google searches...

If you've ever done a google search for this blog, you'll know that there is a singer called Thalia out there. She's the cause of a lot of disappointed visitors to this site, usually from Greece or Eastern Europe. They tend not to stay long. I was wondering why I'd seen an increase in random visitors recently, then I saw this:

Thalia talks about pregnancy and baby showers

That explains it.

It's nice that Thalia (who is married to Tommy Mottola and didn't he used to be married to Mariah Carey or someone like that?) is getting 4 baby showers, including a separate one for her gay friends. Because they can't mix with her other friends? Or because the gifts will be so much better at that one and she doesn't want to embarrass anyone? As previously discussed, baby showers really aren't top of my list, but do you think she might feel like sharing some of the loot? If I asked really nicely?

Offer

This is all very illegal so I'll take this down sometime soon, but if you are in the UK, preferably in London, and are taking Puregon in the next four weeks let me know. I have an almost full 900mIU cartridge in my pen, and I don't need it. It's been pierced, so it should be used within the next four weeks. I used 125mIU from it, which means it's got about 900mIU left (they always have extra, and this is how much extra was in the other cartridges I had this cycle). I don't need any money for it, I just don't want it to go to waste. I also have one orgalutron injection going spare if someone can give that a good home as well. Let me know.

Journalists get it right sometimes

Scan down to 'Weisz up". Forgive me for feeling a little bit amused by this.

http://www.thisislondon.com/films/articles/21895542?source=Evening%20Standard

Validation

I went to a speech last night by an academic who studies organisational energy. We were discussing whether it was easier for an organisation to regain energy it had lost, or to build energy from scratch. Ah, she said. It's about belief in success. If you've never been successful, it's hard to believe that you ever will be. Sound familiar?

But I think it's worse than that for us. We are mostly women who are used to being successful, and to being able to influence that success. Here we are, powerless to make ourselves successful in this miserable endeavour at which we all keep failing, and we also don't have the coping tools to deal with the fact that we keep failing. Low energy from the fact we've never been successful, and negative energy from the frustration at not being able to control our fate. A bad combination.

In other news, it's been a hard week to not be pregnant in my little corner of planet earth. First, and I readily admit I did this to myself, was the documentary on the Discovery channel about Jackie Clune. I'm not going to post a link to the discovery home and health site as all it gets you is a large picture of a naked pregnant woman, nothing to do with the documentary, that I imagine at least some of you aren't really in the mood for.

Anyway, Jackie Clune, for you ignorant non-brits, is a comedian. A reasonably famous one in the UK. One reason she's famous is that she spent 12 years being an out and proud lesbian. Then, as she puts it, she decided to give men another go, fell violently in love with a very handsome man, got accidentally pregnant at the age of 37, and had a daughter. Then, just 8 months after her daughter was born, she got accidentally pregnant again. At the 12 week scan they found out it was triplets.

Triplets. Accidentally. At 39. Now I'm not hoping for triplets but couldn't I have just a little tiny bit of her fertility? A smidge? She does seem like a nice woman - unassuming and terrified - but it was still hard to watch due to the usual blast of overwhelming jealousy at someone else's good fortune that I now seem to be unable to quench.

Second event was my high school reunion. Which I avoided, but I did get to read the newsletter. Let me offer you a sample of what my erstwhile schoolmates have been up to.

Juliette Fertile (nee Party Animal): Well, after getting my MA in Chinese at Oxford, and my PhD in international relations at Yale, I've spent 10 years travelling around the world to various trouble spots, working first with the Red Cross and now with the UN, helping set up crisis centres and saving people from certain death in areas like Biafra, the Sudan, Croatia, and Afghanistan. My latest posting in Iraq has forced me to finally become fluent in Arabic and in my spare time I'm helping a small women's cooperative develop their business in making and selling teapots. I'm also incredibly lucky to be married to the most gorgeous man in the world, Ollie (yes, Fiona, it's true, I promised you I'd marry him and I did!) and we have two lovely children: Joe and Amelia who are 7 and 4 respectively. Looking forward to hearing all your news!

Selena Really-Really-Fertile (nee Artypants): Having won an Oscar for my documentary: Up the Amazon in 2001, I've spent the last three years focusing on writing while being a mother to my adorable twins, Sophie and Madeleine. I hope at least some of you saw my first novel, I still can't believe - which made it onto the Waterstones top 10 list last October - it was very well received. Meanwhile my husband, Jurgen, has continued to wow the Art world with his creative video installations. Thank goodness Charles Saatchi is such a fan! I'm now expecting a little brother for the twins, who will be born around the time my second novel, Having it all, is published in the Spring. So excited to see you all!

Francesca I'm-so-bloody-fertile-I-get-pregnant-just-walking-down-the-street (nee Maths-Wizz): My First in maths at Cambridge soon turned into a PhD on option theory from MIT, at which point I went into banking. After becoming a senior vice president at Goldman Sachs five years ago, I left to set up my own company, which manufactures and markets the product I invented - the QuTiClean - that (we hope!) will change housework forever. Turnover finally hit the millions last year so now I can relax a little and enjoy life with my husband, Jamie, and our children Hamish (10), Freddy (7), Barty and Eloise (5) and little Jessamy (2). It's been an amazing few years and I can't wait to share more news with all of you!

Bitter? Moi? And honestly, I'm not exaggerating. These are truly superwomen.

Another old friend called in conjunction with the reunion. She and I have been out of touch for a while but she wanted to call and say thank you for the sympathy letter I sent her when her father died earlier this year. She's also been very successful - she's married to an actor, has two children and is a child psychologist with a weekly column in a national newspaper and two regular television programmes on mainstream channels. In the course of her work she met Sir RW, the uber-doc of UK fertility. She mentioned this after I told her about where we are on the fertility front. And good news, she passed on the maestro's advice! Now we'll all be pregnant soon! Are you ready for this advice? Because given the source, it's clearly going to be fab, right?

Ready?

Are you sure?

Ok because you know I'm going to tell you.

So, Sir RW says that what we need to do is...

JUST RELAX! Can you believe it? How can no one have told us this before! Seriously, he told my friend that you need to do two things. 1. Go on holiday, relax and have lots of sex. 2. Have an orgasm after the deposit has been made.

I can hardly speak I feel so enlightened.*edited to add that I am well aware that SirRW's comments were being relayed to me by an unreliable witness - I'm sure anything he had to say was more nuanced than this.

To add insult to injury, last night over dinner a colleague was discussing having found, on the JP Morgan women's initiative page, a policy saying that they supported adoption with various benefits. She was joking that of course JP Morgan had to offer those benefits since all the women who worked there would "have to adopt" since they'd be too old to have children by the time they got round to it. I thought about a suitable retort, and then just stayed silent. Coward.

And another colleague just started showing. Her third. Oh well.

Onward and upward.

I need a holiday

What do you guys do about holidays? H and I really need one but every time I look at the diary I struggle to figure out when we can go. Partly because of my work commitments, but partly because my cycle is not completely predictable - it can be anywhere between 23 and 28 days. I therefore can't look more than half a cycle out to see where we will be a cycle at any time. Since my early August cycle will be the first time we can do an IUI given my current clinic's busy-ness, I don't want to be away then. If it doesn't work, I want to be around at the end of August for a second try, so we can't be away then. In between we could go away but we can't get flights at the right time and anyway I'm not sure I want to fly during the 2ww just in case it reduces our chances (can you tell I'm getting really irrational here?).

Plus the holiday we really want to do - to go back to Africa again - we can't do because I can't take malaria tablets if we're trying to get pregnant. So we're struggling to think about where we really want to go. One option is to just have a couple of weeks off and stay at home which I would quite enjoy, but that would disappoint H a great deal. We were going to try a UK cottage holiday but the place we want to get to is booked up. We're overall being a bit pathetic.

So what have you all done? Said "to hell with it" and just gone away anyway? Or tried to build holidays around your cycles and interventions? I'm worried we'll let the summer slip away which will be really bad for both of us.

The best kind of Seder

I have a mixed Jewish background. My father isn't Jewish, my mother comes from a very aristocratic Anglo-Jewish family. My great-(lots of greats)-grandfather arrived in this country as Court Physician to William and Mary in 1692 from Spain via 10ish generations in Amsterdam. Understandably, my mother's family had lost most of their traditions in the 250 years between this arrival and her birth, although they had hung onto a strong Jewish identity, perhaps because of how segregated British society was (my grandmother was the first generation of Jewish women who could be presented at Court). My mother's family don't eat chicken soup, they do eat bacon. But they also go to Synagogue every week, celebrate all the holidays, and generally define themselves as Jews.

My parents gave up religion when they got married, because they'd had so much hassle from their families (although my father once confessed that there would have been even more outcry if he'd brought home a catholic - at least a Jew was exotic!). So we were brought up to be nothing. When I was eight, I decided that I wanted to be Jewish. My grandmother was delighted. After that I spent all the Jewish holidays with her, and learnt our family's traditions from her. This included always attending Seders, where I was frequently the youngest person there, so I'm pretty good at Ma Nishtanah.

During my childhood my parents had a big family row with my uncle and grandmother - it was about money, what can I say. This resulted in my mother not seeing her mother for several years. Yet through all of this I remained close to my grandmother, and my mother supported this. I can only now understand how hard that must have been.

There is a point. I'm getting there

However when my grandmother died nearly 6 years ago (many years after having reconciled with my mother), it left me without a close Jewish part of the family. Although my uncle and aunt are civil to me in Synagogue, and my cousin and I have regained some of the closeness we had as children, they never invite me for family meals around the holidays, or for Seder. Luckily one of my mother's best friends, A. (who also happens to be my aunt's cousin) has taken me under her wing. She's invited me each year to her family Seder. See, we're at the point.

Most years, this Seder is quite formal. Not as formal as some, but Sephardic and serious. This year, however, for the first time, all of A.'s grandchildren attended. There are five boys, ranging in age from 3 to 9. And in the interim, A.'s husband has had a stroke and finds it hard to read. So this year the five boys gathered around their grandfather at one end of the table, and he told them a story.

He told it incredibly well. He has a great voice, and he held them entranced from start to finish. A., sitting next to H and opposite me at the far end of the table, kept getting anxious that the children were losing interest. But they weren't. They listened with open mouths to their grandfather telling the story of what happened in Egypt. The older boys piped in the names of the plagues. They jointly recited the questions in English as their grandfather led them through. And then we had dinner.

We didn't say most of the prayers, we missed one of the glasses of wine, we only sang one song. But I think we did the right thing.

Hmm

I've been enjoying the google searches that bring people here ("egg white" and "fertility" brings you to my entry about Pavlova, "despair" plus "2ww" plus "aussie" brings you to the personal comedy category due to me mentioning Dietgirl), but started to note a somewhat disturbing trend. I did a bit of googling myself and discovered that Thalia is both the name of a Mexican actress with a serious following, and a porn star. That explains the number of "thalia" + "sex" googles I was getting.

Oh well, I'm not about to change my name now. Sorry to those who come here in error, I wish you much luck elsewhere.