Thalia's fertility journey

Pob figures it out

Pob: When I'm a grown-up, I think I'll have two sisters and a brother.

Thalia: Do you mean daughters and....?

Pob [interrupting]: NO! I will have two sisters and a brother. And maybe the brother will be a daughter

Thalia: Will they be your children?

Pob: Yes

Thalia: Who will be their daddy?

Pob: I think he will grow in my tummy and come out and grow up and then he'll be a daddy. And then a Granny and a Grandpa will appear, and then a Grandma and a Grandad!

Pob: And when they are babies I'll feed them from my big boobs

Pob: That's what I'll do when I'm a grown up

About time

Long time, yadda yadda yadda. I didn't mean to leave that post up as the last one for so long, but life just is busy and my blogging muscle (along with many other muscles!) is out of shape.

First, I need to thank you so much for the sensitivity and thoughtfulness you put into the comments and emails on that last post. I really needed that prod to think through how I was really feeling, to continue the process that had been milling about in my head for months before I posted. It was a real signal of just how mixed up I was (am) that every comment, as they switched tack and made different points, meant something to me, and made me think differently about the situation.

Where have I ended up? Well, first, I have not 'ended' anywhere. This is an ongoing process of making our marriage work, or not, so I don't expect everything to be suddenly hunky dory. I did bring up some of what I wrote about, and we've had some productive discussions together. I need to do more on this. H is seeing a shrink, and he's finding that helpful to process some stuff which is going on for him and which he's never dealt with. We haven't yet decided to do couples counselling although I think it's a good suggestion.

One reflection after your comments was that I haven't been 'in love' very often in my life. And I wonder how much this is to do with my first very serious partnership, the guy I lived with for 3 years when we were doing our PhDs. It's a long story but the short version says he wanted to be gay, but was drawn into a relationship with me nonetheless. I fell quite heavily in love with him, but part way through the relationship he made it clear he did not see the relationship as long term, that he wanted to use the move we would both make for our post-docs as an ending. I had to force myself to fall out of love with him in an attempt to protect myself. It was really painful, and left me very angry. Although I had very strong 'lust' for the following three relationships, the ones before H, I don't think I fell in love again in the same way.

Yet I think I did fall in love with H. I remember just sitting and smiling at each other. Just feeling so happy because he was in the same room. And our first kiss, on our second date, was electric. We were passionate, but H's sexual issues have come in the way of that over the years.

I take my marriage vows very seriously (as does H). For better, for poorer, etc. We owe it to each other and to the children to do whatever we can to make this work. There is lots good. We have to figure out what we can do about the less good, and where that leaves us.

Pob snippets #10

Thalia: What did you have for your snack today, Pob

Pob: I had several raisins, Mummy

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Thalia: The lift's not working, darling, let's take the escalator

Pob: Why isn't the lift working, Mummy?

Thalia: I'm not sure, sweetie, perhaps the buttons are stuck

Pob: Why are the buttons stuck, Mummy?

Thalia: I don't know darling, perhaps someone pushed them too hard

Pob: Why did someone push them too hard, Mummy?

Thalia: I'm not sure, darling, perhaps they were in a bad mood

Pob: Why were they in a bad mood, Mummy?

Thalia: Perhaps they didn't eat their breakfast this morning

Pob: But why wasn't the lift working, Mummy?

Thalia: [losing patience with this conversation] Perhaps it didn't have enough breakfast this morning

Pob: [thinking]

Pob: No, Mummy, perhaps it didn't have enough PETROL this morning.

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Pob is having a bad morning, breakdowns at the smallest things

Thalia: Are you in a bad mood this morning, Pob?

Pob: Yes, I'm very sad

Thalia: Why are you very sad, darling?

Pob: Because I'm scared you'll go away again

Thalia: [immediate working Mummy guilt]

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Pob: I wish Mummy and Daddy were at home all the time

Thalia: [immediate working Mummy guilt]

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Pob: Where's Mummy, Nanny?

Nanny: Mummy's away tonight, Pob, I am staying instead

Pob: Where are you sleeping, Nanny?

Nanny: In the spare room

Pob: I'll get you comfortable, Nanny!

Runs between her room and the spare room, bringing about half her stuffed animals and a blanket. Turns the light on in the spare room.

Pob: You'll need some friends to keep you company, Nanny, and I've turned on the light so you won't be scared. Would you like me to talk to the friends and tell them to look after you?

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After infertility

I can't remember what it felt like. I can remember in a factual way that it was awful. Painful, miserable, soul-suckingly awful. But I can't feel it any more. The extraordinary pain that I felt, the hole that I experienced deep inside isn't there any more.

I don't know when it happened. I don't remember when I stopped remembering how it felt. I do remember that I still felt angry after Pob was born, when I realised that the time to just wait for a second didn't exist for us, we had to get on with it if we had any hope of it happening. I remember being so incredibly sad when our first IVF cycle after Pob didn't work. I also remember having to snap out of it soon after I got home so that I didn't affect her. While that didn't reduce the sadness, it did reduce the focus on the sadness.

Sometime after Junior arrived, the visceral reality of the anger and the sadness went away. Not completely, no. When I yearn for another baby, it's there, that feeling that if only we'd had children sooner we might have been able to have another. But it's a yearning, a nostalgia almost, not a deep, penetrating, dreadful sadness like the absence of any children - or of any sense of possibility of those children, at some points - felt. It's there when I look at one of my colleagues, struggling to hold it all together at a women's event where EVERYONE is talking AGAIN about the challenges of working motherhood. And I know she's feeling jealous and angry and ashamed of herself. But I just know it, I don't feel it.

I don't know what made it go away. I don't know if somehow the intensity of the love I feel for my children filled the gap. I don't know if it seeped away because it's just not what I think about all day any more. It comes up, and it goes away while I think about everything else on the list. I don't know if I'm healed, or just papered over.

I know that this is not true for everyone. I had lunch with a friend last week who adopted her daughter two years ago, after nearly 10 years of dealing with infertility. I shared some of the above feelings with her, and she visibly tensed, shivered, looked a bit sick, and then said: "No. I feel it. I feel those critical moments every day. I remember each period of those first three years, getting more and more angry every time I realised I wasn't pregnant again. The day they told me after the operation I'd never have children without IVF, the first time we had to have a social worker in our house. The moment I realised our daughter would not come from China. I am right back there, every time I remember those moments."

Why? Why has it gone for me and not for her? Is it because she is thinking about a second adoption, while, we, much as I yearn for another, are done? Is it because I've filled the hole not just with love but with working too hard and planning a move? Am I distracting myself from reality with a bunch of displacement activities?

As always, it's probably some combination of the above. I know that the love of my children has changed the way I feel about life in a profound way. I know that I am mostly happy. I know, even so, that there are things that are not right in my life and that currently I am doing a medium good job of covering them up. But the sadness, it has lifted. The pain, is a memory of an ache, no longer agony. I got the future I wanted, not when I wanted, but I got it nonetheless.

The experience of being a parent, of loving my children, hasn't cured me, it's just changed the angle with which I experience the world.

 

Junior can talk! (a bit)

At about 15 months, Junior's words started to sound like words. He'd been clearly trying to communicate for a long time, but not managing to be consistent or very clear. While 'Daddy' has been around for a long time, and 'no' for slightly longer, other words appeared perfectly once, and then weren't heard again ('high five'). But over the last few weeks, at precisely the same time as he decided to learn to walk, his language seems to be making progress.

Words he says
Daddy
No
Muhmuh (dummy)
Car
'ank'oo (thank you)
Teef (teeth)
'es (yes)
Mama (Mummy)
Bok (book)
'oof (woof, means dog)
guh (hug)

At the same time, we've upped our use of signing as he has been so much slower than Pob at acquiring spoken language, and we are quite tired by the screaming that he uses to get what he wants most of the time.

Words he signs
Eat
More
Milk
Thank you/Please (the signs are so similar we don't really distinguish)
Hot
Bath
Brush teeth
All done
Bye bye
Up

We're trying to teach him the signs for toast, sorry, banana, book, and drink at the moment. Any suggestions as to what signs it would be helpful to add?

Things in my head

I'm too fat. I'm fed up of being too fat. Must find time to exercise. Must not eat that biscuit...

Is Pob overweight? What can I do about it? Should I ignore it? I don't want her to have an eating complex. I don't want her to be the fat kid. Help.

Why isn't Junior talking? Is there something off with his hearing? Is he just not ready? What did he just say? Is that a word or is it wishful thinking?

Shit I haven't sent that email I said I'd send. Bugger.

Why is H so unhappy? How can I help him?

Should we move? Can I bear the strain? Would it be worth it?

Should I do that meeting or ask someone else to? Is it worth going all the way to Turkey for a 2 hour meeting? Really?

Is my key customer ever going to hire us again?

What should we give the children for dinner tomorrow night?

Shit I haven't ordered the wetsuits for the holiday next week. The children will freeze.

Should I let Junior have his MMR on Monday and risk the reaction happening while we're on holiday, or should I wait for another couple of weeks?

Will the washing machine be safe to use tomorrow after today's flood?

What should I do about my assistant?

When can I get back to my book?

Am I a bad mother because I like working?

What would I do if I didn't do this job?

Let me just browse to see if I can find Pob a winter coat.

What should Pob wear to that party tomorrow (today actually)?

How is Kath? Why hasn't she responded to anything recently?

Shit I still haven't sent that email.

I don't deserve you

I felt quite bad about that post after I wrote it. Like that stroppy email you should save and reflect on ovenight, rather than sending. I did in fact save it instead of posting, and wrote the Nostalgia post instead. But instead of saving to draft I saved it for later posting, and I was so busy at the end of last week I forgot and it got posted. By the time I remembered it already had 15 comments which I didn't want to lose, so I left it.

Despite my red face, I got so much out of your comments, thank you. I think you were all incredibly gracious given my moaning. You wrote some very wise thoughts. I do know that readers move on, and I understand that very well, particularly when they are still in the trenches. So it wasn't about any of my bloggy friends who have just retreated from the bloggy world as it became less and less helpful for them. It was more about those who are still around, yet no longer present here and in some other parts of the community which was once central to them.

It also wasn't about the early pioneers, as electriclady described them, the first wave of 2003/2004. They only very rarely commented here, although I know they read a bit more often than that, so I didn't feel the same sense of us all being in it together with them as I did with those of us who were all in the trenches together during 2005/2006/2007.

In additoin, one of the things I should have written is, "If you are reading this, it isn't about you." It turns out, understanding myself a bit better than I did a few days ago, that my real sadness wasn't so much about the comments, although I do love a bit of validation when it comes my way, but the loss of some of those relationships, and a sense of injustice that I didn't stop being supportive of them, yet they have moved on from me. I was once part of a community where just over 200 people congratulated me on the birth of my daughter. I am still part of a community, but a different one, a different shape and with a different purpose. Not a single purpose but a mess of different purposes, hence less of a unifying force and more of an underlying loyalty based on historical relationships. Some of those relationships were stronger than others, I should not be surprised at that although I allow myself a little bit of sadness.

But your comments helped me a great deal and gave me a bit of renewed energy for blogging. Thank you so very much for your thoughtfulness and fulfilling a need despite my worst side coming out. You're the best.

I'm five. And five hundred

For once, I've actually remembered my bloggiversary in time to write about it on the day itself. And it coincides with another nice round number. Five years and five hundred posts ago I started this blog (I'm not very impressed with five hundred posts in five years. A hundred a year? One every 3.6 days? Must try harder). I had already been a participant in the bloggisphere for some time in the form of comments, but I realised as I read other blogs that when I read a comment I liked I clicked on the name to read more of what they thought and what they were experiencing, yet I wasn't allowing others to do the same for me. So why should people who wrote these blogs care what I thought in their comments if I wasn't similarly sharing my own thoughts? At the same time, we had some difficulties in our marriage that I couldn't talk about in real life, and I wanted a safe space to discuss them, a space where nobody knew my name.

In the five years since I have been writing the size of the infertile bloggisphere has exploded. At the time I started I think I'm safe in saying that we were all connected by, at most, two degrees (e.g., I read Julie, who read Cecily. Although I didn't read Cecily to start off with, a post at Julie's alerted me to the loss of Cecily's boys, which allowed me to connect to Cecily's experience. And add her to my list of blogs I read.). And we were all connected by the famous 'big list of blogs' at Julie's place, which allowed everyone to at least have the opportunity to 'know' everyone.

Nowadays I'm sure that despite Mel's efforts, we are not even all connected through the Stirrup Queens portal. There are simply too many people in the world blogging about infertility and infant loss, and increasingly many of them are not blogging in English and so don't naturally hook into the big US-UK-(some parts of mainland Europe)-Australia-New Zealand-Canada cabal. As new people join the infertile bloggisphere, us old ones often stick around (although sadly others don't), swelling the ranks further. 

For me, this means that a sense of community is harder. First because it's simply too big. The very good programme shown recently on BBC1 - 'Virtual Revolution' - shared some research on this. Basically in every primate society there is a natural group size of between 60 and 150. Beyond 150 groups tend to fragment into smaller units, as it's impossible to maintain the intense 1:1 interactions that are required for the group to maintain its identity. Despite the ease of online interaction, it turns out we still tend to stick to communities of less than 100. On facebook, the average number of friends is around 65. This community is much, much bigger than 150 - probably back in 2005 we had already exceeded this limit. 

What's happened? We've become a social network experiment. If you analysed our connections my guess it we'd look something like this

  Picture from here, thank you
 
Lots of relatively tightly linked groups, connected by less tight and dense links to other similar groups. Except that our links would continue to link those outside the picture. It's not a perfect illustration, but it will do.

Does it matter? Not really. People seem to still find the connection and supoprt they need (although I wonder if that's always true for someone blogging in, say, Hungarian or Tamil. And where are those blogging in Mandarin about infertility? There must be some, mustn't there? Do you think there is a Chinese equivalent of Tertia or Julia leading the way and making connections?). It does make the groups that do exist perhaps a bit less closely knit. The linkages are not so intense because there are more people sharing them. The need for support is a bit less obvious - we know the community is big, we assume someone else will make that comment. But it is what it is. It's much bigger and it's getting bigger.

And perhaps naturally, therefore, I cherish the links that have been with me since the beginning or almost beginning even more, even when those people have disappeared from my life. So I thank Sandy and Nico, who left my very first comments. I thank Grrl, whose blog was the first infertility blog I found. I thank Julie, for being the original glue. And I won't go on because inevitably I will forget someone and I always have hurt feelings when I read similar posts on other blogs and they haven't mentioned me! But I do thank all of you. For the 11,927 comments on my 500 posts. For getting me through it. For understanding when no one in real life did. For becoming real friends. I am so glad I didn't have to go through it without you.

 

Pob snippets number 8: the Charlie and Lola edition

Scene: Morning in Mummy and Daddy's bed. Mummy is feeding Junior, Pob is drinking her milk.

Pob: I'd like to watch Tubbies please

Mummy: Tubbies or Charlie and Lola?

Pob: Tubbies

Mummy: Ok (turning on the sky plus)

Pob: Actually, I'd rather watch Charlie and Lola Mummy

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We are in rather a Charlie and Lola phase at the moment. At Christmas, my mum took Pob and I and her cousin, Z, to see Charlie and Lola's play. It was pretty good, and despite my initial concerns, Pob handled the whole theatre experience really well, sitting still for most of the performance and asking just a few questions. It obviously had a big impact on her. I took her to the theatre to see a children's performance on Friday, a dance performance about the seasons designed for 2-5 year olds. About 3 minutes after it started, Pob asked politely "Where are Charlie and Lola, Mummy?"

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Scene: Climbing the stairs before bed. 

Mummy: When we get to Mummy and Daddy's bedroom, we can collect the present Granny brought you today

Pob: Yes!

Pob: I'm exciting!

Mummy: Yes, you are very exciting

Pob: Wonder can it be?

Mummy: Here you go Pob

Hands Pob a, wait for it, new Charlie and Lola book

Pob: Thank you Mummy, Thank you! 

Pob: (Climbing stairs) You can read half the pages with me, Mummy, and Daddy can read half the pages, too!

Losses big and small

Tomorrow I leave on my first business trip in about 9 months. Junior is 7 months old. I am still breastfeeding first thing in the morning, after his lunchtime nap, at bedtime, and through the night (more on that another time). I plan to give up the afternoon feed this week given that from the week after next I'll be back at work full time.

Dropping feeds has been hard, my boobs have felt pretty buzzy and I've had several leaks. While this makes me feel happy about my breastfeeding success, it is hard to be experiencing it just when I have to give up. I don't want to give up, but continuing to feed just isn't compatible with my work life. I am away tomorrow night and won't be home until after bedtime on Tuesday. I am supposed to be away again on Thursday night. And in mid-March I will be away for a full week - leaving Sunday, coming back Saturday morning (going to Toronto, anyone want to meet up? Aurelia?). While I can pump through a 36-hour absence, I'm not sure I can do so through a week - won't he simply forget how to feed in that time?

I am not ready to stop breastfeeding, and I really wish I wasn't going back to work so that I could keep going that bit longer. When he settles in for a feed, particularly the afternoon one where he's a little bit sleepy from his nap, I feel like I can really do this magical, but utterly basic, thing I've always dreamed of.

That March trip is just over 4 weeks away, so I'm not deciding today what to do then. What I do have to do is deal with my sadness at leaving him at all. Although I've left him for an evening, I haven't left for longer than a few hours, and it feels very sad that for two nights in a row he won't have me there at bedtime. Or that I won't have him. Or both. There all the niggly issues associated with being away. I had to buy a portable pump and it turns out Medela has changed its attachments for this new pump so my existing kit doesn't fit it. I need to dig around to find my passport, my adaptors, portable hair dryer, etc.. I don't know if I'll be able to get the hotel to freeze my icepacks, or if Zurich airport will let me transport the milk I pump. It's all irritating, all that little bit stressful. Not to mention that I actually have to turn my brain on to a different channel and start to engage with my colleague again. We will see how I cope. But mostly I'm not stressed about all of that, I'm just sad about leaving my baby for the first, and very definitely not the last time.

Pob snippets number 7

Scene: I'm in our bed in the early morning, feeding Junior. H is upstairs getting Pob up. I hear loud screams. Then Pob appears in the door of our room:

Pob: I was crying!

Thalia: Yes I heard you. Do you know why you were crying?

Pob: I lost my dummies. My dummies were on the floor and that's the reason I was making lots of noise.

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Scene: H is away so I'm on my own with the two children in the morning. Pob wakes before I've had a chance to go downstairs and get her milk. So I go up to get her, leaving a protesting Junior on our bed, and bring her down to our room to collect Junior, thinking we'd all go downstairs together and I can breastfeed him while she has her milk and breakfast. Then I realise it's only 620 and I cant face making breakfast yet. Pob asks for her milk so I ask her if she'll look after Junior for me while I go and get it for her. I go downstairs and return with the milk. And find her sitting in the middle of the bed, holding Junior's hand.

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Scene: In the car on the way back from Gymboree. I get the usual refrain of "Where's my home gone?" from the back seat. I give the usual response, including "and then we do a twiddle under the bridge." This satisfies her for a bit. After a few minutes I hear a new question from the back seat:

Pob: Where's the [unintelligible] gone?

Thalia: What did you say darling?

Pob: Where's the [unintelligible] gone?

Thalia: I don't know sweetie, can you try to ask mummy again?

Pob: Where's the [unintelligible] gone?

Thalia: I'm really sorry sweetie, I don't know what you're asking. Could you have one more go?

Pob: Where's the TWIDDLE gone Mummy?

Thalia: (laughing) Oh sweetheart there isn't a twiddle, it's just a word to mean we are going to turn left and right a lot when we go under the bridge.

Pob: Oh.

Pob: Where's the bridge gone, Mummy?

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Scene: Boxing day. Pob is opening presents. One of her presents is a toy computer. A nasty tacky thing which she is too young for, but she is so mad keen on our computers that I couldn't resist.

Pob: A muter a muter!

H: Yes darling, your muter. Shall I show you how to use it?

Pob: No Daddy, it's MY muter. Don't touch Daddy, ok? It's mine, don't touch.

Junior's first six months, mostly about feeding

Junior is possibly the happiest, smiliest baby you have ever met. That is when he's not whining because he's TIRED because he WON'T SLEEP. But honestly, seriously, everyone who meets him comments on just how adorable he is. And he's a lot less whiny when he's being held or entertained or allowed to be on the boob as much as he likes.

Yes, he likes the boob a lot. To the extent that until about three weeks ago he refused bottles entirely. Luckily a bit of perseverance helped with this, and he will now take a bottle, particularly if the person offering it is not me. He won't take any more than he wants to eat, though. Just a soupcon more, and he starts to chew the nipple and do whatever it takes to get it out of his mouth. Which is not what he does with a real boob. With that he just keeps on sucking and sucking until he is in a full-on slumber.

Once he is asleep I used to be able to gently remove the boob (a delicate manouevre - a little too early and he'd whine and wag his head around, opening and closing his mouth in his sleep like a tiny pterodactyl) and move him to his moses basket for a proper nap - all of 45 minutes or so on average, although a few times before Christmas he did two hours whereupon I thought he was dead. But increasingly now if I move him he wakes up and refuses to go back down again unless the magic boob is produced. And the magic boob is going back to work in about 4 weeks, so things are going to have to change. Which as far as I can see means a repeat of the miserable month I had in October where I stayed in the house for a month trying to get him to go down for naps and stay down. It worked to an extent but not completely, and in the meantime it was bloody miserable (lots of holding him while he screamed blue murder) so its filling me with not much joy to contemplate doing it again. 

But, you say, he loves the boob. What happened with feeding then? Well, what happened with feeding (can't quite believe I've written so little about this since the early trauma days; guess it's been a dry spell for writing in general) is that we managed to get it to work, supplementing at most feeds with a homemade SNS (so so so much better than the soul-destroying Medela one I tried with Pob). By about week 5 of his life I was pumping enough breastmilk not only to deal with the supplementing needs but also to freeze 100mls or so a day. By the end of month 4 I could no longer freeze any, and by the end of month 5 I was out of my freezer stash - not because he was taking so much more in the SNS, in fact he was settling at - and growing like a weed at - an average of 40mls extra per feed, much much less than Pob used to get as supplement. But because I dropped pumps quite rapidly once I started getting only 20-40mls at most post-feed pumps, and so that we could all get out of the house more. I think he got really good at getting everything out of the boob, and I think I stopped being so good at letting down for the pump. I only managed to get as much pumped milk out as I did by pumping all evening once he was in bed. In fact I'm sitting here now with my pumping apparatus strapped to my boobs, waiting to turn the pump on one last time before bed. 

And not only was I able to do almost all of his first 6 months entirely on breastmilk, I also was able to drop the supplementing for some feeds - both those when I had more milk and when we were out, so that it was possible to have a life again. Sure he'd want to feed again a bit sooner than ideal - every 2 hours or so - but it meant we were/are portable and I could take him along to playdates with Pob and just stick him on the boob when he got ratty, which was great. My final triumph of being the breastfeeder I always wanted to be was going up to Northumberland the week after Christmas (as far north as you can get and still be in England rather than Scotland) and being able to walk into the motorway service station and just stick him on the boob without worrying about it. I felt like I was finally doing things 'properly,' finally a member of that club I was so desperate to join. 

We started Junior on solids this last week, and after an indifferent start he has taken so them well, and so far has lapped up apple, pear, butternut squash, carrot, and baby rice.

Just as we get breastfeeding working, I need to cut back so that thing work when I go back to work. I'm not ready to stop so I'm resisting dropping feeds, and it's not as easy to drop feeds as it was with Pob as I'm feeing less to a schedule and more to what works with what we are doing that day. So far, I haven't dropped any, but it's coming and it makes me sad. Such is my ambivalence that I haven't cut back on the domperidone at all, which I could presumably do a bit of without affecting supply much (and I have a huge domperidone stock so if anyone needs it - it is like magic for improving breastmilk production and it's all very safe for breastfeeding - please email me and you can have a full supply of the drug for about 3 months for free (plus postage)). It would be good to cut back on the dom as I reckon it's one of the things keeping my weight up as it keeps me hungry, but this is the last time I will ever breastfeed a baby and I want to make the most of it. I'm wondering to what extent I could keep feeding once I'm back at work. I stopped completely with Pob before going back to work but that was because I wasn't ovulating and we wanted to try to get pregnant again, not an issue this time. 

I am so very torn and conflicted about going back to work. But that's another post.

And the non-feeding aspects of Junior? Well, as outlined above, he is gorgeous. He is very very smiley and interactive. He's been rolling from back to front for about a month, and just started to sit independently. He has learnt to shake his head and thinks it's very funny. He's trying to imitate clapping and waving, but really cant do it at all yet. It's fun to watch his hands start to make the movement, though, and then he just gets stuck and you can practically see the gears turning in his head, trying to figure out what to do next. He loves to have his legs squeezed and any kind of tickling elicits delicious belly laughs.

He is saying 'mamamma' but it's not directed at me, it's more his unhappy, feed-me noise. He loves Pob to distraction and spends most of his time trying to get her attention, or at least admiring her from afar. She is quite interested in him sometimes, but guards her space and her time with each parent, and Granny, quite effectively. He doesn't complain. He has developed an ear-splitting screech for when he thinks he has been ignored too long, though. He loves his bouncer, not so keen on his playmat. He seems keen to get going but is definitely behind where Pob was on the motor skills- she was on her hands and knees, rocking at his point, and he's not able to get up on his knees yet, perhaps because he is so much bigger. He weighs over 20lbs (9.25 kilos) and is in the 91st centile for both height and weight so there's a lot of him. 

I adore him in a way I was not prepared for. It's just as intense as that first-child love, but without some of the anxious energy perhaps. He lights up the room, and even at 3 am I can't bring myself to be frustrated with him for long. My lovely boy.

With apologies, I know this is rambly but I've got terrible writers block and had to get something out there to try to get over it.

Pob at 26 months: The importance of being kind

Last week, Pob turned 26 months old. Biggest change this month is language. She has now reached real fluency with language, using complete sentences, and  correct tense and grammar almost all the time. This month she switched from "Pob do it" to "I do it," for example, and now uses "I" and other pronouns correctly most of the time, with some misses on the me/you split such as "Help you." Of course she still gets plenty wrong, to whit as an incident earlier this week. She slipped down a couple of stairs while climbing them, and it gave her a fright. She cried for a bit, I comforted her, then her nanny appeared to take her out. They left our room together to go down stairs, after a little bit of persuasion as Pob didn't want to go. Once she'd agreed to head down the stairs she said: "I'm not scarey any more"

She's understanding language rules, and these are leading to some of the more adorable mixups such as yesterday when I asked her if she was hungry. She agreed "Yes, I'm hungry, and I'm play-ey." Nice try, darling.

This shift to fluency was accompanied by some very adult turns of phrase. She now uses "Umm" when she can't think of what word to use. She regularly tells Junior what to do: "You stay here with Mummy, Junior, I'm going downstairs with Daddy." She repeats everything she hears. And her most common phrases are "I want it/that/some of those" and "What's that called?" She also uses substitutes - "I want that thingy" and "Where's that stuff."

Pronounciation is really very good. She misses a few things. 's's in the middle of words often disappear. Double 'tt's become 'p's - "boppom," for example. But the 'p' for 'f' substitution has gone - 'breakfast' is now correct. And some words she just has her own pronounciation for, most notably 'muter' for 'computer.' Like all our children, I suspect, the 'muter' is of great interest, and I've now realised computer manufacturers either don't know this or have a sick sense of humour, locating the 'on/off' switch so prominently in an easily touchable spot.

She remains a strong willed child, and we've had some spectacular tantrums over sharing toys with Junior, and when we just simply are not giving her exactly what she wants right now. It's hard to remain calm sometimes when she starts to break down even after I've said she can have the required object, it's just that it's going to take me all of 30 seconds to get it. Mostly I manage, but with gritted teeth. 

She is also extremely loving and social. She kisses Junior goodnight every night, and asks to hold him. Sometimes. She helps to wash him in the bath and has been showing him how to bounce in his bouncer. With the little friends we have who are her age she shares reasonably well, and is happy to give and receive hugs while they are playing.

She wants desperately to play with older children, though, and particularly with her cousins. Luckily H's nephews are adorable with her and give in to every whim. My nephews, and one in particular, are not so kind. Today at my mother's house, cousin J just refused to play with her at all. He's seven. I feel he should be old enough to give her 5 minutes of his time and to understand how important it is to her. She seems to rise above it, though, and managed to play with him even while he was clearly not playing with her - saying "chase, chase" and running behind him as he walked around the flat, asking where he was every time he left the room and running to find him and bring him back. It really hurts my feelings on her behalf, even while it clearly doesn't hurt hers. I can't protect her, I can't make him a kinder boy, but I wish I could. I worry about my nephew, and wish he could have a bit of the joy that a friend's seven year old had last week when she played 'house' with Pob non-stop for a whole afternoon, including building the house, drawing pictures to hang on the walls, having a tea party, cooking supper, washing up the dishes, having races on Pob's wheelybugs, and dressing up as fairies. Pob was enchanted, and couldn't stop gazing at the seven year old in adoration, finding it hard to let go of her hand as if the child would spontenously vanish if released. I wish my nephew understood what he's missing.

Oh Pob, I wish for you that you will find the kind children, and understand that the unkind ones are only like that because they aren't getting what they need out of life, or because life is not being very kind to them, and not because there is anything wrong with you.

I know tomorrow you'll find better things

Thank you for the sympathy. Yesterday was better and today is doing ok so far. Yesterday:

• I took Junior out for his post-breakfast nap, so I got a walk. He only slept for 30 minutes but when he woke was happy to look at the passing clouds and leaves so it was quite pleasant
• We walked to the post office where I kicked up enough fuss (and enough money) that they decided to release my domperidone
• On the way home I sat in Starbucks for 10 minutes, read the paper, ate a cheese and Marmite panini and had a few sips of a decaf skinny mocha, no whip
• In the afternoon our current nanny decided to bake a cake with Pob, which Pob thought was a blast, and she also took charge of Junior for 45 minutes so I walked round the corner and sat with my book and a decaf cap in our local deli
• My mum came round to put Pob to bed as H was out for the evening. Pob loves her Granny
• Both children went straight to sleep

It was a much better day.

This morning, I got a call from that nursery school. They're very sorry they sent that letter out. They had a class full of siblings so very few places for new children. But one of the siblings has pulled out since they are moving to the country, and Pob was top of the list for a place, so, would she like it?

I feel better. I also feel conflicted as now I actually have to make a decision about whether the school is right for Pob since she will almost certainly get in to another, closer school which is a bit more relaxed. But it's good to be wanted.

__________________

I need a new title for the blog. Any ideas? I've been musing on some combo of 'evolving infertility', 'Post-post-infertility', 'Evolutionary parenting' but nothing seems very catchy or particularly witty. I've always regretted choosing the original title in a hurry on a day when I just wanted to start writing NOW NOW NOW, so I'm prepared to spend a bit more time trying to be creative this time. I don't feel right letting go completely of the infertility part, even though we won't be doing treatments again. I used to study evolution, hence that reference. The blog won't be just parenting so I don't want to major on that too much, although it will be a part of it. Your creativity much appreciated.

Bad day

Today I:

• Listened to my baby scream on and off for most of the morning while I tried to get him to nap, gave up but then could not constantly hold him but put him down occasionally to answer the phone/make myself a sandwich/eat the sandwich/brush my teeth etc.
• Dealt with some work crap
• Tried to get a hair appointment booked for the first time in 5 months, involving juggling my temperamental colourist, my hair cutter, my MIL for baby-sitting, and my own timing. Plus the salon reception
• Heard from a nanny agency that they don't have anyone else to send us who is a good fit for our position (short version of long story, the current nanny is not working out)
• Heard that the nanny we were interviewing tonight had accepted another job
• Heard that the nanny we invited back for a second interview isn't interested
• Heard that Pob has been turned down by the nursery school we want her to go to (WHY WHY WHY?? How can anyone turn us down - we are lovely and Pob is remarkable!)
• Got told by inhousepharmacy.co.uk that the domperidone I need to keep my supply going has been impounded by the post office and it's not their problem and they will not resend until the end of the week despite there being a mail strike and despite its essential nature to my life*

It was a bit of a crap day.

* Updated to add, they have now agreed to resend, but said it may take up to a month. I am buggered.

Losing it

There are several posts which traditionally show up in the few months after a baby is born. That is if you are a common-or-garden blogger like me, rather than if you are a superstar creative writer like, say, Julie, or Alexa. And even they have been known to write one or two of these. Some experiences are . To my reckoning, those posts are:

• I have a baby, he/she is the best thing that ever happened to me
• The baby doesn't sleep, what do I do?
• Breastfeeding is awful/wonderful/stressful/impossible (delete as appropriate)
• I'm so utterly sleep deprived I just [insert humorous anecdote here]
• My husband isn't helping/is wonderful/doesn't get it/I've fallen more in love with him than ever
• I'm still fat/the weight has just dropped off aren't I lucky

This post falls into the last category, and guess which side of it I am experiencing. Not hard, is it? I have quite a history with weight issues. Not exactly a shocker given the experience of others in this community, not to mention the global privileged world female population.

I'm currently carrying the 15lbs of infertility weight, and another 10lbs of post-pregnancy weight. I was actually losing weight beautifully in the few weeks after Junior was born. It was like magic, stepping on the scales every morning and watching them plummet down. I don't know how much I lost in those weeks as didn't weigh myself after the third month of pregnancy, but everyone commented on how little weight I'd gained this time and when I first weighed myself post-birth, when Junior was about 2 weeks old, I felt pretty optimistic given I was already below the weight I had been four months after Pob was born. But then the weight loss stopped. And then I started gaining again. I managed to halt the gain at only 4lbs by stopping buying my favourite chocolate biscuits, and by walking more with the pram. But that just halted the gain, it hasn't helped me lose more. And the walking with the pram has fallen foul of napping bootcamp (of which more anon), which doesn't help.

The perennial problems are two. First, that I really like food, and second that I eat for comfort. The one time in my adult life that I have been in great shape was around our wedding, and then the impetus to look my best in that huge public display outweighed the two underlying issues. Although I never really gave up on the first one, I always ate delicious food, just less of it and didn't give up chocolate, I just cut back. And exercised A LOT.

But right now the emotional eating side is strong. I've been stuck mostly in the house for four weeks trying to get Junior to nap. I suppose I should just declare defeat (although there has been some progress) and get out again. But I'm bloody minded enough to sense that things might get better and therefore to keep going. And my approach to breast feeding takes so long that the time I have to exercise at all is limited in any case (cue the bloody minded riff again). And the slots that I do have are taken up spending time with Pob, which doesn't give me much exercise as even her favourite activity - running - doesn't happen for long enough or fast enough for me to get a lot of cardio out of it.

So I'm not really exercising, and I feel hard done by enough that I'm eating more than I probably need. Not excessively, but enough not to shift the weight. And I'm getting fed up with not fitting into my nice clothes, but not fed up enough to stop myself from eating that extra bit of chocolate. I'm not sure I'm up for another search into my unconscious to work on the emotional eating bit - although perhaps it would help Pob a lot in the long run - but I am up for trying to find time to exercise, persuading H to give me smaller portions at supper, and perhaps limiting the amount of chocolate in the house. I just need to get on and do it. 

Last week I went out with some of the women from my ante-natal group (from my pregnancy with Pob, I didn't do classes again this time). One already has a second child, one is pregnant, the other two are trying. I confessed to them it was the first time I'd been out since Junior was born, and they were horrified. Particularly the one who already has two children- the second being born just a year after her first. She is somewhat of a socialite and has a very active social life and regular date nights with her husband. She was moved to write me an email asking if I thought I had PND since she was shocked at my lack of activity and lack of confidence ( I should note all these women are at least 6 years younger than me and all but one shed all their baby weight in about a month after their first children were born*). 

I don't think I have PND, I'm certainly a lot more stable than I was after Pob was born. But I am hard on myself. And I am very tired after all these months of feeding in the night. But that's normal at this stage of parenting, yes? I could definitely get out more if I made different choices about my parenting, and it's true that the morning I took Pob out to a charity party and left Junior to have a bottle with our nanny was the morning I've felt the best in a long time. So perhaps that's the key.

Hence a resolution. I'm taking Junior to a cranial osteopath tomorrow to see if that helps to settle him a bit better. Either way, by the end of this week I will be heading out for a fast walk with the pram once a day. And I will try to take a deep breath and start to leave Junior a bit so that I can do more activity and am not tied to being in the house every three hours during the day (yes I know one can breastfeed outside the house, but it's hard with my SNS set up to do so effectively and discretely, and Junior has got to that stage where he's very interested in the world around him so he feeds poorly anywhere other than my bedroom, and also I want to keep my supply up as it's very fragile at the best of times so I do need to pump regularly, and...). Doing so might mean Junior has to have a bit of formula occasionally, and I'm thinking about that. Not ok with it just yet, but I think I need a bit of my life back, as well as doing a bit more to get my body back, before I go back to work and surrender a big part of my life again. 

Cue a whole new post about mothers and guilt and whether it's just my job to sacrifice what I need for my children right now. But I'll stop here and start that one another day.

* And please don't slam them. They are lovely women who love me a lot and appreciate me, they just happen to be rather lucky in the fertility and beauty stakes. Although 'lucky' is a bit relative as one has had two miscarriages and one had horrible anaemia and couldn't breastfeed and one had premature labour and pre-eclampsia.

The end of the fertility journey

I will never be pregnant again.

Really. We have decided that we don't want any more children. The newborn stage with Junior has persuaded me that no matter how much I love my children, I don't need to be that sleep deprived again. Nor do I really want that emotional struggle with breast feeding again. If we'd started earlier, if I had that much more energy, if we even had the option of conceiving easily, when we wanted to, then it would be on the cards. But two children is perfect for us, and I can't help thinking that having three would start to get very complicated in the parenting stakes - speaking as one of three children.

Just because we don't want them, doesn't mean we wouldn't have a surprise. It's very unlikely, but it has happened to others in our community. Well, we are taking steps to remove that option. H has had the preliminary consult for a vasectomy, and has said he will make the appointment before the end of the week. He said, very forcefully, when I pushed him on whether he was happy with permanently ending his fertility, that even if he ended up in another relationship because I had died, he would have enough on his hands with his two children and would not want more. He is committed to the family we have.

We also have several frozen embryos. I can't actually remember how many, somewhere between 6-8. But they were never the best embryos from any cycle, and if we wanted to use them it would be a long and probably painful process of suppression, estrogen, trigger, progesterone, transfer, and possibly a chemical pregnancy or two before we were done. And besides, we don't want any more children. We don't want any more children.

As others have written, though, it's hard to let frozen potential children go even when you know a pregnancy might kill you, let alone because having more children just isn't right for you and your family. Nevertheless, I am psyching myself up to remove our frozen embryos as an option. We will donate them to research. There is no option that I know of to donate them to another family, and even if there was, I'm too old to be an egg donor in the UK so fairly sure that would rule us out. I'll make that call tomorrow. Or the next day. Or after the weekend, perhaps. Well, we have mentally let them go, at least.

With the vasectomy/donation double hit, we will have no other chances to be pregnant again. And I am sad about that, no matter how I think through the misery of sleep deprivation and the pain of failing again to breastfeed my children successfully. I am sad that Pob will not have a sister. I am sad that I will never again use the little white Egyptian cotton babygro with the two little embroidered silver feet on the breast, the babygro which was the first thing I ever bought for Pob. I am sad that I'll never again have that newborn on my chest, conked out between one suck and the next. I have fallen in love so hard with my babies, both times. I fell in love at different points, and it didn't preclude moments of despair and frustration at the screaming infant at a later point. But I won't get to fall in love like that again.

It's sad, but it's wonderful, too. Wonderful that I got to experience that at all. Five and a half years ago we started trying to conceive, and four and a half years ago I started writing about it. There were moments on the journey when I was convinced it would never happen for us. And then moments where I thought Pob would be an only, and mourned for her and for us that sibling relationship. But now here we are, a family of four, and those who meet us now assume it was all smooth sailing - after all, our children are only 21 months apart, and who would 'choose' that? And we have the boy and the girl that people assume must be what we wanted. We have been so incredibly lucky.

And yes, some of that luck is because I pressured and argued, researched and fought for the best treatment, the best treatment as soon as it was possible, fast, no waiting. But that's just a small part of how we got here. An important part, but a small part. Others argue and fight and research and it doesn't happen for them. I have no rationale for why it happened to us other than the weird quirks of my biology, the randomness of that sperm and that egg, and that sperm and that egg and that test tube and that embryologist and that catheter and that drug and the resulting embryo happening to hit the uterine lining just so, and find just the right blood vessel to colonise, and...

So the fertility journey is done. So what, pray, am I doing with this blog, with this blog title? Not writing much, that's for sure. But this isn't goodbye. It's my space, it's our community even if the community I am truly part of now is more naturally those parenting after infertility, with a strong emotional connection on my part, if not on theirs, to those who were in the trenches with me but who didn't make it out, whose embryos never quite found the right bit of the uterine lining. I will try to change the title to more accurately reflect my life now, but I will remain here until they consign Typepad to the dust. The blog got me through, you got me through, through infertility and pregnancy and breastfeeding and the start of parenting.

Junior is stirring. This post didn't end up being what I thought it was going to be. But it is what it is. And I am here, now. A parent.

So. Napping bootcamp then.

You asked what napping bootcamp entails? Well, it first entailed getting in a sleep nanny who was recommended by a colleague. She came in to do one nap with us, but stayed for two given that Junior simply refused to nap for the whole duration of the first one. She gave us various hints tips and tricks to try to get him down, most of which you've heard before, including darkening the room, swaddling him, having a regular schedule, offering a dummy as a nap cue but taking it away before he is completely asleep, picking him up if he gets distressed, patting until he's calm, then putting him down again, etc. She asked us to make sure that almost all his naps for the next week would be at home in a darkened room, and to make an exception only for the late afternoon nap if we had to.

Being me, we've adhered to the plan almost in every detail in an attempt to give it a good try. The only area where I've been a bit lax is in sticking precisely to time. Sometimes I'll go 15 minutes later if he's finally asleep rather than waking him. But other than that we've been very good. And the results have been...mixed. I thought we'd cracked it when on Monday it took only 15 minutes to get him down for his morning nap, and he went down with no fuss at all, just a little grumbling, for the lunchtime nap. But then Tuesday every nap took at least 25 minutes to kick in, and the breakfast one was really screamy as well. Yesterday the morning and lunchtime naps only took 10 minutes each, and the only crying was when I first put him down, he immediately calmed down when I put my hand on him and then just grumbled and then lay quietly while he waited for sleep. But yesterday afternoon he only slept for 10 minutes of the hour's nap time, and this morning took 20 minutes again, although not much of it was crying.

So I dunno. It's been a long week, and unlike the previous not-very-successful napping strategy of putting him in his pram and walking, I've barely left the house. I'm going to give it another 3 days or so and then start to try him in his pram as well as in his room as I'm not prepared to be housebound for the next three months. I like to think this will work eventually but so far I'm not totally convinced.

Just bug me enough, and I'll write. The question is, is it worth it?

I'm not looking up how long it's been, but someone emailed and said it had been a month, so that's probably right. There is nothing wrong, I am just completely washed out with work, which has stretched into a 730-midnight kind of thing, with (most days) 30 minutes to get Pob up in the morning and an hour or so to put her to bed at night. And weekend work too, and pretty much anytime I'm sitting still not with Pob, I'm working. It's getting really old and I'm very tired, but I don't think it will let up much until I go down to 50% the week of 15 June, and stop completely the week after.

To compound my stress, the builders who are doing our bedroom and bathroom are (of course) taking much longer than planned, so we're sleeping in the attic which is 6 long flights of stairs up from where we spend most of our time, which at 7.5 months pregnant is really no fun. Plus everything is in boxes, and the boxes and everything else is covered in dust, and I want to get stuff organised for Junior but there is no space to do it. So actually I think we are considerably less prepared for Junior than we were for Pob. Poor old Junior.

We also have no name for him, which is starting to worry me a bit. I like slightly avant garde names, but H doesn't, plus Pob's names have real meaning for our families so I feel there is a high bar that we need to meet for him, too. Our shortlist is currently very uninspiring, and I feel a bit stuck about the whole thing.

Of course this is nothing to those still in the trenches. I am not meaning to whine, I'm just being descriptive. Pob is doing lots of cool stuff, including her first three-word sentence a few weeks ago - comprised grammatically correctly of subject/verb/object. When I approached her to help her with a bowl of yogurt which was proving too much for her relatively new self-feeding skills, I went to take the spoon away from her. She pushed my hand away. "[Pob} hold it!" She said. So she kept hold of the spoon and I guided her hand to make things easier. Various other things not to forget about this stage:

• Nighttime routine still working ok, but increasingly she is taking ages to settle once we put her down - up to an hour of chatting, alternating with throwing everything out of the crib and then crying inconsolably for her dummy/teddy until we go and rescue her. Part of this I think is that she really suffers with her teeth - she has been getting the first set of four molars for the last 2 months. One is pretty much through, two are peeking, and one is still under the surface after all this time. But I'm not sure pain from teeth is enough to explain the lack of settling
• Waking up earlier in the mornings. I think this is the light. We are about to experiment with blackout blinds. Currently we lie in bed and listen to "Hello! Teddy! Park! Up up up up! Park! Hello! Mummy mummy mummy! Daddy daddy! Granny Granny granny! Outside! Morning!" for about 30 minutes before she gets really fed up and starts whinging
• She did her first pee on the potty after her bath a few days ago. A bit of a fluke, she hasn't done it again, but she's very interested and forces us to read the inane potty books I bought her at every available opportunity
• We have spoken to her about a baby brother, and she has various books about new babies, but I don't think she gets even a little tiny bit what it will mean for her
• She loves loves loves doggies, and her favourite treat is to be taken out on her trike so that she is at their level and can get licked all over when they find her
• She is not interested in dolls particularly, but loves her soft toys with a passion
• When she says 'yes' she shakes her whole body to emphasise its importance
• I can see her get tense with fury as she cries when she can't do something she wants to do, but it seems to pass relatively quickly
• When she wants us to do something she reaches for our hands and pulls us along until we are where she wants us to be. Sometimes this means just walking around the kitchen/playroom for a while, a little stroll together. 
• She adores the teletubbies, and asks to watch them frequently. Less frequently we give in.
• She loves some of her local friends, when she sees them she runs around holding hands with them and giggling, offering lots of kisses and chatting away in their own toddlerese. And sometimes pushing them over and snatching their toys away, too.
• She loves apples and will eat a whole one, including the core, given the chance. Just like mummy.
• She has just discovered cake and now asks for it regularly
• She is not allergic to eggs in cake, biscuits and french toast, but still has a reaction to scrambled egg. 
• There seems to be little limit on what she will eat
• She has started to get the hang of hiding to play hide and seek, but can't bear to stay hidden for too long and always reveals herself as soon as we ask ' Where's Pob?'
  
• I don't spend enough time with her
  

Got to get back to work. I'm fine, I'm just really really tired.

Letter to my daughter

Dearest Pob

I came downstairs after my early phone call this morning to find you playing with Uncle R. You were having such a lovely time together, and he was delighted to get to see you after a few months' absence. Thank you for making him feel so welcome. You are the child I always wanted - and so much more. So much more complicated, so much more intense, so much more delightful than it was possible for me to imagine before you arrived.

I've been worried, ever since it looked like this baby sibling was going to stick around, of the effect he or she would have on you. If Sib would disrupt the lovely relationships that your daddy and I have with you. That you'd feel that we didn't love you enough, that we needed something more than you. We really really don't. I wanted you to have a sibling because I wanted you to have what I have now - two lovely brothers who share a lot of my history, who love me and frustrate me in almost equal measure, who I know will always be there for me. Your Daddy feels the same way about his brother. I don't want you to feel alone in the world, alone against unreasonable parents when you are a teenager, alone at the (hopefully long-distant) point where won't be around any more for you.

We really weren't sure a sibling was going to happen for you. It took such a long time before you arrived. But here is this potential sibling, still growing, kicking Mummy from the inside on a regular basis. On Friday, at our Gymboree class, your friend A's tiny baby sister, I, was there. You went up to her carefully, patted her face, and said "Baby!" And everyone cooed at you. You know what babies are, I wonder if you know what having one in your own house will be like.

But there was a specific part of giving you a sibling that I realise now I was very invested in. That was to give you a sister. I haven't got a sister, and despite my now very strong relationship with my brothers, I have always really really wanted one, jealous of the relationships I see my friends have with their sisters. My mother got pregnant again just after my little brother was born, and she had a termination as she felt our family couldn't cope with another baby. She told me this when I was a teenager, and I understood, although I also saw her regret and my father's regret. They both thought they were doing the right thing for the other, while both secretly wanting this fourth baby to arrive anyway. My mother told me she has dreamt about this potential baby ever since. A little girl, the sister I always wanted, although she would have been seven years younger than me. Blonde, like my middle brother, to proove to him he wasn't adopted, his secret fear based on being the only blue eyed blond in a family with dark hair and mostly dark eyes. 

So maybe I might have had a sister, in another reality. And I thought, perhaps you could have a sister, give you that very very close sibling I wanted. Because my brothers, close as I am to them now, were not easy relationships when we were younger. My 2-year-9-month-old self was desparately disturbed by the arrival of this invader baby, or so I'm told. I don't remember much about it, except for throwing my panda out of the car window on the way home from meeting the baby at the hospital, after my mother had told me (with very good intentions) that the baby didn't want my panda, he was mine. I thought "well, if the panda's not good enough for the baby, I don't want him." So I threw Panda out of the window, and my father, furious, pulled the car over, stomped down the street to pick up the panda, and threw him back through the window at me. It wasn't a good day.

I do remember constant frustration as we grew up. Me, the good girl, always helping clear the table, do the dishes, do my homework, and those boys, noisy, rough, breaking enough things when they cleared the table that they weren't asked to do it again. Banding together as soon as the little one was old enough, to make bigger noises, make fun of me and my friends, beat me in tennis and football so often that I just stopped trying to play sport, and got pudgy and shy.

So although things between us are good now, I wanted a closer sibling relationship for you. One that wouldn't take so much fixing as young adults. 

I didn't realise how much I wanted this, until the sonographer zoomed in on the gap inbetween your little sibling's legs, and said "There you go, what's that!?" And your baby sibling, my lovely, is a boy. And I cried and cried, despite having just been told that the baby is perfect in every way.

I felt so awfully embarassed at the crying. This clinic is one where people go when they have serious problems with their pregnancy. And my pregnancy is fine, my baby is fine. But he's a boy, and I had to let go of all those futures I'd imagined for you and your little sister, the images of her wearing some of those little dresses you've grown out of, the thought of you having a female ally against all those hordes of boy cousins you have.

That was a few days ago. I'm getting used to the idea of a boy. I've started to test out little sentences about my son. I've ordered a book that might help me continue to understand what I'm feeling, although I'm feeling it less and less as the days go by, as I feel him kicking me. I'm hoping we can help you have a great sibling relationship, maybe do better than my parents did with me. Maybe. And we are certainly committed not to getting you to play the role I had to play in my family as the responsible, good, quiet and helpful one.

Daddy and I have started to think again about boy's names - Daddy was convinced that your sibling was another girl. We haven't told our families yet. We want to share our excitement with them when we do, since we know both grandmothers will have moments of a little sadness at a reduction in their abilities to buy pink clothes. But I know that will be transient, and then they'll get on with loving him, as we all will. As I especially hope you will, when all that disruption in your life has started to seem normal again.

This morning when you were playing with your baby doll, I said to you that you might have a baby brother in the house to play with by next year. You repeated "baby bother" and went on playing. I hope not, sweetie. I hope not.

Another world

I just attended our quarterly group baby shower in the office. They are group events, not what I understand is the usual American-style rah-rah, just a group of mothers-to-be and already-mothers (fathers are invited too, but don't show up). Understandably, I've never been to one of these before. There was no way I was going while in the midst of infertility, and when I was pregnant with Pob I most definitely didn't want the attention and certainly not the little gift-ette they hand out, not before she was safely in my arms. Instead one of the organisers sent the present to our home after Pob had arrived, which was very kind and much appreciated.

But today I went down for 10 minutes to see one of my mentees who was there with her two month old. It was fine, low key, just a bunch of women chatting. Then they started to give out the gifts. And they tried to give me one. I'm 19 weeks people, this is not the time to give me a fuzzy bunny and a cute little yellow babygro! I've barely told anyone at work, and I'm wearing a lot of black and big baggy jackets, but I guess the rumours get around. I was absolutely horrified, and in a moment of desparation said no, honestly, no thank you, not now, and the poor woman handing out the goody bags backed off, looking a bit confused.

I know we've all written about this multiple times, but it is astonishing to me just how different our worlds are, our worldviews are. Trying to give me a present for the baby at this stage of pregnancy, the fact people tell me we're rushing it by having another so soon. "Oh, I couldn't bring myself to have another one just yet, while he still needs me so much!" said one colleague with a 20-month-old. So I pointed out that having taken 3.5 years to get to the first one, we really didn't have much option but to get going again if we wanted a second at all, and that I felt extraordinarily lucky to be in the position to even contemplate that a second baby may arrive in July. And they all nodded and turned to a conversation about finding out the gender.

In this environment, with women I mostly know, unlike the conversation at the posh hotel a month ago, I felt able to talk at least a little bit about how this kind of event looks from my perspective. In general I think this is the right strategy, although it does result in that moment of awkwardness. But surely you don't have to have been through the not-too-terribly-traumatic experiences that I have had to feel awkward about getting a present for the baby at 19 weeks pregnant? One of our colleagues last year lost a baby at 22 weeks, she spent this year's pregnancy constantly tense and anxious. Many of the women there know about that experience. If you're Jewish, for starters, it's culturally inappropriate. And shouldn't that thought cross people's minds?

I'm both fuming and a bit upset. Not very upset and quite understanding that this all came from a place of wanting to do the right thing. But it wasn't, and I hope it won't now happen to someone else.

42 years ago today

My mum insists he was in there with her for most of the time, but at some point clearly he saw fit to put his feet up and read the paper...

It's been a good day. Not a milestone birthday, but a happy one. Pob enjoyed unwrapping the presents. Some colleagues sent me some flowers. Most of my RL friends (ALL my RL friends actually) forgot, but lots of you on facebook remembered (or were reminded) so thank you for that. I do love it when people remember my birthday!

Now I'm off to eat cake.

Lurgies

I got ill on Christmas Day. One of those things where various diseases have been floating around me all autumn, including Pob having multiple colds, but it takes being on holiday for me to get ill with one of them. I've been in bed on and off since the end of Boxing Day, just managing to drag myself into the shower yesterday morning when I couldn't stand it any more. I stretched to doing a load of laundry, one sink of dishes and emptying the dishwasher after my shower before collapsing back onto the sofa. Poor H has been on single parent duty, although we managed to get my mum over to help today and she was great - looking after me as well as Pob, bringing soup and magazines and delicious juices, and making the bed for me. H is pretty good at single parenting but less good at knowing how to look after me - he hasn't even felt up to cooking, which is his usual care-giving role in our family. I think it's end-of-year ennui for him.

The lurgy has meant we skipped on our usual trip to the cold north for New Year. I am sorry, but I couldn't face the travel - it's really a long way and not a straight forward journey. I don't think this will be a banner New Year for us - H has bought a lovely bit of steak to cook tomorrow, but I don't have a big appetite right now and it will just be the two of us with sadly no fireworks over the bay to look forward to. No doubt I'll be in bed at 10. Which is fine, just a little bit of an anti-climax. I wanted to have a lovely break as a family, so this is a lot less fun.

I'll be 13 weeks tomorrow. Hard to credit that things are going ok. I know I shouldn't write that, as cue for disaster, but this is really pretty uneventful so far.

More interesting posts to follow I hope as I start feeling a bit more human again.

Feed

Thanks for the comments about my feed. It turns out the problem was the post with the funky characters in the heading, it messed up a lot of feed aggregators. Who knew? Turns out swearing straight is better for your feeds than covering it up with symbols. I'll be more straightforward in future.

%$£@$%£

Well, I was going to write a post about economic melt-down and goodness me how the US senate needs to pass a that bailout bill, or I was going to write a thoughtful post about secondary infertility, but then I got my period this afternoon, so now I'm just going to write a pissed-off sad post about how much I fucking hate doing this trying to get pregnant thing again. Consider yourselves forewarned.

We've had seven tries at getting pregnant since I started ovulating again, including the IVF cycle. None of them have worked. And not surprising. I'm 41 and 3/4. I obviously wasn't Mrs Fertile to begin with. The endometriosis seems to be under control or gone but who knows if that's really true. It's not surprising. And it hurts a lot lot less than it did when we didn't have Pob. But it still hurts. Mostly it hurts on the day I get my period and the few days after, and the days when I have to make excuses with work. It hurts because somehow conceiving Pob made me feel invincible, that I had paid my dues and life would just go on from here, infertility remembered but not recurring.

But the dues are back and need to be paid again. I'm not one of those women whose infertility is cured by getting pregnant. I'm not an old lady miracle of fertility. I'm just a woman of a certain age whose fertility is crashing and whose chances of conception are vanishingly small each month.

That doesn't stop me hoping. I have a calendar written out at the back of my work notebook and every so often during the day I peruse it. I know the pattern of my period days. I know what 40 weeks from the start of each period would have been. I know my ovuation days and when it would be reasonable to pee on a home pregnancy test. I never get there because my period arrives beautifully, regularly, reliably and depressingly at 12 dpo pretty much without fail.

The hope is silly because every time I have been pregnant, I've known by about 8dpo. So if I don't have any signs by then, it's not our cycle. But each time I wake up on 12dpo and there's no blood, I hope. I look at my little black book and remind myself when 40 weeks would be. I day dream in the off moments during the day. And then sometime around tea time, I go to the loo. I wipe, and there is a pink smear. And I know its all over again.

Today hurt worse than the other recent periods. Because it's cumulative. Each month it feels less and less likely that we will get lucky again. Every month it hurts that bit more. And in this month, it brings us to the start of our fifth IVF cycle. I really don't want to do IVF again, but I really do want Pob to have a sibling. At the same time as I also struggle with the fact that I'm not spending as much time with her as I'd like, and having another baby wouldn't help that. But her having a sibling is what I think is right for her in the long run. I might have to revise that opinion in the end, but for now I'm sticking to it.

Sticking to it means injections again, injections and frustrating phone calls with the clinic, and scans and hopefully retrievals and embryos, and another week of sitting there, looking at my little black book, feeling worried that the potential baby would have a crap birthday (end of July, who's ever going to remember?), at the same time as knowing it won't work, and we'll be into 2009 and I'll be 42 and honestly why on earth are we still hoping. We got so lucky once. Others get lucky more than once, but increasingly I think once was all our luck in one go. It was wonderful wonderful luck and every day it gets better, but it made me greedy for more. I thought we'd get lucky again. Increasingly it looks like I was just that bit too optimistc.

Sweet people

Thank you everyone. I'm doing ok. Our holiday hotel is not quite what we expected (rather more of a resort than a secluded upmarket beach place, but very nice with it), but we are having a lovely time in the wind and the sun. Pob has charmed everyone in the hotel with many shouts of "Dad DAD dad DAD DAD!" As well as lots of crawling after dangerous or forbidden items, and even more smiling and waving. She's developed a very cute habit of shrugging her shoulders up to her ears and grinning and giggling simultaneously. She does it when she sees her teddy, when she thinks something is funny (not much rhyme or reason to what she thinks is funny), or when we are laughing at her. It's a virtuous cycle.

I am doing ok. I was pretty sad on Monday, sadder than I thought I would be. The thing that really made me cry, however, was having to wait 35 minutes at the clinic for my bloody blood test. Which takes about 90 seconds once someone calls you. It's not as if there were lots of people waiting, just 5 or so in line in front of me when I arrived. And plenty of nurses, just none of them taking blood, for about 25 minutes. Somehow the utter injustice, as well as the stress of trying to get into work early so I could leave early and do Pob's packing before she went to bed, just got to me and I ended up in tears when the nurse who finally called me in then asked me if I had permission to have my blood test on day 13. What was I going to say at that point, no?

Anyway, I knew it would be negative, even while I sort of hoped otherwise. But really, Aurelia aside, my internal instinct, my sensing based on vague symptoms, and the pee sticks, have always been true before, so there's no particular reason to doubt them now. And they were spot on.

What's next? Of course, sod's law, I'm travelling over the days I will probably ovulate this month, so we're unlikely to have another miracle. We'll see Dr Candour on the 28th for a review. The question is whether it's worth doing another fresh cycle given how crappy my eggs turned out to be this time, even while there were a lot of them. H thinks we should give fresh one more try. I dunno, I've lost faith in my eggs somewhat. I've ordered some DHEA, will give that a try and at the very least, we will do a frozen cycle in October - September is just too busy with work for it to be realistic. We're down but we're not out.

Will write more when I get back from holiday. Thank you again for your lovely messages.

The baby is fine, mummy will need some time to recover

As caused you much hilarity on my last post, all was fine. Pob had a hard time going down at bedtime, and got quite upset when we weren't there when they got back from the park at lunchtime today, but other than that she was happy and chirpy, did lots of walking (supported by Granny, I hasten to add), lots of standing up and cruising, lots of chatting and plenty of crawling.

The party was lovely. My friend really had thought of everything, and turns out all her friends are nice - from 4 or 5 major parts of her life, we by no means knew each other, but everyone got on and had a good time. "There are no assholes here," exclaimed one colleague after the first hour. We had afternoon tea on the lawn, drinks in a different part of the grounds, dinner outside with a huge barbeque, dancing and dessert inside the lovely dining room. I wimped out around midnight due to a rather frustrating stomach upset (must have eaten something that disagreed with me - odd because usually I have the iron constitution). H partied on with cigars and whiskey until 130 or so. So no nookie, which would have been nice, but a fun evening nonetheless.

We had a good time. I missed her. A lot. Last night I quite enjoyed being without Pob for the early evening. I was free to have a long soak in an 'infinity bath' (ever seen one of these? very funky. It had underwater glowing lights as well), then shave my legs, then have a shower. Then sit around with my hair wet and cool off a bit while watching my current favourite programme. Then dry my hair. Then sit around a bit more. Then get dressed, and choose my jewelry and my shoes. It all took nearly two hours and was most enjoyable. It was also good to sleep through the night and into the morning - although we both woke at 6, we managed to sleep until 8 before finally getting up (time for my injection, anyway).

But the rest of the time, I would have been happier if she had been with us. Yesterday afternoon, having tea on the lawn, in front of this beautiful hotel, in the very uncharacteristically glorious sunshine, I wished she was there, crawling around on the grass and telling us what she thought about it. This morning at breakfast another baby was shouting 'nananana' (meaning, give me more scrambled egg, daddy), and I imagined her shouting 'upupupup' at my mother, demanding more toast. It wasn't a horrible feeling, it was just a sensation that I would be happier if she was with me.

We arrived back at my mother's just before Pob woke up from her nap, and it felt wonderful to go in and get her when she started to stir. She was pleased to see me. She showed it not with big grins, but by hanging on for dear life for the first 15 minutes after she woke up. She was also pretty screamy for the rest of the afternoon, not sure if it's connected or not. She's happily asleep now despite it being 26 degrees in her room, so I imagine by the end of tomorrow she will have forgotten we ever left her.

So everyone concerned had a good time. My mum had a lovely time, although she did take the opportunity this afternoon to drop in a few more comments about how she thinks we overfeed Pob (more on this in another post. I am a bit worried about it - Pob has shot up to the 95th centile for weight (75th for height), and I don't quite know what to do. Anyway, more in another post). But it was good. And I'm glad we're back.

Blogging, or lack thereof

I'm really doing rubbish at posting. I'm doing great at writing long posts in my head. Just last night, between 0130 and 0330, when Pob and I were both up, I wrote several posts. One about sleep and my increasing desperation. One about the US democratic nominee. One about a recent UK TV programme about childhood. One about sleep again. One about Pob's development. One about food, my weight, my body, my lack of exercise. Another one about sleep.

Yes, none of them sound particularly interesting, do they? Not surprising since my brain is pretty mushy these days. I simply can't remember words any more. Took me a while to call up the word 'oblivious' last night at dinner. I said 'obtuse' instead. Which really doesn't mean the same thing, but at least shows my brain works at some level since it got the first letter right. I was with a friend who is in the middle of a bad love situation. It's really bad love. It's been bad love for a while and I wish it was over but she says he is the love of her life despite the fact he is never going to be there for her in the way she deserves, so she keeps on plodding on. She is a very loyal person. We've been friends for 22 years now so I think I can say that with some authority. We've all given up being anything other than quietly supportive, but it's hard sometimes not to rant and rave about how she needs to look after herself.

I won't go on about the sleeping, but I will say that I am now utterly conflicted about what philosophy to follow.  I find it inherently hard to believe it's 'good' for my baby to be left to cry for any length of time, or that she needs to learn that we won't come in the night when she cries. But also I do really need to sleep - H and I both do - and taking her into bed with us - the sure fire way to get her back to sleep with minimal pain - only results in one or both of us not sleeping as we curl around Pob and she periodically bashes us in the face or offers us her dummy. So I dunno what to do. It's been 4 months since she's slept through the night (and when I say that, what I mean is from 11pm or so til 7 or so). I'm very tired.

Aside from the sleeping at night, she is beyond wonderful.

Men are weird

H is currently jumping up and down and punching the air. He seems to feel a very personal sense of accomplishment. But they won because the other team missed a goal. I don't get it.

Ah well. Best leave them to their manly fantasies, eh?

Irony

 Nanny: My mum wants to come and see Pob. She's very excited.

Me: [puzzled look]

Nanny: Yes, she'll be uncontrollable when [boyfriend] and I have kids

Me: [non committal grunt]

Nanny: Of course it won't be easy for us. We will need treatment to get pregnant

Me: [enquiring grunt]

Nanny: Yes, I have polycystic ovaries and [boyfriend] has low sperm count

Me thinking: Blimey, I managed to hire the infertile nanny. Who knew?

Back to the peesticks

About 2 weeks ago I noticed some signs of that lovely EWCM, you know, that stuff which means you're fertile. So I peed on an OPK, and after 3 days it turned positive. We used the opportunity to have some nookie on the relevant days, and then I got ridiculously excited. I seemed to have lost the infertile protective shield of pessimism. I knew it was a small chance, but I started to think about what it would be like to have babies 16 months apart (and was terrified at the prospect).

Those of you who have been around for a while will remember that I have known each time I was pregnant. The pullings and tuggings in my abdomen were utterly diagnostic. So I've been waiting for those tuggings, and a couple of times I've thought maybe, but in general my abdomen is just starting to feel heavy and full, as it does before a period.

Today is roughly 10dpo.I know it's early, but Pob and I are about to fly off on our travels, so I peed on another stick. And after three minutes it stared back at me. Snowy white. Although it's early, when I was pregnant with Pob I got such a strong positive on day 13 that I'm pretty sure I would have at least seen a whisper of a line on day 10. So the whiteness combined with the lack of clear symptoms means I'm 99% sure it's over.

I'm not really surprised, but I am ridiculously disappointed. I saw this cycle as another potential for a miracle baby, one conceived despite my endo and my age. I felt that if we got pregnant now, it would mean that infertility no longer had any hold on us (although I was also prepared for the terror of wondering if I'd miscarry again). Now that we've failed this cycle, I somehow feel we're right back in the middle of the drama, the waiting and longing and losing and all that sadness. That we're in for a year of not succeeding before we decide Pob isn't destined for a sibling.

Believe me, I know this is ridiculous. That I was ridiculous to hope, and that it's ridiculous to have lost all hope because it didn't work. But that's just where I am. It's an hour before we have to leave for the airport. We're packed, Pob is napping and I'm a bit sad.

Well goshdarnit

I missed my bloggiversary. Three years and three days ago I started this blog. It seems a very long time ago. My early entries are, well, not good. Too self-conscious a tone. Plus I was so perkyturdish about our conception efforts. Embarassing, but at least my writing improved as I just learnt to simply type and not worry about the persona I was trying to portray, and stopped trying to write like other bloggers did and just wrote as I thought.

The world obviously looks very different to me now. But I don't know what I would have done without this blog. Thank you for being there with me. There's very little I could type which could properly convey the extent to which this blog and this community have sustained me. So I'll just say, thank you.

Mother's work

I'm feeling thrilled at our recent successes with feeding, at the same time as finding it a little bittersweet. It's wonderful that we finally seem to have the hang of breastfeeding, but sad because it will have to at least reduce, if not stop completely, when I go back to work.

Thank you for your comments on that latter point, by the way. I will try to keep up with one or two breast feeds a day once I go back to work, but given the uncertainty of my hours, the fragility of my supply, and the occasional need to travel, I'm not convinced it will work. My mother is convinced it's very important for me to try, however, as she worries that Pob will get depressed when I leave her. I'm constantly fretting about  my decision to go back to work in May, but so far not enough to change the decision and leave going back until the end of my alloted year of (unpaid after 4 months) maternity leave. I'm going back in May not because I have to financially (although we'd have to move to a smaller house and change our lifestyle rather dramatically if I chose to quit completely), but because it's going to be harder and harder to get back into the swing of things the longer I leave it. Relationships with customers move on, and after a year I would be very out of touch with the work we are doing with my customers.  In addition, if I don't go back in May things will start to slow down for the summer and I might end up sitting around twiddling my thumbs for a couple of months which would be bad - frustrating for me as well as bad for my evaluation next year. So on balance I think it's the right thing to do to go back in May. What I might do is go back part time, which would give me at least one weekday with Pob, even if that day might have to change from week to week so that I can be responsive to my customers' needs.

This indecision on my part is making hiring a nanny difficult. We've seen one great candidate and I've spoken to another good-sounding one on the phone, but since I can't confirm if I want them full time or part time, it's a bit hard to hire anyone. Plus of course in reality I don't really want a nanny at all, so I'm being very very good at procrastinating at setting up appointments to see candidates.

I love this baby so very much, I really really don't want to leave her. At the same time as I recognise that I'm very good at my job, that I often enjoy my job, and that my having a rewarding job will bring something to Pob that she wouldn't otherwise get, particularly as she gets older. Not to mention the financial benefits it brings to our family. I'm being pulled in two different directions and I'm still two months away from going back.

Book meme - UPDATED

I've just written a very ill-natured post that I've thought better about posting, at least for now, so here's something a bit less inflammatory. Here's a book meme from Ceci n'est pas un blog via Oro. And now with extra context. This meme seems to have started some time in October, and is based on the top 106 books marked as 'unread' at Library Thing. Hence the somewhat random nature of the list. I guess people don't read Jane Austen but they do read Hemingway? Here are some others who have done the meme, to give some kind of a blog trail. It's been rather like Chinese whispers, the nature of the meme, its origins gradually lost as new blogs picked it up.

Books are in bold if I've read them, in italics if I started but couldn't finish, and struck through if I couldn't stand them. Now with asterisks for those I've read more than once. One asterisk is one repeat reading, two askterisks are for multiple re-readings.

**1984
The Aeneid
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
*American Gods
*Anansi Boys
Angela’s Ashes : A Memoir
Angels & Demons
*Anna Karenina
Atlas Shrugged
Beloved
The Blind Assassin
**Brave New World
The Brothers Karamazov
The Canterbury Tales
Catch-22
The Catcher in the Rye
A Clockwork Orange
Cloud Atlas
Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
A Confederacy of Dunces
The Confusion
The Corrections
The Count of Monte Cristo
Crime and Punishment
Cryptonomicon
**The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
*David Copperfield
Don Quixote
Dracula
Dubliners
Dune
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
Emma
Foucault’s Pendulum
The Fountainhead
Frankenstein
Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
The God of Small Things
The Grapes of Wrath
Gravity’s Rainbow
Great Expectations
Gulliver’s Travels
Guns, Germs and Steel: The fates of human societies
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
The Historian: A Novel
**The Hobbit
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
The Iliad
In Cold Blood : A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences
The Inferno
*Jane Eyre
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
The Kite Runner
Les Misérables
Life of Pi : A Novel
*Lolita
Love in the Time of Cholera
Madame Bovary
Mansfield Park
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlemarch
Middlesex
The Mists of Avalon
Moby Dick
Mrs. Dalloway
The Name of the Rose
*Neverwhere
Northanger Abbey
The Odyssey
Oliver Twist
On the Road
The Once and Future King
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Oryx and Crake : A Novel
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Persuasion
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Poisonwood Bible : A Novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Pride and Prejudice
The Prince
Quicksilver
Reading Lolita in Tehran : A Memoir in Books
The Satanic Verses
The Scarlet Letter
Sense and Sensibility
A Short History of Nearly Everything
The Silmarillion
Slaughterhouse-five
The Sound and the Fury
The Tale of Two Cities
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
The Three Musketeers
The Time Traveler’s Wife
To the Lighthouse
**Treasure Island
Ulysses
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Vanity Fair
*War and Peace
**Watership Down
White Teeth
Wicked : The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
Wuthering Heights
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : An Inquiry Into Values

I wasn't surprised to find out I do fairly well on this. It's a combination of having been a shy, bookish child with a father who readily supplied books when I was much too young for them (the Tin Drum at 11, anyone?), plus having done English A-level (school leaving exam at 18 in the UK, you only study 3-4 subjects for the last 2 years so there's plenty of time for each subject), plus the book group I was part of in Philadelphia - which inflicted the AWFUL 'Confederacy of Dunces', and 'The Fountainhead', on me. 'The Fountainhead' was the only book for bookgroup I never finished, I hated it so much I subconsciously left it behind on a plane so I COULDN'T finish it, and thankfully I couldn't make the meeting where bookgroup discussed it so I didn't have to own up. HATED it.

I feel  bad at some of the classics I haven't read. Vanity Fair, Gulliver, Don Quixote among others. I don't feel bad about not reading Ulysses. I don't have the brain power to attempt any of those at the moment, and envy my friend C who just did jury duty, and used it as an opportunity to start reading Trollope, who I've never even attempted. She's a more serious reader than I am. She got me going on a bunch of less obvious classics when I was 18 and about to go to India for 6 months. She acted as a reading consultant and I went to India with around 30 books, most of which I got through and which really changed my life. 'War and Peace' was one of them but she also got me to read 'The Raj Quartet', 'A Room with a View,' and 'The Spire', among others. I think that 'The Portrait of Dorian Gray' was one of her suggestions, too. I'll have to dig up my journal from that time and remnd myself of the other books on the list. It was a transformative six months of reading for me. She also more recently gave me 'Ghostwritten' by David Mitchell, the author of 'Cloud Atlas', telling me she thought it was rather better than his more famous book, and I loved it.

I've never heard of "The Historian" or the 'History of the US' book. Why is that last one a classic? Is it a classic just if you're American or for the rest of us, too?

I remain frustrated at the non-finishing of "Les Mis". I was reading it on a bus travelling around China when I was 20, and left it behind at 4am when I had to scramble to get my stuff together when I was told by the bus driver that we'd arrived at the town I was going to. We hadn't, it was some other random town and I ended up wandering the streets for a while until I found another bus station. And then I found I hadn't got my book with me, with just 80 pages to go til the end. It wasn't possible to find another copy, in the wilds of southwest China on the backpacker trail, and by the time I was back in Europe it didn't seem right just to dive back in 7/8ths of the way through, I thought I'd need to start all over again. I've never had the heart to pick it up again.

Scenes from the last week of pregnancy

I've finally taken the time to figure out how to load my bloglines links into the blogroll on typepad, so that the links are up to date without all that annoying manual editing that is involved in maintaining typelists. I feel ridiculously proud of myself. Apologies to those of you whose status was frozen for about a year while I couldn't be assed to do anything about the typelists. This does mean that password protected blogs will be listed without you knowing that they are until you click on the link. Sorry but that's just beyond my skills to fix!

I have two things left to do for work. I've been not doing them all week. What do you reckon - denial or laziness?

H and I need to move furniture so that our living room doesn't look like we just moved in. We can't find anyone to help. This is bothering both of us.

I now own a breast pump and some herbs for promoting milk production. And 4 bottles. And 2 nursing bras. And nipple cream. And a nappy bag (diaper bag). I'm afraid I chickened out and got one that H would be ok to carry rather than the very funky ones I kind of liked. This one is nice and practical. And 3 changing mats (one for each floor of our house). And...some baby clothes. There's a lot of kit involved in this baby thing, no? Although I haven't bought maternity pads yet. Must do that.

My blood pressure is still 110/65 as of Wednesday. So yah boo and sucks to all those who cast aspersions on a pregnancy at 40 and its risks. Although I have finally had to take off my wedding ring. It feels odd without it. I keep going to fiddle with it but it's not there.

I went to see some paintings yesterday. I bought one of this artist's paintings back when I got my first ever bonus from work. The paintings are exquisite and have only become more so (the jpgs really don't do them justice. The point about his work is the brushwork - tiny, tiny strokes with exquisite detail. If you're in London I highly recommend a visit). I really really wanted to buy one, but the artist has won a couple of prizes in the meantime, and he's gotten pretty expensive. And H really wants to try to pay down the mortgage. Which is sensible. So I didn't buy one. But I really really wanted to.

After looking at the paintings my erstwhile best friend and I had lunch. And wandered the shops a bit. By the time I got home I was so tired I had to lie down on the sofa before I could make it upstairs to change my clothes. I'm terrified of what real sleep deprivation feels like when it shows up, umm, this time next week?

Unhelpful

I don't think Bob Crow has it in for me, personally, but it felt quite a lot like that both yesterday evening and this morning as I fought my way onto a bus to get home and then into work again this morning. Really not what I needed at nearly 37 weeks, and with increasingly less willingness to work. Plus my office was heated up to sauna level, despite me having complained about the temperature on Monday. Plus some asshat external company I'm working with sent through the programme for the conference they want me to speak at on Thursday, only they've left my name off the programme. Given Thursday morning is the doctor's appointment at which they'll scan me and decide whether or not to try an external version, and if they do an external version I don't reckon I'll be in good enough shape to go to work afterwards, I'm pretty tempted to just blow them out. One of my colleagues (who they did put on the programme) will substitute instead. Bastards.

Yes, I know no one is really out to get me. But they're annoying me anyway.

The emotions, balanced they are not

I'm always an emotional person. What I feel is written on my face most of the time. If something touches me, I cry easily and often copiously. I still remember dissolving into uncontrollable sobs during a performance of Romeo and Juliet at the RSC when I was about 19 - it was something about the hollowness with which the Capulets and Montagues delivered the lines that vow that these deaths have changed the way they feel about each other that meant I was beyond comforting. My mother was rather embarassed, as I recall. I did the same thing at a performance of Billy Elliot 18 months ago, although of course at that point I was mourning the negative IVF cycle we'd just had as well as being empathetic with Billy's lost relationship with his mother. There are too many incidents to count. And it happened again last night.

I'm not entirely sure what set me off. In one sense, I'd had a good and productive day. My mother wanted to take me shopping for the baby, and the day our diaries meshed was yesterday. I arrived at Peter Jones and immediately felt very ambivalent about being there. My mother suggested we take a basket and start filling it, but I struggled to pick one up. "Ill just look around first," I said. This took a while and eventually she started to get impatient. I resigned myself to picking up at least a few things. I bought nipple pads and cream, barrier cream for the baby, a pack of muslins, 2 nightdresses (apparently easier to change nappies in the middle of the night), a pack of vests, a hooded towel. Stuff we need, stuff that isn't too personal, doesn't cost much. We looked at moses baskets, cribs and other furniture but nothing was terribly exciting. After a poor lunch we headed down the road to a shop that I knew carried some furniture a friend had recommended. It was totally worth it - fantastic service and great looking furniture. The choices were hard. We liked things from different ranges, and I couldn't decide on what kind of colouring I wanted. It took maybe 2 hours to decide and to buy some serious stuff, including a few more bits and pieces, like swaddling blankets and a baby healthcare kit with thermometer, nail scissors etc.. Mum kindly paid for the 2 big pieces of furniture, a crib and a wall storage unit including a wardrobe. I bought a glider that I had not known I wanted until I sat on one in the shop and immediately felt better, relaxed and comfortable.

I spent most of the time in that shop on the verge of tears. I didn't cry, but I kept wanting to. I tried to get H to come down as I was really struggling to make a decision. H wouldn't come, he was suffering from a hangover and probably couldn't face leaving the house. It felt like a big deal. It's not, I know it's not, but it felt like one.

Part of the problem was that three years ago, before any of the drama, I had come across some hand-made children's furniture while surfing the web, and set my heart on it. It costs a small fortune, and it seemed we would never need it so I put it out of my mind. Recently a friend whose baby is now a year old had recommended another brand and actually it looks remarkably similar to the hand-made stuff but at a fraction of the cost. So I'd had this image all through the journey of how the eventual nursery would look, and now perhaps I could create that look. But when I saw the stuff in the flesh it was quite big and chunky, and looked best in a very dark wood that I worry will overwhelm the room. So I dithered and paced and wished someone would just tell me what the right answer was. After much thought I decided to go with the dark colouring, but kept fretting about it. I still am. I may change my mind, who knows.

We capped off the day by visiting a third shop to comparison shop the furniture, desparately trying to find something to eat and failing, and then going back to Peter Jones to try and find curtain fabric and fabric for the chair. We were knackered by then and I was starting to feel a bit feeble I was so hungry. I tried to get mum into a taxi home but she wanted to come back with me. We walked in the door at 1900, to find H feeling a bit sheepish and worried about me. I downed a bit of cheese and a huge glass of water and started to recover slightly. We made mum a cup of tea and I started to really really wish she'd go home, I wanted to collapse on the sofa but didn't feel I could. I also felt emotionally tense. It was a huge deal, suddenly having all this baby stuff in the house, and I felt both stressed and ridiculous about being stressed that I'd bought the wrong furniture.

Eventually while mum was encouraging me to show her other bits of furniture on line, I snapped and said something along the lines of "I just can't make any more decisions about anything this evening, I've just had enough." At which point she stood up and said "well, I'll just go and wait outside for a taxi, then." So then I felt terrible and asked her to please stay, and she started telling me how awful I'd made her feel, and I just lost it. Started sobbing and couldn't stop. I tried to articulate why but I'm sure all that came out were snippets of stuff along the lines of "still don't know if we'll have a baby" and "don't have the right stuff" and "if you get upset by this, how are you going to be helpful after I give birth and am even more emotional and tired." (mum has promised to come and stay after the baby is born to help, and swore blind that she was the right person for us because I could be horrible to her with impunity and she wouldn't mind).

Mum left after I calmed down somewhat, but she was clearly upset and I spent the whole of the rest of the evening on the verge of tears despite H's attempts to cheer me up. I don't entirely understand why I found the whole thing so stressful. Yes, buying stuff for the baby is hard, but it's also wonderful. It's exciting to be choosing curtains for a nursery, isn't it? Shouldn't I be excited and happy rather than stressed and freaked-out?

I wonder if my tension is because the nursery is a signifier of what we've gone through to get here. That I finally get the furniture I've always wanted but it's not really the right furniture - is that about my worries about being a mother? Some of the stress is undoubtedly because my relationship with my mother is always stressful, but most of the day was actually ok. I feel bad for ruining it. I feel stressed about whether it's really right for Mum to come and help after the baby is born. And most of all I wish I knew how to make it all better.

This was going to be a post about the emotions of infertility and how they've changed, but I think that will have to come in a follow-on post, this is enough already.

Finished

Let me know when you're ready to talk about the boy wizard. I'm not going to spoil it. I guess I can write that I think it's much the best book in a while, less rambling, more story and some good character development. I enjoyed it, even though I feel wrung out right now. And I really want to talk about it but H hasn't read it and won't read it so I'm counting on all of you.

Retail therapy gone mad

Well, as you can tell by the presence of this post, I bought the Mac. H will be delighted so I don't feel too awful about spending that much money. He can't access many websites from his work laptop so he regularly borrows mine to find what he's looking for, which irritates both of us. And a Mac with all the lovely imovie-type software is just the ticket for that increase in photo taking and home film-making that we hope will start sometime in September. It's really silly to buy one here when I could have bought one in the US for half the price. But I'm not doing any more long haul travel until the baby can come with me, as a separate person, so if we want a Mac any time soon we have to pay UK retail prices. Ouch.

It's been 8 years since I've regularly used a Mac, but my love for them has in no way diminished. They've only grown more beautiful, not to mention faster and with better software. Just touching this MacBookPro is making me happy. The brush against the metal, the resolution of the screen, it's all, just so yummy.

Sorry, lost myself there for a minute.

I now need a bunch of technical help. I managed to download Firefox but it doesn't seem to have loaded properly - it's sitting on the desktop as if it's a separate disk. I downloaded Acrobat but Firefox doesn't recognise that it's there. Any ideas? I also can't turn off the underlined links thing in Firefox - I think it makes things look very messy so I always turn it off in IE.

Although I haven't had the relaxing day I had planned, I did go and spend an entertaining couple of hours (I had no idea how long I'd spent til I got home) in West London's new foodie mecca. It's a very seductive place. I don't usually get to do the food shopping as H has us set up with a weekly delivery of an organic veggie box, and he picks up the other stuff we need himself at our local providers. I'm a very bad food shopper. I buy what looks good with only a small care for what we might actually cook with it. So I've come home with very exotic items, like soft tortillas and salsa, some oven roasted tomatoes and some fresh heirloom tomatoes the like of which I've never seen in this country before; and some simply extra delicious items, like British organic strawberries. I do have a plan. I'm going to roast some corn-fed organic chicken thighs with lemon and basil for dinner, and eat them with some new potatoes and asparagus. I've already snacked on some edamame. For dessert I'll have some of those strawberries with cream. Then for H tomorrow night, not that he deserves it, I'll make a butternut squash curry with chicken, ginger, chard, and thai red curry paste, and we'll have roasted peaches for dessert.

I'm feeling a bit crampy now but I'm hoping it's the passenger settling down after a busy day. More water is on the horizon, and I need to start cooking. Tomorrow I'll get on with relaxing.

This time last year

This time last year, I thought I was pregnant. If we take Saturday 13th of May as a year ago, I didn't know for sure, but I was, in my own words, scarily hopeful. I had suspected that I was pregnant for a few days before that. I'd never been pregnant before, to my knowledge, but I knew that this felt different. That those uterine tuggings and pullings I was feeling were like nothing I'd ever felt before. I didn't want to believe it until I knew, but it was hard not to hope.

The following morning I eventually took a pregnancy test just after 4am. And it was positive. I have rarely been that happy in my life. I woke H up, we laughed, we cried. I wrote you all a long post, and I went back to sleep for a while. It was a wonderful feeling.

It didn't last. On our wedding anniversary I still believed it, but the weekend before our 6w scan I stopped believing it. I didn't feel pregnant any more. My boobs shrank. I 'knew' I was no longer pregnant. It didn't end then, but it ended 2 weeks later.

That baby would have been born about 3.5 months ago, or about 1 month into this pregnancy. There was nothing wrong with him genetically, we don't know why he didn't make it. But he never got as far as having a heartbeat.

It's hard to think about him now. In all the discussion of whether the baby of this current pregnancy is a boy or a girl, and how I felt about that, I did think about him, but found it too hard to mention him in the posts. If he had survived, I wouldn't have had this pregnancy. I wish he had survived, but I also don't wish this baby away. I had a dream early in this pregnancy, I can't remember if I typed about it or not, and I can't remember the details now, but it involved 2 babies, or being pregnant with twins, and being told I could only have one of them. In the dream I screamed and cried, but in the end I had to give one up so the other could live and thrive. It seems pretty bleeding obvious what that was about, no?

I know I'm lucky. I got pregnant 3 times in 8 months, after all, that barely qualifies as infertile, even if 2 of them were through IVF or FET. I know I'm lucky in that nothing seems to be wrong with this pregnancy or this baby (but remind me to tell you about our Friday night trip to labour and delivery when I get the chance. Short version, nothing's wrong, but it felt wrong enough to get checked out). I know I'm lucky in so many other ways. And I'm not saying I'm suddenly too sad to appreciate what I've got. I haven't woken up this morning and felt suddenly bereft. I'm still so very excited about this pregnancy. I miss him but I'm happy to be pregnant with his sister. It's the usual mess of feelings that we all walk around with every day. We're happy to be pregnant but worried what it does to our community and how it will make our friends feel. We're relieved that the failing pregnancy is finally over, yet we are still grieving the loss of the baby that didn't get to be. We're thrilled to finally be submitting our home study, but a part of us still mourns the biological children we lost. None of it is easy, none of it is straightforward, but we're all just doing the best we can to get through it ourselves, and to support others as they suffer, too.

This morning I'm remembering my son who didn't made it.