It's Been Too Long, and Things Are Changing

I haven't posted (or logged in) in 2 years.  I always wish I did, because so much happens and I no longer record any of it (unless you count Facebook statuses).  It's just hard to find the time.  Seriously, as I'm sitting here trying to type this post, Noah is standing beside me and won't stop talking to me ("Imagine if we had to walk to the cottage?  Can you imagine how long that would take?  Do you think we're ever going to make videos on YouTube? I think we will.  If we did I think I would...").  It makes typing coherent sentences a little difficult.

I'm hoping that will change for the next little while, because.... drum roll...

I'M PREGNANT.

What?  I know.  We did it all on our own this time, no fertility treatments.  It's something I always knew could happen, but I thought it would happen when I was, like, 40, and definitely didn't want any more kids.  We WANTED this baby.  And I'm only 31.

We'd been trying.  For over two years, actually.  It felt pointless, but I just couldn't make myself call my clinic.  They've got completely new staff and my doctor is no longer practicing, so it would be like figuring out a completely different clinic.  Plus it's an hour away and would be so time consuming and emotionally consuming.  The idea of going there was giving me anxiety.  I had almost resigned myself to the fact that we would only have two kids.

We only did it ONCE the cycle I got pregnant, because we've been dealing with a LOT of illnesses in our house.  The one time we did it we probably shouldn't have, because Justin was just starting to get sick.  But we wanted to, so we did.  And it happened to be the day before I ovulated.  And after 8 years of never using birth control and trying our hardest but never getting pregnant, that one fluke time that we basically did it just because we wanted to and not because we didn't want to miss ovulation, I get pregnant.

I was SUPER sick when I found out.  Sicker than I had ever been in my life.  I couldn't swallow, I couldn't even talk.  It was the day I was supposed to get my period (I always get it at 12DPO).  The two days beforehand I had gotten a tiny bit of brown spotting on a few occasions when I wiped, so I was kind of thinking that my period was REALLY wanting to come.  So I figured I'd have it right away in the morning.

It was 5am and I still didn't have my period.  No big deal, I still had all day to get it.  But the spotting the last couple of days, and the fact that I had that but my period hadn't arrived yet made me think I should test.  I hadn't slept all night anyway because I was in too much pain. 

I started by taking ovulation tests, because that's what I do.  Two different brands, because one of them is more sensitive than the others.  Neither of them was actually positive.  The more sensitive brand was maybe getting close, but the other brand definitely wasn't.

Still, I felt compelled to use an HPT.  I dipped it in and sat there watching it with my iPhone flashlight.  I don't know why, but I was expecting it to turn positive.

And then it did.

And I just sat there staring at it like "Are you kidding me?"  I was surprised, but I wasn't surprised.  I always thought we'd get pregnant on our own one day, but at the same time I never thought it would happen.  My mind has always been filled with a dichotomy of thoughts on the topic.

Anyway, it was 5am and Justin was still sleeping (he cosleeps with Noah, I cosleep with Isaiah).  He gets super red eyes if he wakes up too early, and I didn't want to wake up Noah, so I just texted him to let me know when he was awake.

In the meantime I texted two girlfriends, Corey and Kayla.  Corey was up nursing her baby at 6am so she was the first person I told.  Kayla was shortly after.

Justin woke up around 7am and texted me that he was awake and going to the bathroom.  So, super sick me hobbled to the kitchen and waited for him, sitting in a chair.  When he came out of the bathroom he said "What's up?) 

I had no voice, and no energy for any fanfare, so I just whispered, "I'm pregnant." 
He said, "Whatever." 
I whispered, "No seriously, I'm pregnant." 
He said, "No you're not." 
I whispered, "Yes, I am."
He said, seriously, "Why are you messing with me?"
I whispered, (and it was extremely hard to whisper this many words) "I'm not messing with you, I am actually pregnant.  Here's the test."

And then he had his hands on his chest saying, "What?!  How?!  We only did it once!!  Oh my goodness!! You're pregnant?!"  He was insanely excited and I was just sitting there, feeling like I'm dying, wishing I could muster together enough energy and enthusiasm to act really excited.

It took a little while to sink in, but I definitely has.  I'm 5.5 weeks pregnant now.  At 4 weeks pregnant I had a flat stomach and a 6 pack.  This was me in the MORNING on the day I turned 5 weeks (I'm much bigger in the evenings).  I hadn't even showered yet, but I wanted to see how my maternity jeans fit.

Just like with the other two, I am growing insanely quickly.  I don't really understand why this happens to me.  My uterus does get big very very quickly, but I don't get why I immediately get so much bloat higher in my abdomen as well.  It never disappeared with my other two pregnancies, so I don't expect it to this time.

Because I haven't been seeing a fertility clinic, this pregnancy doesn't have the same level of monitoring that my previous pregnancies have had.  Because of that I've taken like 15 pregnancy tests, and as of this morning the lines are still getting much darker every time I take a test! 

As for symptoms - at 5.5 weeks my big symptoms are major fatigue, bloating, and very sore boobs.  I had a lot of aversions last week, but they're not so bad anymore so I think it might have been a strange symptom of my illness.  I'm still getting over it and it's been 2.5 weeks since I got sick.

So, this is why I'm back.  I documented by first two pregnancies very closely, and I've enjoyed being able to look back at what happened when with both pregnancies.  Hopefully I can pop in once in awhile to record what happens with this little Bambino.

I May Have a Touch of "The Fever"

Baby Fever, that is.

For most of Noah's life so far I have had zero desire to have another baby.  I knew in my head I wanted more children, but I didn't have that burning desire like I had the first time.  I thought that was weird, because Noah was becoming a toddler, and I thought I would want another baby soon.  When he was born I thought we'd be doing treatments again when he was a year old.  But I just didn't have the yearning.  I didn't know when it would come, or if it would ever come.  I actually thought we might have to just try for another baby without actually having that strong desire.  I couldn't imagine when I would get to that place.

Well, as the days go by, it appears that I am creeping closer and closer to that place all the time.  Whereas before I would occasionally have a desire to be pregnant or have a newborn, now that desire is becoming more frequent.  That desire is becoming stronger than my desire to not.  More of my time is now spent wanting another baby than not wanting another baby.

I'm not sure how I feel about this.  Ideally I would like Noah to be a bit older before I get pregnant.  Or even a lot older.  I would really like to nurse him until he's at least two, for many reasons, one of them being that 2 years old is the recommended minimum.  Using fertility medications to get pregnant could quite possibly put a wrench in our nursing relationship.  Furthermore, getting pregnant could mess it up.  You can nurse when you're pregnant, but it's fairly common to experience a reduction in your milk supply, and many women have very sore nipples and breasts during pregnancy, making nursing very uncomfortable.  I know what this feels like every month while I'm ovulating, and it's a toe curling, teeth gritting kind of pain that makes me dread every latch.

Not to mention the fact that Noah still nurses overnight, and he still very much needs his Mommy at this point in his life.  I know that if I got pregnant now, by the time I would have the baby he would be almost two, or over two.  But morning sickness happens right away.  I couldn't imagine how I'd deal with morning sickness and Noah.  And my pelvic issues were happening before I hit 30 weeks... how would I be a cripple with a 20 month old son?  What about me only getting 3-5 hours of sleep every night because of being pregnant and uncomfortable.  What about having a newborn and only getting 1-2 hours of sleep in every 24 hour period?  The thought of the sleeplessness alone has kiboshed any real desire to procreate again anytime soon.

Until now.

The thing is, those things seemed insurmountable a month or two ago.  Now they seem like something I would be willing to tackle.  They don't seem quite as scary.  Up until now I have felt unwilling to purposefully change Noah's life in order to accommodate another baby.  Now I feel like I might actually be ready to do just that.

I'm getting a little freaked out by this feeling.  I don't want to have that desire again right now.  I'd rather wait another 6 months, or 9 months.  But the fact is, I do have that feeling.  And I'm not exactly sure what to do about it.

We are definitely trying naturally.  I'm pretty sure I am actually ovulating now.  My body acts like it is, and it never acted like this in the 14 months we were trying before we got pregnant.  But we still have the MFI to deal with. 

I know we will probably have to do treatments.  I'm not ready for that yet.  But with the way I'm starting to feel, I'm not sure how much longer I'll be able to put it off.  I don't want to try naturally month after month and experience the heartbreak month after month.  That's too hard on me, emotionally.  Especially since we know what our issues are.

I didn't think I would be dealing with this when Noah was 15 months old!

Cycle Info

It's Wednesday.  I wanted to go into town to run errands today.  Instead I am stuck in my house.  On Monday I got my period, and its so heavy I can't be away from a bathroom for longer than an hour.  So instead I am baking a chocolate cake (I've been craving chocolate like nobody's business), listening to music, and hanging with my little man.

While I'm feeling annoyed at being house-bound, I thought I would write out my last cycle information (since this blog is my catch-all space).

-It was a 42 day cycle.

-CD 1 was Monday, March 7.

-I had EWCM from CD 27 to CD 32 (April 2 - April 7).

-I had moderately sore nipples from CD27 to CD 31 (April 2 - April 6).

-I had really sore nipples from CD 32 - CD 35 (April 7 - April 10).

-My period came on Monday, April 18.


I'm really not sure when (IF??) I ovulated.  I'm guessing maybe on April 7th, give or take.  That was my last day of EWCM, and also the first day of really, really (I mean really) sore nipples.  That would make my luteal phase about 10 days long.  When I was doing treatments and was actually successfully ovulating, my LP was 12 days.  This was only my second cycle after giving birth, and I'm still BFing 10+ times a day, so it's normal that my LP be short for awhile.  Just like it's normal to have such a long cycle at the beginning.

I do know that I never noticed so much and such pronounced EWCM in the whole time I was TTC.  So I do wonder if I actually am ovulating.  I wish I didn't have such a bad track record with OPKs.  I just can't trust them because of my high LH.

I'm glad I decided to keep track of all this.  I'd like to see a pattern emerging.  I had EWCM for 6 days, which is kind of a long time, and sore nipples for 9 days, which is quite a long time.  And I got my period a mere 7 days after all the symptoms were gone.  I was expecting it before Sunday, but really didn't think I was going to get it on Monday. 

So I will continue to track my cycles and symptoms.  And we will continue to sprinkle a few 'marital relations' in amongst the EWCM, just in case. 

It's the Infertility in me.  I just can't let a cycle go by without giving it a try.  Even though I don't have the burning desire to get pregnant again right now, and I like things how they are, I do want a couple more children.  And a natural-miracle-pregnancy would still be welcome.

I wonder if this is what normal people feel like when they decide to have a baby.  Not all high strung and "LET'S GET PREGNANT RIGHT THIS SECOND!!!!!!" but just casually seeing what will happen.  I wouldn't know, because it was never casual for me.  From the second I was able to try to get pregnant, I wanted it to have happened 3 months earlier and was very bothered when it didn't.

And even now, we most likely will not be getting pregnant without ART.  So why is there this little tickle in my brain telling me that just maybe we will???  My logical side tells me otherwise, but that teeny voice is still there.

Back on the Fertility Train??

I think it might be time for me to jump back on the fertility train.  Or rather, the infertility train. 

As I mentioned in my angry post about getting my period back, approximately two weeks (a little less, actually) before I got my period, I was showing fertility signs.  Really sore nipples when Noah was nursing, egg-white CM, maybe a few twinges in the ovarian area.

Well, my first day of this cycle was March 7 (I only know that because I blogged about it), and now, April 4, I am having those fertility signs again.  Starting on April 2 I was having lots of EWCM, and my nipples are starting to get sore again.  Not as terrible as they were last time, but that might still be to come.

I'm not wanting to start actively trying to get pregnant, although we're not preventing it.  Still, I think it might make sense for me to start paying a little more attention to my body.  Who knows when I'll want to get pregnant again (I could say 'we,' but really, my husband will just follow my lead).  When I do want to, it's quite possible I'll want it to have happened YESTERDAY (since that's how it goes with me and my "ideas").  It'll probably be good to have just a basic amount of cycle information.  Just cycle start dates and maybe the EWCM and sore nipple thing.  I think its probably a good thing for me to track. 

I've also been thinking about asking my doctor to give me a requisition for Day 3 bloodwork.  He knows nothing, but I know a lot.  So I can interpret my own results and decide what to do.  If my FSH has gone even higher, I'll probably want to start trying to get pregnant earlier.  Earlier than what?  I don't know, because I seriously have no plans in that area.

I'm feeling kind of blaaah about this.  I have liked not paying attention to these things.  But Noah's 12.5 months old, and we're infertile, and I don't want to have my children 5 years apart, so I feel like I should at least be slowly shifting my focus in that direction.

Plus, every once in awhile I get an "Awwww" nostalgic feeling about being pregnant or having a newborn.  It's really such a magical time.

Then I remember 24/7 morning sickness, being on crutches for the last 2 months of my pregnancy, and how I was only getting 2 hours of sleep in every 24 hour period leading up to and after Noah's birth.  For months.  And I realize that I already HAVE a baby, who will make having another baby more complicated than it was the first time around.

And the nostalgic feeling starts to fade... ha.

This CANNOT Be Happening!

Yeah, I know, third post in one day.  This one is important.

I JUST GOT MY PERIOD.

I am so FREAKING pissed off. 

I nurse more than 10 times a day.  Noah's nutrition is still 90% (OR MORE) from breastfeeding.  I still nurse OVERNIGHT.

I am really ticked.

I don't remember if I mentioned how 2 weeks ago I had REALLY sore nipples.  Horribly sore.  I was dreading every nursing session.  It came on really suddenly, lasted about 5 days, and then went away really suddenly.  I also had a lot of egg-white CM during that time.  I was just saying to Erin today that it seemed like my body was trying to ovulate.

Then tonight I've been soooo cranky, and really crampy. I told Justin it felt like period cramps. Just now we were in the kitchen, and he was trying to be nice to me because I've been so ticked off all evening. Then I told him I had to go to the bathroom because it felt like I was bleeding.

AND THEN I WAS BLEEDING.
 
I'm really pissed off. I nurse 10+ times a day. I nurse overnight. And I don't WANT to have another baby right now. I don't have that burning desire in me right now. So what's the point of the stupid period?!?!?!

I DON'T WANT THIS TO HAPPEN RIGHT NOW! I HAVE CRAMPS AND I FEEL LIKE CRAP.
 
 
I'm really ticked off.


(Noah is 11 months, 2 weeks, and 3 days old)

Elijah's 2nd Birthday

On Saturday, March 5, 2011, my nephew Elijah turned 2!  His parents, my brother Nick and his wife Hilary, had a birthday party for him at their house, which is 2 hours from our house.

Our day was super busy, but fun!  We left when Noah was ready for his nap at 11am.  Noah slept in the car from 11:08 until like 11:50 when Justin yelled (it was a windshield wiper fiasco).

We had planned to stop as quickly as possible in L-town, the halfway point between our houses, because I desperately need new nursing gear.  That is a whole other story, which I'm going to tell separately, but we ended up spending an hour and a half there.  I was hoping for 30 minutes.

We didn't get to Nick and Hil's until 2:30. Noah had a great day (so did we), but he never had another nap.  This is about the 3rd or 4th day that he's gone with only one nap. I didn't even bother trying for a second one because he was having so much fun playing, never fussed once, and the house was so noisy it would have been hard to get him to sleep.  Then I would have had to sit there holding him the whole time since he refuses to nap anywhere but in his own crib. 
 
Desite the lack of sleep, he did wonderfully.  He wasn't even that attached to me.  He was going all over the house, playing with everything.  He would come back to me for some cuddles or nursing, but he often left my sight, on his own, and never freaked out.  It was good. 
 
We left at 6:40pm with Noah in his jammies, and he fell asleep within 45 seconds of driving. He stayed asleep the whole way home. I just had to reach my hand back to touch his head once when we were almost home because he gave a little cry. He immediately fell back asleep, though.
 

Oh my gosh, the drive home was SCARY!  It was so weird. It was totally fine until about 35 minutes from home.  Then suddenly there were tons of ambulances and cars were in the ditch everywhere. There were at least 15 cars in the ditch in the span of about 3km.  Some of them were flipped onto their hoods! The roads were so weird. They would be completely bare and dry and then suddenly black ice. We never actually felt any slipperyness except when we drove on a bit of snow, but it was terrifying to see so many cars going in the ditches around us. My stomach was in knots.  Especially when a stupid transport truck swerved into the lane right in front of us and then completely stopped.  Smart thinking, buddy.

 

We got home at 8:50pm. I took Noah out of his carseat and laid him on his sleepsack on our bed, and he stayed asleep the entire time.  At least, his eyes were closed and he was barely moving.  That is NOT like him.  Normally if I even put my hand near his head while he's sleeping he will stir and almost wake up.  It's not like he was limp, he was moving, but he wasn't waking up. I could have just put him straight into his crib from his carseat (which I normally could never do), but he needed to be in his sleepsack, because our house goes down to 64 degrees at night. When I started putting his arms in the holes he must have woke up just a little more because he kept his eyes closed but he lifted one hand to sign "nurse". I was planning on nursing him anyway, so I nursed him for about 8 minutes and put him in the crib, and he stayed totally asleep.  He slept until 7:15am, just getting up to nurse once at 4:30am.

 

It was a fun day.  I really like this age that Noah is at.  He's a lot easier to do things and go places with, because he takes fewer naps.  And he is sooo much fun.  And so much more independent.  I can actually visit with people now, instead of 75% of my time being spent caring for Noah.  I feel like I just got used to that, and now we're past it.

 

Elijah's little brother, Josiah, is 5 months old.  I was holding him and saying "You're so little!" (which he's not, if you compare him to most 5 month olds, but compared to my 11.5 month old he is!).  My mom said, "Doesn't holding a little one like that make you want to have another one?" 

 

It doesn't really.  I mean, yes, I want to have another one.  Hopefully two - but not at the same time.  But not right now.  Noah is still a baby.  And a 5 month old is so useless.  Maybe if he was a newborn my uterus would be tugging a bit.  But a 1 year old is a lot more fun than a 5 month old, especially when he's my 1 year old, and it's someone else's 5 month old.  I love this stage in Noah's life, and I am in ZERO hurry to disrupt our lives and start into the fertility treatment madness again. 

 

I think it's weird that I don't have that burning desire to have another baby right now.  I love that I don't have that feeling.  I do want to have more children, but I am not in a hurry for it to happen.  It's such a nice change from the feeling I had trying to get pregnant with Noah. 

Hormonal Musings (A Post About ME!)

This post is probably entirely Too Much Information.  Be forewarned.

SO things have been a little different in our household lately.  Since the beginning of January Justin and I have been working to cut out all grains from our diet.  Justin has actually been really good and only cheated once (and got a giant headache as a reward).  I, on the other hand, have been doing this more slowly and mostly just trying to avoid gluten.  We will eat rice about once a week, but other than that I never cook anything that has grain in it anymore.

(It's a very long explanation, but we're doing this because grains are horrible for you.  For ANYBODY.  They are biologically designed to attack whoever eats them, and basically they punch holes in your gut, and cause tons of autoimmune diseases, infertility, etc.  Dairy and legumes have a similar effect. Obviously not everybody has these problems, but grains do, in fact, treat everybody the same way.  It's just that some people are more sensitive to these effects than others.  So we've been cutting grains - especially gluten, which is the worst contributor - out of our diet to see what kind of effect it has on our fertility, my colitis, and our general health and well-being. )

Some interesting things have happened since I have cut back on my grain intake:

1. I suddenly have a sex drive.  I mentioned my lack of sex drive and all the complicated possible reasons for it back in my post on Baby #2.  Well, it has reappeared.  We've been having sex several times a week (or more), because I want it, not because I feel like I should because I love my husband.  This is a nice - and welcomed - change.  In my opinion, this is the most sex we've ever had.  It's not technically the most sex we've ever had, because we obviously had a lot of sex when we were trying to get pregnant.  But that was mostly obligation sex ("We better never go more than a day without doing it because we don't want to miss ovulation...").  Like I said before, infertility kind of ruined my appetite for sex, and nursing seemed to make that even worse.  Suddenly, not so much.  I'm still nursing as much as I always have.  So could it be the lack of grains?  In our research we have read that decreased libido can be a side effect of al those gut irritants.  Interesting...

2. Last week I spotted verrry lightly from Monday to Thursday (Jan 17 to 20).  It was a similar sort of spotting I used to get the day before I would get my period during the cycles we were doing IUI and I was 100% for sure ovulating.  It never really got any heavier than just the slightest bit of pink (and occasionally a small streak of red).  It definitely was not a period - this I know for sure.  I don't know what it was, though.

3. I had a negative OPK!!  I've mentioned before that one of the symptoms of my fertility issues are that I always have positive or almost positive OPKs.  I have taken about 10 OPKs since giving birth, just for the heck of it, most of them in the past few months.  All have been positive.  This past week I took one when I was spotting that was also positive.  Today I took one, just for funsies, and it was negative.  Negative!  Wahoo!  It wasn't super negative, but the test line was definitely lighter than the control line.  I'm going to keep monitoring this every so often, just for my own awareness.  But this is the first time I've had a negative OPK since giving birth.


I kind of went into this no-grain thing half-heartedly.  Even though I know all the issues grains cause, and how beneficial it can be to get rid of them, I haven't really been into it.  I haven't really believed anything would change for me, personally.  But I'm not so sure now.  Maybe these 3 things are connected?  They're pretty out of the ordinary for me.

I guess we'll wait and see... :)

Not Ready for It

The past 4 days have shown me that I'm not really ready to be pregnant again.

I forgot how much 24/7 sickness (I didn't have just "morning" sickness) SUCKS.  Last time I was pregnant, the height of my illness was during summer vacation (although I still experienced daily nausea until sometime in the second half of my pregnancy). So I literally spent all of August in bed.  I went nowhere and did nothing.

This wouldn't dissuade me from giving it another go right now if I didn't currently HAVE a baby. And a nursing baby, at that. The past 4 days have been awful with the intense nausea and still having to nurse every 2 hours and rock him to sleep. Thankfully Noah has been an angel, and this didn't coincide with any teething to create more misery. But I've felt very bad for him that I've been so unavailable. Justin has been amazing with Noah when he's been home, but he can't be here all the time, or even half the time.  Plus, he is a terrible housekeeper.  My house is a disaster zone, but I think he's just waiting for me to be better and then it will get clean.  Men.

On Wednesday, I hadn't really experienced the runs yet, and the constant nausea (and the fact that it seemed like my stomach wasn't emptying even though I was starving and had barely eaten anything all day) felt eerily similar to how I felt when I was pregnant with Noah. I was 99% sure I wasn't pregnant, but I decided to use an OPK (I've got like 30 of them lying around, but only one pregnancy test) to see if it was positive, since OPKs detect HCG. 

(Sidenote: One of the indicators that I had fertility issues was that my LH was always high, and my OPKs were constantly positive or nearly positive.  The only time this wasn't an issue was when I was on the right cocktail of drugs and injections that made me actually ovulate.  I forgot to mention in my Baby #2? post that I have peed on about 5 OPKs on various days in the past couple of months, and they have all been positive, even though I am clearly not ovulating..  I've been really disappointed about this, because I was hoping that my fertility issues were due in large part to stress, and that being pregnant, giving birth, and nursing would all make my body "get it" and start working properly.  Then we'd only have MFI to contend with.  No such luck.)

The OPK was positive.  Very positive.  Not just two lines the same colour, which is what I normally have.  The test line was clearly darker, which is what happened at 12DPO the cycle I got pregnant with Noah.

I was still fairly certain I wasn't pregnant, but I had to know, so I used my only HPT.  It was negative, but that's not the point here.  The point is that I was actually kind of scared that it might be positive.

Justin dared to get annoyed at me when I admitted that I was afraid of that outcome.  I'm ignoring that, because men can be idiots and they have no idea what being pregnant is like, nor do they know what being a nursing mother is like, so they can't even BEGIN to imagine what being a pregnant, nursing mother would be like.

It's not just "being pregnant" that scared me, nor the thought of having a newborn when Noah would only be 18 months old.  It's the thought of the here and now.  The constant nausea while trying to be a full time nursing mother.  The thought of possibly having to cut short the way I want to do things with Noah because I'm pregnant and then another baby will be here.  I'm just not ready to handle that.  Or rather, I'm not ready to chose to handle that.  If it happened, I would of course handle it and would be grateful for a miracle pregnancy, even if it did put my current life in shambles.

I don't think I'm going to be ready to be pregnant again until Noah is on a mostly solid diet (right now he only has one meal of solids a day) and less dependent on me and me alone.  And I've said before, I don't want to force that.  So it'll probably be awhile.