Another Baby

I have been thinking a lot lately about having another baby. I love having a baby. I love that E is growing bigger and that we are getting to experience her as an older baby now that she’s crawling and eating and growing developmentally, but I am also already missing the infant stuff about her! I want her to have a sibling soon.

My husband and I have talked a lot about our hopes to have a baby naturally this time. We are so grateful for modern medicine that has allowed us to get pregnant with E, but I would love to be able to experience getting pregnant like most women do, just getting pregnant naturally, without all the ultrasounds, medications, exams, etc. 

Although I have a baby of my own, I still feel a little jealous when I hear of other people I know getting pregnant and having babies. I think it’s because I feel like we are back to square one again trying to get pregnant. Even though we have been immensely blessed to have one child, I constantly think about how long it took us to get her here! I don’t want to have to wait another 2-3 years to get pregnant. All the mothers I know seem like they have a baby, then the month they want to conceive again, boom, they get pregnant. 

I just found out recently that a good friend of mine was able to conceive within WEEKS of getting off birth control. Weeks! I would KILL for that! People who are blessed to be fertile have NO IDEA the heartache that accompanies infertility. They cannot possibly imagine what it’s like to want to be pregnant NOW and be denied that blessing for months, even years. 

Another friend of mine at work is pregnant and stated clearly that it was an accident. She was paraphrasing something her husband said, “Why can’t we at least have to try to get pregnant like everyone else! I swear I blink and you’re pregnant!”. I do understand that for some people having an unplanned pregnancy is hard for multiple reasons, whether it be financial, physical, emotional, timing is not right, etc. But still, they are blessed to be pregnant! I would much rather be able to get pregnant without hardly trying than go through what I have been through. At least people who are super-fertile have the option of birth-control! 

I’ve been trying to suppress my feelings of jealousy at others who are pregnant/just having babies, but it is still there deep down (okay, maybe not that deep down!). I want to be like them. I want to be able to surprise E soon and tell her she’s going to be a big sister!

The questions that run through my mind all the time are:

-When will we get pregnant again?

-How long will we have to try to get pregnant?

-Will we be able to get pregnant naturally or will we need to do IVF again?

I need to focus my thoughts on something else. I know that in time we will have more children, I just wish I could look into my crystal ball and see when that time will be!

Another Baby

We have a daughter who is less than one year old. And I am constantly thinking about when we will get pregnant again! We have struggled with infertility for years. It took a lot of time and money to get pregnant with our daughter.

Once we finally got pregnant, I felt relieved that I didn't have to deal with infertility again for a while. But the thought still loomed in my head. We had a magical pregnancy and delivery, but as soon as our baby girl arrived, I started thinking about our next baby.

When would we get pregnant again? Would we be able to get pregnant naturally this time? Or would we embark yet again on a several-year journey of medications, ovulation testing, procedures, ultrasounds, waiting, more waiting, hoping to get pregnant?

I can't help thinking sometimes that my infertility has been "cured". It's easy to think that because we have one baby having another one will be a piece of cake. At least that's what I'm hoping for.

We are not under so much stress and pressure to have another baby right away this time. For years the only thought that occupied my mind was "I want to get pregnant now!". I am more content and happy now that we have our baby girl. But I still wonder when the next time is that we will get pregnant.

Will it be in a month? 6 months? 1 year? 3 years? I KNOW that we will get pregnant again and have more children. That's a fact. But the not knowing WHEN is so hard!

We had discussed birth control when my daughter was born and made the decision to not take any kind of birth control. We truly felt like if we got pregnant right away (even though it's not advised or good for a postpartum body such as mine) we would be thrilled.

And I truly would be thrilled! Now that our baby is older and not really a newborn, getting pregnant would be so great! I always wanted my kids to be close in age. Maybe not 9 months close, but within a couple years of each other.

Some days I try not to think about it much, since stress is not good for a woman who wants to get pregnant. But I can't help thinking about it.

Whenever it does happen, my world will transform again in to a magical land of pregnancy hormones and dreams of a larger family. I love being pregnant.

Laughing at Infertility (Part 2)

I found this website which brought great relief to my situation. However, I feel like I missed out during my years of inferitlity, because it wasn't until after I got pregnant and delivered my daughter that I stumbled upon this website.

There are others out there just like this one, but it helped me to realize that there are hundreds, no, thousands, of other women and couples out there who are struggling just like I did to get pregnant. Struggling with the same emotions and questions that I struggled with on a daily basis.

All those years I thought I was the only one out there. I didn't want to talk about it to anyone. I didn't want to laugh, to smile, to be happy. I thought, "Poor little me, no one else could be hurting as much as I am."

I was pretty self-absorbed. But the other night I spent a while reading through several reasons why to laugh at infertility. I LOVE these "Birds and Bees" videos on YouTube:
Jane's Pregnant
I had a window
They must not be working

On a different note, I just found this video of the song "I Would Die For That" sung by Kellie Coffey that made me cry!

Seriously though, take a moment to laugh at your situation. It's the only way to get through life. I wish I had learned this lesson years ago, it would have helped a lot during those long sleepless nights.

Laughing at Infertility (Part 1)

My husband and I have struggled with infertility for years. I never thought in a million years when we got married that we would have so much trouble getting pregnant as we did.

After 3 years of TTC (trying to conceive), we finally became pregnant through IVF (in-vitro fertilization).
This was our 2nd attempt at IVF and luckily we were successful and became pregnant with our daughter. IVF was the the last option we had before we would consider adoption. We had tried everything we could to get pregnant before resorting to IVF. We tried taking expensive medications; clomid, metformin, levothyroxine, femara; and when those didn't work we went to injectable medications like FSH. Nothing worked. Then we tried IUI's (intrauterine insemination). After 4 rounds of those, we decided to try IVF.

Throughout out the years of TTC, my emotions took a toll. I was depressed every month when my cycle started, or when we found out that the hundreds of dollars we'd just spent on last month's meds didn't work. Or when we found out the IVF cycle that cost us $$$ didn't work. You get the idea.

Crying myself to sleep became a habit. I tried to look at the positive side of things; how my husband and I had an opportunity to enjoy married life a little bit longer before having kids, how we were able to get into a house sooner than we planned on, how I was able to work full-time longer and save up more money. But all of these "positives" were outweighed in my mind by the biggest burden I'd ever felt in my life, my inability to conceive!

I thought to myself constantly, "Why am I not able to conceive? Why does this have to happen to me?" The doctors couldn't find a reason why I was infertile (my husband was absolutely fine, in fact, better than fine. His "swimmers" as we like to call them, should have won an Olympic Gold Medal for their record time and agility.  The timing of my cycles had always been a little off, so the idea was to get my cycles more regular and take meds to make me ovulate more regularly. But once that was happening and we still couldn't get pregnant, I felt helpless.

All I wanted was answers. I wanted to know what else I could possibly do to increase my chances at getting pregnant. During all this time, I felt utterly alone. I felt like I was the only person on the face of the planet; no wait; the entire universe; who couldn't get pregnant.

But I was so utterly wrong! I knew there were others out there who were infertile, but they all seemed to get pregnant quicker than I did. I never wanted to talk about my infertility trials to anyone but my husband. I didn't even want to tell our families about what was going on. That would signal defeat in my mind. It would be like acknowledging my defaults in front of the whole world. They would all know that something was wrong with me. Was it too much to ask that all I wanted to do was provide grandchildren for our parents?

After going through the trials of infertility for 3 years, finally getting pregnant, and having our beautiful daughter, infertility is still looming in my mind. It never goes away. Yes, I was able to get pregnant which is one of the greatest blessings in my life. But that didn't take my infertility away. For 9 months I looked like a fertile woman, but I was still incapable of conceiving on my own.

I think a lot about having our next child. How all of this will come back to haunt me. Will we need to do IVF again? Will we finally be able to conceive naturally? These questions swim around in my head all the time.

I felt powerless for years. How could anything possibly be positive about this situation? What could I possibly find funny about our infertility?

And then I found out..........