Getting Excited

I don't want to jinx it, but I'm pretty excited for this month.  I'm ovulating on the 20th, and so far, everything is going according to plans.  It actually doesn't feel like it's been a year, but we have, indeed, been trying for a year now.  I'm so happy to have finally figured ot what was going on with my body, that I guess I'm almost expecting it to happen this time.

My 31st birthday is coming up, too.  I was really hoping everything could work out so that I could take my pregnancy test on the morning of my birthday, but that will only be 7 days post-ovulation, and therefore highly unlikely to come up positive, even if I was pregnant.  On the other hand, this might be a blessing in disguise.  If I end up not getting pregnant this month, I don't need to start my birthday out with a big, fat negative staring at me.

I read my cards last week.  I asked just a general question about my future baby, and the Reincarnation card came up, in my Druid Tarot deck.  It got me to thinking, this baby could be someone from my past, or my husband's.  Could one of our grandfathers be ready to come back already?  They've only been gone a few years, but they would be welcome in our home.  All of them were wonderful men.  I just wonder how they'll feel about coming back with a uterus?  Haha....

Or, perhaps this little soul is someone who was important to me in a past life, and is coming to reunite with me.  A past sibling, mother, father, friend or lover?  Anything's possible.

It's hard not to get excited about meeting someone who will be so important in your life.  After all, one's children should be some of the most prominent figures in one's life.  I thought about it a lot with my son. I wondered how we would relate.  What tensions would exist in our relationship?  What would we have in common?  He's not even 3, so I don't know the answers to these questions yet.  Funny, but I thought about them more while he was living inside of me than I do now, and I'm closer to knowing the outcome.  I wonder why that is?

Either way, I think I need to plan something fun on the day I test, so that I can't dwell on it if I'm not knocked up this month.  I don't know why this month seems so urgent.  Maybe because I think having an Aquarius would be awesome?  Or maybe because giving birth in late January/early February would give me some cool spring weather to get back in shape before summertime, and only the early part of my pregnancy would be in the hellish heat?  I need to calm down.   It would be just as cool to have a Pisces, and one month later wouldn't make a whole lot of difference, in the scheme of things.  Yeah, that's what I have to tell myself.  :)

Check-in after a long hiatus

It's certainly been awhile since my last post, and life has been getting in the way of writing.  My son is involved in swim classes that clash with dinnertime, my father-in-law moved to Tucson which takes up some our weekend time (happily so!) and I've finally become a full-time Crossfit gym member, so that I can become as buff as my hubby.  Okay, maybe I'll just be able to keep up with him, but that's good enough for me.

My quest for a daughter is ongoing, but there have been breakthroughs.  The last two months my cycles have been longer and ovulation much later than normal.  I've also had a lot more fertile cervical fluid, which makes conception more likely.  Unfortunately, I've been timing sex much too early for conception to occur because my ovulation has always been on day 11 or 12 and my cycles always been 24 or 25 days.  But in March, my cycle lengthened to 28 days, with ovulation occurring on day 15.  This is the stereotypical normal cycle for women to have.  It happened in March and again in April.  I didn't want to correct my ovulation calculations for it, because it was so sudden and I wasn't sure that it would happen again.  Then, I read the FAQ (which I skimmed over in my first reading) of How to Choose the Sex of Your Baby.  One of the questions was, "Should I try the Shettles Method while breastfeeding?"  The answer was no, that you should wait until 3 months after weaning to allow your cycle to regulate itself.   Funny, my cycle lengthened about 3 months after I quit nursing my son.  So, while it has been an interesting year of trying to conceive, I think this revelation will finally allow me to get my baby girl sometime in the next few months.  Besides, my dad called last week asking if I was pregnant.  I mean, he knew we were trying, but nothing beyond that.  He told me that he had a dream that he bought me a beautiful crib made out of driftwood.   I think this is a sign that it's coming soon!  At least, I hope it is.

Okay, NOW I'm ready

I've been ready to be pregnant with my little girl for some time now, but I'm wondering if she was waiting for ideal circumstances to show up.  If that's the case, this is the time!  My loving, but reluctant, hubby just added out-of-network coverage to our medical insurance, so that I can go to my midwife instead of the lame nurse-midwives (who all work out of hospitals) or the OB-GYN's covered by our old insurance.  I also just got word last week that Babymoon Inn, the only birth center in Phoenix, has found a building and should be up and running in 9 months or less.  Yay!  Those were the things I really wanted for my birth, and now I'm ready. I'm also super excite that my man is finally on board with a non-hospital birth.  It took a hell of a lot of convincing, but now we're ready to roll.

I don't think it'll happen this month, but you never know.  At least now I have a bunch of extra reasons to celebrate when I get that big fat positive!

Some months are ridiculous

I think this month was fated to not happen, pregnancy-wise.  As of today, I ovulated a day late, which is not great for conception.  It's still possible, just a lot less likely.  Anyhow, I knew, from observing my body, that I was going to ovulate a day early last month, and I saw the same things this month, so I naturally thought I was just back to ovulating on day 11 every month again.  Sigh.  Not this month.  Day 12.

I suppose I really can't be too upset, since we could not have possibly have tried a single day later than we did.  My wonderful husband hurt his back working out, aggravated it mowing the lawn, and actually threw it out having sex on (what I thought) was our last possible night to conceive our little girl.  I did not have the heart to tell him I ovulated early and that he probably threw his back out for nothing this month.

This was my month to conceive a little Sagittarius, and I'm sad that it probably won't happen.  Next month is Capricorn territory, and I don't think I want to go for that.  But then again, I don't want to miss another opportunity to try since this is taking so much longer than I thought it would.  Sigh.  What a dilemma.  I mean, if I tell my man I want to take a break from trying to conceive for a month because I don't want our baby born so close to the winter holidays, he'll agree and understand, but then I'll always wonder if I had conceived that month if the baby would be born late and be an Aquarius, which is what I originally wanted to have anyway.  Besides, I could calculate to have an Aquarius and end up going into labor early (like I did with my son) and have a Capricorn anyway.  I guess I'll just err on the side of caution next month and not even come close to pushing into conceiving a boy territory.  Then, if it's meant to happen, it'll be possible.

Mourning

Aunt Flo came to visit this morning.  Right after my intense morning workout, it came in a gush and smothered my hopes for the month.  This happened right after I took another pregnancy test this morning and got an ambiguous answer.  There was just enough of a hint of line to make me want to go out and get another test for the next morning.  After seeing that, I was pretty sure in my mind that I was probably pregnant.  Any line at all in a pregnancy test is supposed to be taken as a positive result, and, adding that in with my weird symptoms, I figured this was the month for us.

Then my period came.  I didn't cry.  I wasn't even really disappointed when I first saw it.  It was more than twice as much blood as I normally have on my first day, and I've never cramped for four days before I began bleeding either.  Adding it all up, I figure I probably just had a spontaneous abortion.  My body rejected the zygote, or it died on its own.  Either way, I think I had been pregnant momentarily, and now I wasn't.  It was for the best though.  A spontaneous abortion most often happens when there is a serious problem, and I would not have wanted to carry the pregnancy out any further.  It was all very logical at the moment.

Then, the crying happened.  I realized that even though I understand scientifically what happened, and I know beyond a doubt that this was the better outcome, I still have a flood of hormones and emotions associated with it to deal with.  I still have to let myself mourn the baby I really wanted, and have been waiting for.  It's okay to be upset that this journey, which is becoming a bit stressful, isn't over yet.  It's understandable that I'm upset that the Thanksgiving baby that I thought I'd have isn't going to be here.

I hate crying.  It's just not something I often feel okay doing.  But it's okay today.  Today I will mourn, and tomorrow I will start preparing to try again.

One busy month

I haven't blogged in a while, but this has been an eventful month in my quest to conceive my little girl.  First, the lameness: we only had sex once during my fertile time.  Yep, once.  And even getting that in was difficult.  he was tired, he didn't want to, and it was late.  I admit, I was so not in the mood.  But making a baby on purpose isn't fun... making one on accident is!  I knew that going in, so I figured this month would be a total wash since we only did it the once.  Oh, and my dear loving husband spent about 30 minutes in a scalding hot tub earlier that day.  Yep, he's out to wound his little soldiers before sending them off to battle. I was not pleased.

So, I definitely thought this could not even possibly be the month.  Then the cramping started.  About three days after ovulation, I had cramps.  They felt just like the cramps I had when I got pregnant with my son.  It was just like getting period cramps way too early.  Hope filled me, and I've been paying super-close attention to my body ever since.  The cramping has been off and on ever since, and I had two days of nausea about 10 days post-ovulation.  My skin has been breaking out (I rarely get adult acne now,) I've been a bit over-emotional (crying over the death of my grandfather a year and a half past while showering,) and once my husband's kiss tasted like copper to me.  All these things make me really think this could be the month.

But I got a negative pregnancy test two mornings ago, 12 days past ovulation.  My period was due today, and it hasn't come yet, but that one negative test was enough to make me want to wait until Saturday morning to test again.  I know that some women don't show up pregnant on the pee-stick until 19 days past ovulation, but with my son 14 days was enough.  So I figure 16 days should do it. We'll see!

Nope.

Still not pregnant.  Sigh.  I started cramping within an hour of getting the negative result on the test.

Some people wonder why I bother testing as soon as my period's due, rather than just waiting a few more days to see if I bleed or not.  The answer is simple, really.  Stress can delay your period.  If I'm at all excited or worried on way or the other, that can delay my period for days, and I want it to start asap so that I can get started on the next month of trying to conceive.  I've waited before.  It seems like every time I wait and I'm either hopeful or scared, my period starts as soon as I get the single line on the pee stick.

I'm done playing games.  I'm still not going to stress about it, or cry that I'm not pregnant yet, but as long as the 99 cent store sells pregnancy tests, I'm going to test the morning that my period is due.

So, maybe next month will be the one.  Actually, next month could be perfect.  I've always wanted to be obviously pregnant for Samhain/Halloween so that I can paint my belly like the Earth, and dress up as Gaia.  It's my perfect costume!  Also, I'd love to have a Sagittarius, and this baby would still be born in the year of the Tiger.  Although, next year is the year of the Rabbit, and that would be great, too.  Well, either way, let's hope this cycle is the one!