oops....have i forgotten to blog for 4 years??

hello there world! not that anyone is reading this, but i've just spent the day reading blogs of other ttc or pregnant ladies (my boss didn't come today, nothing to do, just a normal day at the office...) so i'm feeling inspired to write again. i figure at some point someone will want to read about the details of our whole journey, even if it's just me during bed rest (god forbid!) or when our child graduates high school, or whatever.

so i think the last time i wrote we were in buenos aires and scouting out fertility options there. to make an exceedingly long story ridiculously short, we ended up staying in buenos aires until march 2010, when esther got her permanent residency visa to the u.s. through the diversity lottery system (major miracle!!) and we moved to chicago. we've been here a year now and love it!

we didn't make major headway towards Baby during our time in buenos aires, except right at the end i decided to get some testing done before i left my job there (the translation agency from hell) and lost my health insurance. so, we visited two fertility clinics for consultations (fecunditas in CF was awesome, kind, welcoming and helpful; the one in la plata not so much) and i got some blood work, an ultrasound, and a histerosalpingogram done. (that last one is apparently usually only done when there are fertility issues, which i didn't realize at the time, but it was covered and not TOO horrible, so no harm done). i forgot to go back and get the results of the blood work, but the other two tests seemed to give good results. it was shrotly after this that we made the move Up North.

so we got here and started trying to settle in to living in the states. i found work, esther started studying and teaching spanish lessons on the side, we began a search for a church (still ongoing), etc. as the year started to pull to a close for some reason we both started thinking about babies again, independently of each other. when we realized this one night, we decided to take some time to think about it again individually, and then have a good, thick conversation about it after the new year. i realize this was all me, wanting to make plans and set dates and all that jazz, but esther goodnaturedly went along with it.

i did bundles of research and got books from the library and scoured websites and quizzed a friend at work who had a baby a few months back. i had a good list of questions which i ran by acquaintances such as "why do human beings want to reproduce?" and came to some satisfying conclusions myself (thanks in large part to the ladies of lj's ttc_lesbians group). after esther and i talked in january, mostly about the practicals like 1.) who would carry, 2.) how exactly we would inseminate, 3.) health insurance coverage, and 4.) how in the blazes we would be able to afford a baby on essentially my income [the answers to these questions are: 1.) me; 2.) probably just ICI or IUI with anonymous donor sperm even though we would have preferred to combine her eggs with my uterus or vice versa but it's far too prohibitively expensive; 3.) my bluecross blueshield through my current employer is actually a pretty awesome plan covering all pre-natal and delivery costs except for one $20 co-pay at the first OB visit, and $100 per day in the hospital, though literally nothing after the baby is born so i'm counting on IL All Kids for that; and 4.) i have no idea! every so often i'll suddenly think to myself, we can't afford kids! i mean, we can, but i'll have to work 3 jobs and i'll never see the baby! but then i respond reassuringly: 'so the heck what?? i'm having this thing!' and i think we're sticking with that for now].

so then we 'got started'! starting in january, i started taking a pre-natal with dinner every night, charting my BBT (basal body temp, or waking temp), using OPKs every month (ovluation predictor kits) and (TMI alert) charting my cevical fluid. [for those of you wondering why the heck so much prep, the answer is that when you're going about this with frozen, then thawed, donor sperm, you have a much smaller window of fertility each month and in order to make the best use of that time, you have to get to know your body well enough to confidently know which day (if not hour) you are ovluating. it's also been a really fun process to learn everything my uterus and hormones do each month--i had no idea! i'm very proud of them and absolutely glow with joy each month (around cycle day 16ish) when i get my fertile cervical fluid!]

i also did a crap load of research regarding what hospital/medical providers we might want to use, and through a serendipitous viewing of "the business of being born" (thanks for the suggestion, netflix!) heavily started leaning towards water birth or at the very least NOT any birth that would have me tied down to the bed by IV lines, and thus found a particular hospital in our area that met these criteria and through them, a specific midwife group. we've been there once to have the preliminary conversation (and also have a pap smear and a test for...um....some childhood disease that i couldn't remember if i'd had or not? clearly it didn't leave a lasting impression on me, but in any case, i am immune to it, yay.). they were just as nice and wonderful as i expected them to be (all their reviews on yelp said things like "i live 40 minutes away driving and it was totally worth it to make that commute every week, or more often, in my last weeks of pregnancy") and totally answered all our questions. the particular midwife i spoke to didn't have tons of experience with the insemination process (she usually just seems folks after they get pregnant :) but promised to look into the questions i had about that and see if she could find answers, including whether or not they could do insemination right there. turns out they can, which she informed me of a couple days later during the phone call to tell me my pap was fine, but she also suggested another place i had also recently heard about, which was specifically founded to provide fertility services to LGBTQ folk.

bringing us to the actual act of Getting Pregnant. don't get excited, we're not there yet! but we're on our way. the books all recommended i chart for 3 months, which i did, and now we're going on vacation to paraguay in may, so i'm not going to inseminate right this second. we're going to wait until we come back (i'll likely be ovulating right around our return date) and then chart for one more full cycle to make sure things are still going on about the same timeline. which means trying to insemination around the end of july. that will be our Cycle #1!

in the meantime, once we get back from paraguay, i'd like to make an appointment to go visit that LGBTQ fertility clinic and set that in motion. also, we have to decide where we're going to get our little swimmers from. there was a very affordable option right here in chicago, but it actually shut down amidst much confusion and drama about a month or two ago. so this has changed the budget quite a bit--the next least expensive option is only about $50 more per vial, but it's in seattle, adding on about $150 in shipping each time we inseminate. so we may not be able to afford to do this every month, but we're just going with the philosophy of trying whenever we can, then waiting while we save up again. it's quite usual for it to take many tries (although it's suggested to seek professional advice if you've tried 6 cycles with no result) so i definitely have the mindset that we're in for the long haul. still really, really exciting :)

meanwhile a billion of my friends are pregnant (or does it just feel like that many?) so i want to avoid getting pregnant out of jealousy, but thankfully we went through this whole 'thinking it out' process before this sudden wave. i wish them all well :), and am trying to learn from them....

p.s. we have the absolute most perfect names picked out already! they will most definitely be a secret, however, as i can't have anyone stealing them like rachel does to monica in friends.