here we go!!!

crazyness!

today i am running around like a chicken with its head cut off trying to order sperm. yes, that’s right people, we're taking that final step over and actually starting TTC!!! last time i wrote the big news was that we had our appt for our consult at the CWHC. we went wednesday night, totally loved the groove of the place (hippy feminists....yum...), and got the OK to go ahead at my next ovulation. there were some things i wasn’t excited about–number one, they charge a $100 fee if you "take a month off" so my plan for doing it every other month suddenly was going to cost us. and secondly, they had this rule in place when they started out that since both the inseminating community (is that a phrase??) in chicago and the donor pool from midwest sperm bank (the one most of their clients use) is so small, they did not allow more than one pregnancy from any particular donor. they don’t have this rule anymore since both groups of people have grown exponentially and geographically, but it’s still in place for the people who conceived during that time–and one of them used my argentine :( (apparently he DID come back!).

so these were slightly annoying issues, but i think we’ve gotten past both of them. i ran the numbers last night and discovered we can afford to do three months in a row if we take a couple months off after that to recover, save for taxes, etc., so we won’t need to skip every other month. this is a good thing so as to not throw away $100 on the "not-this-time" fee, but also coincides with their general practice to change things up (i.e. rethink things, pick another donor, whatever) if no pregnancy after 3 tries. so we’re going to go july, august, september, and then stop for the rest of the year (and october, november and december ought to be enough of a break to save up for taxes AND to pay for the new mac computer we got a couple of weeks ago :), plus there is no fee if you take off 3 months or more. actually we were going to go august, skip september (because I was going to be o’ing RIGHT during our labor day trip to pittsburgh), then try again october and november, but...just this morning i got my period! about 3 days early!! so that means everything moves up a bit and it’s completely likely that i’ll O in late august before we leave for labor day weekend. whoo!

and regarding donors. we love Mr. 290 over at northwest, but we really didn’t love anyone else quite as much (and of course, he’s limited supply...why am I not surprised!!!). But, emily (the health worker we consulted with at CWHC) said we really should have at least 3 choices, and of course she’s right. i was really resistent to this mostly based on racial and ethnic characteristics–i don’t have any desire to bring another lilly white baby into the world, and that seems like all there is in the Donor Universe. no offense, i love many white babies (jack and charlotte, holla!) and i’m sure that i’m going to be passionately in love with whatever baby comes out of me, but that’s just my gut feeling right now. i want to have a baby who maybe sort of could look related to esther too, and while she isn’t particularly dark-skinned, she is certainly more so than i am.
so to this end, we were looking for south american donors, or in the absense of that, native american (the country where esther is from in south america is completely and totally mixed as to european background with the indigenous peoples from the area, so she feels a great connection to native american ethnicities as well). in all the banks we looked at (and i looked at ALL of them out of morbid curiosity, even though i knew the only ones we could afford were midwest or northwest) we found only ONE south american--the argentine i can’t use :(-- and one fully native american person (Mr. 290!!). northwest has other donors who are PARTIALLY native american, but they’re also partially irish, dutch, german, polish and croatian, and have blond hair and blue eyes. no gracias! (man, i am going to regret this post if i have a blond kid and they read this someday. honey, i totally love you the way you are! mommies just have weird thought patterns sometimes :)).

so anyway, that’s why we’re fixated on 290. but since we have to have at least 3 in our list, we were going to go through nw’s list again and try to squeeze someone out of it. i think we were planning on doing that this weekend...so of course my period comes today! and as we were instructed to call and place our order on CD1, we need to have our donors picked out NOW. so this morning while i ate breakfast and got dressed, esther scoured the webpage again. we FINALLY found someone listed as "hispanic", which is less than ideal because that is awfully vague, but he at least is darker-skinned and had black hair, so he went on the list. but then we were at an impasse. it seemed like literally every other single donor on there was either german or norwegian! as i rushed around so as to not miss my bus, we fretted and stewed... i remembered one other one i had seen, who had some native american (along with like, german, polish, estonian, irish, who knows what else) but also had medium complexion and dark hair, so maybe him....until esther looked at his details and saw that he has allergies to pollen, grass, etc. i mean, obviously that is not the end of the world and totally possibly would not even get passed down to the bubbala, but it has the potential to be awfully annoying for the entire life-span of this new little person. so maybe not. and finally as i was about to leave, esther called out "here’s one that’s german, polish and korean" and i honestly thought she was joking. we’d already decided to try and avoid german, and i think i just assumed asian backgrounds were not being considered because of the starkly obvious way the baby would not look like either one of us, but she was serious! i came over to the bed to see her face as she confirmed this. Mr. 599 had medium complexion and dark hair, which would be more like her (and green eyes, which is like neither of us but still awesome :), studied music history in school (again, not like us, but cool :), and if you consider the korean to be only a third of his background (whatever that means) and mix it with me, in the end he’ll just maybe look ‘slightly exotic’ (my words :) which is absolutely totally fine. and then on the way to work i read his answers to the essays questions and actually liked them A LOT. those things are more often than not disappointing–either the person can’t spell worth crap, or they say things that just kind of make you cringe inwardly ("your baby will be beautiful because my genes are awesome") (come to think of it, i think the argentine actually said that!). but this one, while, yes, pointing out the good things about himself, was also well-written, thoughtful, and reminded me a bit of my writing style. so now i actually really like him a lot :)

this morning i’ve been super nervous about these phone calls i had to sneak to make while my boss drifts around the office (to CWHC to let them know AF is here and see if we’re good to go, to NW to give them credit card info, etc). i talked to CWHC and all is ok (yay!!!); cheryl told me that with NW i actually have to place the order myself but can have it sent to their office, and that i should have it sent to them by CD13 (which is july 27). but then when i called NW they said everything looked fine, but they needed to send me a final confirmation email that will explain how to order and he would send it right over...and of course it’s 2 hours later now and nothing! i’m so nervous....i told him what date i needed it by and he said that was absolutely no problem, so if for some reason i can’t order until tomorrow (or monday?) there likely would be no problem. but i want to do it now! i want to be able to text esther (as she sits at home working on the final draft of a 20-page paper due today :) and say "i just bought spermies!!!!" or something along those lines. checking my email again....nothing! i think i'm going to give them another call.

*****

score! i called them and they shot the email over right away. so now i'm good to go, i started to place the order...and my first question is, how many vials are there exactly of 290? turns out there are FOUR. FOUR!!! not even enough to try for 3 months, much less to save some for a future sibling. i knew he was limited supply, but i was hoping he'd be like 8 or 10. four is almost non-existent. and speaking of limited supply, i either forgot or didn't notice this on their princing info*, but when they are limited supply, they are more expensive! i can't remember if there is a reason behind that, but the bottom line is that he costs $350 per vial rather than $275 (well, $249, but all their prices go up to $275 on august 1). so is he worth it? i think so, it's only $150 per month to get our absolute first choice...but here's hoping his little guys can do it in the next two months. and where are all the native american donors, people?? step up!

anyway i sent an email to esther with these details to see what she thinks before i call them back to finalize the order....just got her reply, she agrees with me! so here we go, at least the first try will be with Mr. 290, keeping my fingers crossed that no one else will buy him before the end of august just in case i need him again....

JUST ORDERED MY FIRST IUI EVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! now nothing at all is going to happen until i O in about 2 weeks.....que locura!!!!!

*by the way, i can't check the NW website while i'm here at work because-get read for this-it's BLOCKED by some program they have installed on the computers because it's "Forbidden Topic-Sex Education." that is maybe the weirdest thing i ever heard. never mind that i can look at the websites of lots of other sperm banks. never mind that i also can't see xkcd because it's "Forbidden Topic-Adult/Mature Themes" (what???). weird bosses, weird job, weird internet :)