Salt and Pickles

I have a pet peeve. I don’t feel entirely fair in this pet peeve, since my grammar has started a definite decline since I started typing away on the internet. I got lazy, that’s for sure. My English teacher mother is surely horrified by some of the emails I write to her.

But still, I go internally ballistic when people make the Loose vs. Lose error. Loose rhymes with goose. Your clothes can be too loose, your shoes too loose, you can be loosey goosey. In old days they might call a woman loose (hmph and never men) if she liked sex . You LOSE your way, you can lose your wallet, you can lose at a game.

so, this comic cracked me up

On the topic of pregnancy: I wish I could ask for another beta. I’m constantly paranoid nothing is happening in there, or things are fading away. One more week. ugh.

I’m still not fully believing that this last cycle worked. Today H and I were at the shopping center to pick up some kitty litter & food. We get these giant refillable tubs of litter, and they’re very heavy. When we were putting it in the truck, i tried to take it from H and put it on the floor by where my feet would be. H said “no way, you can’t pick this up. out of the way” I said “why not, hand it over” and he said “You’re pregnant” and i started dancing in the parking lot right there. Because, somehow… even though I think about it every single second of every day, I still manage to somehow not know/forget that i’m pregnant. I think it’s only sunk in about 20%. I can logically talk about it, but i can’t feel it yet. Part of that is because I don’t have the belief yet that something can work out for me relating to IF.  

While we were out we bought the kitty some treats. We got him one of those cardboard corrugated floor scratchers and we sprinkled it with catnip. He is now rolling around on it, scratching at it.. and drooling on it. It’s covered in wet marks from his prolific drool. My cat is a dog. (really. he growls when people ring the doorbell too)  

Last night I dreamed that we had twin girls and we named them our top girl name and the other name was Coraline. (nn Cora). Coraline is a book I just read and not a name on our list at all. I woke up convinced we were naming our kid Coraline. By 4pm that feeling had faded and it didn’t have that special dream portent to it anymore.

Last night we went to a “say goodbye to my boobies” party for a friend who is having a reduction. There were lots of girls in cleavage shirts, boobie cupcakes, a boob cake & even the dip was made to look like boobs. good times.  

I think I slept 12 hours last night. huzzah.  

I have to admit that every day that I go to the bathroom and see nothing on the toilet paper feels like some sort of win. 

also, i don’t have a lot of symptoms. I have mild crampy/twinginess.. and my boobs hurt a bit. The thing is my boobs don’t hurt the way i was expecgting them to. I thought they would hurt in a “ow you touched my boob and it really hurt!” sort of way, but rather they hurt when they’re not being touched. in an achey ‘wow, it’s really cold and my nipples could cut glass from feeling frozen’ sort of way

It’s funny how i’m constantly waiting for the next bit of bad news. I spent all of today totally nervous and shaking a little (vibrating, really) .. wishing my lab was faster.. wishing that work didn’t get in the way of IVF nurses calling with results, etc. (”what, you guys have jobs other than calling us??”)

anyway.. second beta came back at 3,068. This is good. really good. I’m still in a bit of shock and just waiting for something bad to happen. I need to stop that thinking, maybe.. but it’s a bit ingrained at this point in IF.

but right now I feel mostly happy. I’ll work on my meditative breathing, since that does really help to keep me positive, somehow.

Christopher Columbus, I’m pregnant.  (wow, such a Little Women thing for me to say).

First u/s is set for March 5th

Beta #1 comes in at 1371 at 18dpo.
beta base is down, but according to this (scroll down)

yowsa…

I feel mostly paralyzed/shocked than anything else, even though i knew I was pregnant. I also was shaking a little bit for awhile there.

my IVF nurse said “This is a very healthy number” .. but we’re being cautiously optimistic as she and i are both a little superstitious. so we’ll wait to see how well it doubles on thursday. (please double!)

I’ve been super sick. I spent most of thursday night entirely unable to swallow, because it hurt so bad. I’d left work early wednesday and again early on thursday.. and i called out entirely on friday. I spent time looking for some relief on Friday (i’d been trying chloraseptic but at this point it wasn’t doing anything for me. i had nothing but pain pain and more pain). I found a website that swore by the method of gargling with warm salty water with cayenne pepper in it. Seemed a little crazy, but at this point, what the hell…so i tried it, and it was marvelous! i gargled every 15 minutes for an hour and then every hour after that for another 4 hours. And by the end of that my throat was almost entirely better! who knew!  Now the only thing left is some congestion my chest, a small sniffle & my ears are still a little plugged. I feel definitely on the road to normal… and this is good because the house is a crazy mess. H had to work a overtime a lot this week, so he couldn’t pick up my sickly slack and we both decided not to do anything today… so… ugh, it’s gross in my kitchen.  

It is nice to feel much more zen this cycle. Yea, it helped that my pee sticks were ever darkening, but I also just feel more confident this time around and I have no idea where that confidence is coming from.  

Things done while sick: watched one ratatouille and 3 romantic comedies… all thanks to the ‘rental’ option on itunes. read 2 books on kindle. peed on 3 sticks (til last one today. i’m out. o no!) and slept a whole buttload of a lot of sleep. oh, and don’t forget the nose blowing, hacking cough, temperature taking, throat clearing and wheezy snoring.  

life with me is a cacophony of delightful noises 

That second line keeps getting darker. After last time, this is a huge relief. Even if it doesn’t end up meaning anything, it’s giving me great pleasure and a sense of relaxation to watch the second line darkening with every day.

and to make things even better, today my Kindle arrives from amazon! In fact I only came to work because I can’t wait another day for it. I have a cold, and will probably go home once it’s here. H was very sweet last night and went to our neighborhood thai place to bring me home Tom Ka Gai, which is a yummy delicious lemongrass chicken soup. He bought me the kindle a few weeks ago and the expected timeline for kindles has been 4-6 weeks, so having it arrive exactly on valentine’s day is pretty awesome.

I sound like a frog and i keep hacking nastiness from my lungs. The soup place near work looks at me weird when i ask for the chicken soup but with no stuff, just broth.. but it feels so good on my throat. I think it’s the chicken fat. mmm chicken fat.

I just have to put this question out there: What if it’s twins?!

I blame Azalea Baby. (ah, always so handy to have somebody to blame).
I had planned to wait til at least today, but yesterday .. I came out of my acupuncturist feeling like she wasn’t telling me something, I read that AB had tested early and i basically threw my hands in the air, said “fuck it!” and ran across the street to Walgreens like I was being chased by rabid dogs.

anyway, yesterdays pee stick definitely had two pink lines. it was a FRER. the second line was about 50% the strength of the control line, so while it was light. it wasn’t even all that light
Today it was more like 80%. Last time i never actually got this dark with a pee stick, so i’m going to see this as hopeful.

I feel much more sane this time around though. no where near as spazzy. I just feel happy it worked again. And if I hit a wall again and it stops working, at least I’m consistent and my doc can attempt to figure out why. and if it continues to work, well… huzzah and parties on roof tops ! I like feeling calm and mostly happy about it.
granted, if i get a low beta.. i’ll be sad. but, the spazzy feeling from last time was really disconcerting.

so, hi… as of this second .. I am pregnant.

just a quickie nothin post:

woo hoo, netflix arrived while we were gone. Tonight I’ll be eating nothing but vegetables (there was a sad dearth of healthy eating in the mountains) and watching Some Kind of Wonderful !

Tahoe is quite the balm for the itchy brain. I was able to play with a 2 year old and 5 month old. play board games (actually I didn’t do much of that, but I watched others) .. roast 3 chickens (there were 10 of us) … make grilled cheese & soups for lunches. and just all around relax with some of my favorite people. My tribe. It was great and I’m totally in love with the 2 year old. She’s a sunny force of personality.

The house we stayed at was gorgeous. huge. although it had really poor taste in art. The main painting in the living room was aproximately 10 feet by 10 feet . Huge. It was of two people in a boat on a lake in the moonlght with a huge torch in the prow of the row boat. They were rowing towards a small cove. It was remniscent of hobbits, bootleggers & an early century prison break… all at the same time.

So now I’m in the second week of the two week wait. Let’s see how many days I can go without giving in to the siren call of the pee stick.

Also, can I just share this. I found it very powerful and it made me cry. Granted, i’m all hopped up on hormones, but I think I would have cried anyway.

I’ve been tagged by the lovely melanie, and this will be my first ever ‘tagged’ style post! I had a different blog for years, but somehow never got tagged by any meme’s.
only problem with rule #4 is that I don’t know many people in this community, and I haven’t let many people I know outside this community know I have this blog. So I might have to tag 3 people in a later post.
I had small amounts of online time in tahoe and so I saw I’d been tagged and had no idea what I could post, but I came up with a few things.

The rules:

1) Link to the person who tagged you.
2) Post the rules.
3) Share six non-important things / habits / quirks about yourself.
4) Tag at least three people.
5) Make sure the people you tagged KNOW you tagged them by commenting what you did.

now to the meat and potatoes.

1.) I need lots of blankets on me to sleep at night. If i’m in a rental house.. say, you know.. in Tahoe? I often going around pillaging empty beds and/or linen closets for extra blankets. It’s not so much about warmth as it is about weight. My step father likes to joke that I’m like the man in The Crucible where , as they’re trying to get him to confess to being a warlock and piling stones on him, he keeps moaning “mooooore weeeeeight”

2.) When I was a kid I was so upset about not being allowed to go to Narnia, that i created my own very elaborate world named Folifa. I was very very convincing about it being real and soon had at least two other kids claiming to also having been there. We were not 6 or anything so flight-of-fancy as that. We were around 11 or 12.

3.) I like clowns. I like them a lot. I like old creepy (but not the scary newer big teeth kind) 1920’s style clowns. I have quite a few clown things.. from a clown head tea pot to a weird old very heavy metal (iron maybe?) clown penny bank. and to add to the quirk. .. If H were to put on a clown nose while we were gettin it on, I’d probably be turned on. ok? yes, it’s true. don’t look at me like that.

4.) I also like marionettes (the older and slightly creepier the better) and have a very small (maybe 5) collection of cool marionettes. and doll parts. i also have lots of weird doll parts.

5.) When not 2WW’ing or pregnant , I take about 5 baths a week. It would be 7 except for having an actual social life. I usually stay in the bath tub for about 3 hours. I am happiest in water.

6.) I’m not sure whether to talk about my Jane Austen obsession, or a weakness for cowboys. Or maybe the fact that I always pat my sandwiches flat after I make them. I’m totally cheating on #6, I know. not really a quirk, but my biggest skills are : i type super super fast, and I read even faster. My reading skill does me no good in the practical world (although there’s on denying that reading is useful), and in fact can end up being a bit expensive (what with my horrible lack of ability to return a book to the library). also, i could live on buttered popcorn with a dash of honey melted in the butter, rosemary, salt & fresh ground pepper.

ok, done cheating on #6.

I will tag some folks when I get the lay of the land!

Ok, first tag is of claire!