TTC: Cycle 6

Verdict: Failure.
Future Prospects: SUCK.

As you can see in the chart below, I gave up early on in the cycle. We had sex a couple of times during my fertile phase (if I had a fertile phase), but I didn't bother recording it. My growing sense of futility is not such a great motivator to chart diligently, as it turns out.

This past cycle was particularly unfair, in that my period was a couple of days late, but the tests still came up negative. The last time my period was late (an entire year ago, now), I was pregnant. This time...not so much.

In the meantime, Fertility Friend is throwing a fit because my subscription is about to expire. I don't intend to renew it for now. Doctor D wants to see me if the next couple cycles are a bust, so I'm going to take break from charting for the next two months. It's just such a pain in the ass to deal with the temping and all that, just to see every damn cycle to come to the same disappointing end.

How To Soothe A Crying Infant In 5 Easy Steps

Doctor Harvey Karp, pediatrician and author of The Happiest Baby on the Block: The New Way to Calm Crying and Help Your Newborn Baby Sleep Longer (damn, what an obnoxiously long book title!), claims to have discovered how to activate a calming reflex in infants. My first instinct, as usual, is to think that it's simply too good to be true, but the video is pretty interesting:



Now, the shushing really really doesn't sound like anything I would consider to be "soothing" for a baby, but Doc Karp remarks that the sound of a woman's blood flowing through her veins sounds about as loud as a vacuum cleaner to the growing fetus. I'm not sure if that's true (a cursory Google search didn't turn up anything), but there are a lot of mothers in one of my pregnancy forums who swear by this method - basically, every one who of them who has tried it says that once they figured out the right formula for their kid (some kids were more responsive to one particular step than others), it worked like a charm.

Has anyone out there ever tried this or heard of it? Would any of you with infants be willing to give it a shot and share the results with us? Y' know...for science?

Sometimes It Just Sucks To Be Pregnant

Health officials in North Dakota are now recommending that pregnant women and children under 6 abstain from eating meat from animals that were killed using lead bullets. This recommendation comes on the heels of a study which found that people who eat wild game killed with lead bullets had higher levels of lead in their blood. So I guess that means we can add venison to the long, long list of things that pregnant ladies can't have. (I wonder what this means for low-income rural families whose primary source of food is what they've hunted themselves?)

Meanwhile, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has found that the incidence of employment discrimination against pregnant women is still going strong, even thirty years after the passage of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act.

Obviously, there are financial reasons why a firm might not want to hire a pregnant woman: her health insurance will be more expensive and she'll have to take some leave in the foreseeable future. Even so, if it can be proved that that's the only reason she wasn't hired, that firm could be facing the EEOC. "You can imagine the slippery slope," says Frye. "First it's, 'Don't hire a pregnant woman.' Then it becomes, 'Don't hire a woman at all, because she could get pregnant and is likely to be the primary caregiver.'"

Then there are the studies that suggest that pregnant women just plain gross some people out. In one, people who viewed videotapes of non-pregnant women and visibly pregnant women doing the same task judged the pregnant women more negatively (and no, the activity was not smoking. Or sit-ups.)

That bias may stem from an urge to give pregnant women lesser duties. "People may feel they're doing the right thing," suggests Frye. "But they're not."

The emphasis above is mine. I'll be looking into these pregnancy gross-out studies later.

I feel like I should apologize for my recent lack of posts. In all honesty, I get sort of bummed out sometimes reading and writing so much about pregnancy, all while we continue to struggle to conceive. It just starts so feel very, very masochistic after a while.

Okay, I Surrender!

I'm giving up on this cycle. My temps don't indicate a thermal shift and my microscope also says that I have not ovulated. I'm really just getting tired of it all.

You see the look on Charlie's face? That is how I feel about this cycle.



In other news, I officially joined the curling league today. Dodgeball season ends in two weeks and I need something to keep myself occupied (and to make sure I leave the house and socialize with others!) until we finally catch an egg.

Now I'm off to tend to my pulled groin! (Note to self, stretch before curling.)

A Good Weekend Makes For A Lazy Cycle

I'm still floating cheerfully on my natural high from an astounding weekend, which has resulted in my being rather lazy with temping, checking cervical mucus and cervical position, and spitting on my tiny microscope. I know you must be wondering, "What could have happened that was so wonderful that August has managed to relax her neurotic grip on ttc?" Allow me to share!

Thursday was like any other day, except for the fantastic dodgeball match we had that evening. I played better than I have all season: I threw further and more accurately, I dodged more quickly, and I caught more balls. My team lost the match (as per usual) but played competitively and managed to win four of the games - and I ended one of those games. There were three of us and two of them left, and I hit one of them out and caught the last guy's ball (he threw it at me while I was distracted with the other guy) in short order. The other team was friendly, playful, and overall a joy to play with.

Friday was a whirlwind of activity. I went to work, ran around like a madwoman trying to do as much as I could in four hours, before leaving to pick up my bridesmaid's dress from the seamstress at David's Bridal. I had about fifteen minutes to breath before I had to shower and dress for the rehearsal. I met the brides and their families at the hotel where the reception was going to be held, we drove to the church and rehearsed the ceremony, went to the restaurant for dinner (one set of grandparents was accidentally left behind at the hotel - d'oh!), and had a grand ol' time with our friends. After dinner, Marcus and I spent the night in the brides' apartment caring for their dog, while they spent the night in their plush hotel suite.

On Saturday we woke up, let the dog out to pee, went to my mom's house to pick up the wedding gifts that she'd bought, then went home, where I promptly panicked when I realized that I couldn't find the shawl to my gown, tore the house apart for half an hour looking for it, then remembered that I'd left it at my mother's house for safekeeping two weeks ago. I showered, grabbed my gown and my shoes, went BACK to my mother's house to pick up the shawl, then went to the hotel for wedding pictures and more running around like a crazy person. The ceremony was beautiful, the brides were gorgeous, and afterwards I got properly smashed at the reception (oh, the joys of waiting to ovulate) and danced my ass off (but not before being reduced to tears while offering a toast to the lovely newlyweds). My husband, who in our three years together has neither seen me drunk nor seen me dance, was absolutely tickled by the sight.

On Sunday morning, a friend and I took a three hour course called "Learn to Curl," where we learned the ins and outs of sliders, grippers, skips, houses, and stones. I had a certain advantage and learned how to shoot the stone rather quickly, as it requires a honed sense of balance - and as a mountain unicyclist, I can say pretty confidently that I am a well-balanced person. I've got to say that I absolutely love curling, and Marcus and I will be returning on Saturday to participate in their breakfast game.

Today is Tuesday, and my abs and thighs are still incredibly sore from dogding, dancing, and curling. I've got another dodgeball game tomorrow night, so hopefully my muscles will feel a tiny bit better by then. Even after all these months and all the frustration, a part of me is very grateful that I got to experience this weekend with no limitations. If I were pregnant, I would not have drank; and if I hadn't drank, I would not have relaxed enough to dance at my sister's wedding, which felt wonderful, as I haven't really danced in about 8 years! It may be a strange thing to be grateful for, but grateful I am. It was a wonderful, heartwarming, amazing celebration, and I'm glad that I got to fully partake.

Our Child, Our Future

As the election draws near, and as droves of fearful closet racists have begun to act out, I find myself wondering about the culture in which Marcus and I will be raising our children. How do you raise a child to be sensitive and thoughtful towards other races and cultures in a nation that is so saturated with prejudice? Racism is a part of everyday life here; and I do mean that literally - I enounter it almost every single day.

Not all acts of prejudice are equal. Not every act is violent and not every act is hateful. Some are merely annoying or inconvenient. Some may be frightening while others may provoke a mere eyeroll. It's been years since I've actually been brought to tears over it, which means that I should probably count myself lucky.

This is the culture we live in:

At work: Just yesterday, one of my coworkers called another a "chink" and then quickly dismissed her as being oversensitive when she took offense. The day before, another coworker squinted his eyes at her and then told her that he was part Chinese. Last week yet another coworker (there is no shortage, I tell you!) went on a tirade about how interracial marriage is destroying the country.

Online: Ugh, there is no shortage. I frequently come upon psuedo-scholarly rants about how blacks are naturally inferior and less intelligent than whites in Youtube comments, web forums, comments sections in news articles - basically any medium in which anonymous users have the freedom to rant. It doesn't surprise me to see even the most foul and racially charged comments anywhere online, I suppose because I'm used to it.

Retail: While on vacation, Marcus and I went into a souvenir shop that had several t-shirt designs featuring the confederate flag and wonderful slogans such as "It's called the WHITE house for a reason."

Even our nation's holidays are no exception. The whole nation over, children are being taught that we celebrate Christopher Columbus every October because he "discovered" America. The fact that he was a bit of a murderous psychopath and the father of the TransAtlantic Slave Trade never seems worthy of mention. (Is it really progression to whitewash history and pretend that those things never happened, to celebrate a day that the indigenous people of this country rightfully mourn?)

I think about my childhood and I wonder if our children will endure anything like that. It wasn't awful, it certainly could have been worse...but it certainly could have been better. My brother and I were called nigger sometimes by our classmates. When i was 11, a couple of boys in our school threatened to stab me with a broken hula hoop (they swung it about an inch from my face) and then told my 8-year-old brother that they were going to cut off his penis. He was bullied constantly.

One incident that I don't think I'll ever forget happened to me in 7th grade. A black girl named Lynette joined our class (there were about 40 kids to a grade and 20 to a class - it was a very small school) and she was immensely liked by the popular kids. One of those popular girls, someone who had been my classmate for almost a decade, started talking to me at the start of the school year, which came as a surprise to me. She sought me out at lunchtime and talked to me about boys and makeup or some crap like that, and I just sort of tolerated her for a week or two, until the day she suddenly called me Lynette. Startled, I looked at her and stammered, "I'm not Lynette." This girl, who had known me since pre-K but apparently couldn't tell the difference between me and a complete stranger because of our skin color, just stared at me before saying, "Oh" and walking off, ignoring me ever after.

My brother and I never told anyone about the abuses we suffered in school due to our race, and now that I'm all grown up, I have to wonder why. I remember feeling like it was just the way things were and being certain that if I spoke up, I would not be taken seriously. The people that said these things were usually known as good or okay kids; would any of our teachers even believe us that they could be so hateful in secret? I knew that our parents would believe us, but honestly, I still don't know why I didn't tell them either. I hope that if our children are ever threatened or bullied (because of their skin color or any other reason) that they know that they'll be able talk to us about it.

I hope that my children know that I will always be their advocate.

I don't want to be "that" parent, the one that folks in the PTA hate for not being content with the status quo. Common practices that seem minor and harmless to lots of other people don't seem that way to me (for instance, many people would be horrified if their children brought home an assignment to "color the negro" or dressed up in blackface for a play at school - but it's perfectly acceptable to color a caricature of an Indian or to don a stereotypical costume?), and I'm going to raise my children according to my values. The woman in that link sent her son's assignment back uncompleted, which I think was appropriate. But what if he was punished by his teacher for it? I hate to think that my child could get caught in the middle of an ideological struggle because of me, that she may pay for something that she might not even totally understand.

But at the same time, I can't help my convictions. I can't help feeling that some things are worth fighting for even if it gets ugly, that comfort and approval from others is a small price to pay for doing what is right, that some unsavory truths must be dragged into the light if we're to ever achieve...harmony? I don't know. I don't know what I can realistically expect for our children's futures. I just know that I want my kids to be sensitive, to be aware of their privileges, to be grateful, and to be kind. And I want them to know that doing the right thing will sometimes mean pissing a lot of other people off, but that doesn't make it any less right.

TTC: Cycle 5

Verdict: Failure.
Future Prospects: Meh.

See that temperature spike just two days before the end of the cycle? Yeah, that's never happened before. My highest temp of every cycle has always been on the sixth day past ovulation (and in one case, the seventh). To see it on 12dpo caught me completely off guard, and I actually spent all of Wednesday thinking that I really just might be pregnant. I really did. I was surprised and disappointed on Wednesday night to see the negative test result, but still hopeful. I decided that if Thursday's temp remained high, I would test again, and if not - well, I knew what that meant.

As you can see, Thursday's temp was almost an entire degree lower than Wednesday's. My hopes were dashed and my day was ruined just 2 minutes after I woke up, and I remained in a bitter, tearful mood for most of it (as yesterday's post can tell you).

My consolation is that we get to approach the next cycle with a brand new tool - my microscope. I don't know if it will work, but it's comforting to have something to try.