I guess it wasn't AF after all

It's been almost 9 weeks since my D&C, and the Witch has yet to rear her ugly head. I haven't had a period since the end of May, and it's been kind of nice. I had some spotting start on Sunday and figured it was finally time, but it was very little, and old brown blood. Less blood than I had in my early pregnancy spotting.

I am looking kind of forward to my period returning though, to see if my body can finally be normal again or if the IF drugs have messed it up. Maybe all that Gonal-F had a permanent effect and I won't be a late ovulator anymore, or maybe I'll make my own progesterone for once. Riiiiiiight.

And of course, there is the secret hope that I will become pregnant somehow, on my own.

The aftermath of Rita

We here in Houston were very, very lucky with Hurricane Rita. If the storm had hit here, as originally predicted, my house might be under a few feet of water at the moment. I was really concerned about the refineries getting hit and the impact on our already high gas prices.

We were sent home from work on administrative leave starting last Wednesday. We spent Wednesday packing, getting furniture put away in the back yard, and enjoying the pool. Then it started looking like we were actually going to have to leave. We got up at 4 AM and hit the road on Thursday at 4:30 AM. It took us 5 hours just to get out of Houston. We reached Brenham, about the halfway point of the trip (a mere 100 miles away) and we had been in the car for ten hours. I said to David, "you know, if we turned back, we could be home in an hour and a half". We got gas and lunch in Brenham, and forged ahead. Luckily most of the traffic started thinning out and it was smooth sailing until we got 9 miles east of Giddings. It took 1.5 hours to drive six miles and our patience was wearing thin. We kept remembering the guy on the traffic report saying it was thinning out after Giddings. We finally made it to Austin at 6 PM, almost 14 hours after we had left Houston.

Apparently they did not think it was necessary to set up contra-flow lanes on the major highways. We got lucky because 290 was the only road that was even moving out of Houston. Driving in stop and go traffic, and seeing all the empty lanes on the other side, was enough to induce road rage. Fortunately everyone pretty much just accepted it and dealt with it (except those rebels on 59 who made their own contra-flow, good for them!).

We didn't want to deal with the traffic on the way home, so when we got up on Saturday and (thankfully) saw the storm missed Houston, we headed back home, and made it in a record 3 hours. Our house is fine, and life is returning to normal. We spent yesterday cleaning the leaves out of the pool and the debris out of the driveway.

While we were in Austin, we spent some time with my friend who hooked us up with HSM, and her lovely 9-month old daughter. Apparently when you have a full-time nanny it's really hard to spend time parenting your child. I would gladly trade places with her.

The green-eyed monster

I have this friend who is trying to get pregnant with her second child. She had number one at age 39, her first month off the Pill. Number two has been a little more work, but she went to my RE and did an injectible/IUI cyle, and I think she's knocked up. She had a beta last week, and when David saw her yesterday, he asked how it went. She said she was still waiting on the results. I figure if it were negative she would have told him, so that can only mean one thing: repeat beta. So I guess if I were to follow my girlfriends, and wait until I'm 40 and do an injectible/IUI cycle, I should get pregnant pretty easily. Damn, wish I had known that before I spent all this money on IVF!

Am I jealous? Of course I am. I realize that the feelings I have towards her (or my sister-in-law, or any other Fertile person) aren't really directed at them, but rather at myself. I hate myself for not being able to get pregnant when it's so easy for other people.

"Real" kids and other thoughts on PRIDE

Class was really long last night, 4 hours that was mostly lecture. We did some role-playing where we had to be the parent and it was hard. At the end we had to learn about physical restraint, but David and I think we can take a 6-week old if he gets uppity, no problem. Fortunately the Baptist minister's wife kept her mouth shut most of the time, but tonight is on sexual abuse and that's her prime concern, so I'm sure she'll have loads to say.

I have to say, it really pisses me off in the class when people keep talking about interactions between the foster kids and their "real" kids (most of them already have bio children).

I found this quote:

Natural child: Any child who is not artificial.
Real Parent: Any parent who is not imaginary.
Your own child: Any child who is yours to love.
An adopted child is a natural child with real parents who is loved.
Copyright © 1985 and 2005 by Rita Laws, Ph.D.

The classes can be kind of emotional and bring out a lot of stuff to think about and my mind just races, and I can't turn it off. I'm having trouble sleeping this week. Poor David got reminded of some bad childhood shit from yesterday's class and was really upset. They ask a lot of questions in the homework about how we were parented, and his mom takes the prize for emotional abuse. He is terrified of parenting for that reason. I have to admit it scares me a little too, but I think that since he is so aware of bad things that happened to him, hopefully he'll try extra hard to not pass that same abuse on to his children.

Don't worry about a thing, cause every little thing's gonna be allright

I am going to try and make this my new motto. We were inundated with Bob Marley in Jamaica last week and I decided this is a good theme song. Jamaica was wonderful, just what the doctor ordered. We spent a whole week sleeping when we were tired, waking up when we weren't, eating when we were hungry, drinking a lot of alcohol, hanging at the beach and pool, and having sex when we wanted (and because we wanted, how's that for a new one?).

The best part was that I barely thought about children or IF the whole week. It was one of the Sandals couples-only resorts, and even though I'm sure a lot of folks there had kids, nobody talked about their kids. It was child-free heaven, no pregnant women or anything. I only talked with one girl about my experiences, because she and her husband were taking one last vacation before starting to try and get pregnant. I was very proud of myself for not being jaded with her. She told me her mom remarried later in life and her new husband wanted children, so mom had her tubes untied and tried and tried, and they ended up adopting. It's nice to hear people speaking positively about adopting.

So, now we're back to reality and PRIDE. We have three classes this week so it's going to be exhausting. But then we just have next week and we're done except for our two makeup classes in mid-October. I thought we missed three, but our social worker said one of them wasn't applicable to their agency and we didn't need to take it. Woo-hoo!

Baptists from Cut'n'shoot

Our second class last night was interesting. It was on the stages of child development and attachment, and attachment disorder. I studied all this in my psych class I took recently. But the interesting part was how out of control the teacher let the class get. People were asking all kinds of questions, which were good ones, but totally not on the topic of of the class. It almost made us wish a representative from each agency was sitting there taking notes, although that would be awkward for us. The Baptist minister's wife has to mention her own kids with every sentence she speaks, and is soooooo concerned about children who have been abused coming into her home and abusing her precious children or her pets. I'm not sure this is a good program for her! We think the overall education level of people in this class is not very high.

David is now a little worried about an older child. The SW warned us that PRIDE may scare us, but we shouldn't let it. The information is primarily for older kids who have been in the system for a while. An infant or very young child probably won't have most of these issues.