First bill (meds)

I got my first bill of this IVF session today. We paid for all of our meds, and the grand total was $213.09! While that is a lot of money, it's SOOOO much less than last time (about $3k). Insurance is already making a difference! We also got our bill in the mail for another year of storage for our frozen embie, but we don't have to pay it. Since we are in the middle of a cycle that will use that embie, we don't have to pay. I just realized that the money we save by not paying that ($360) more than covers the cost of the meds. Yay!! :-)

I wrapped her!

My new obsession is baby wearing. Thanks to my friends, I am now spending my time drooling over wraps. Well, it's now actually proving useful as I was able to put Beanie on my back today.

See!!

New features

I have a tag cloud now! I know it's probably not a big deal to most people, but it makes me happy :-)

Here we go again...

As I said earlier, we are about to try the whole IVF thing all over again. We're using a different doctor this time. She's so much nicer and more open to telling us what's going on, so that's really cool. It's definitely a change over our experience last time! Actually, we saw her at a restaurant today, and she even recognized me :-)

As always, I had to take Prometrium to get AF to show up. Luckily, it came quickly, so that was as painless as it could be. On this past Thursday, I went for my CD3 blood testing. Everything was great, so I started birth control pills yesterday (Saturday). I'll start my first injections (Lupron) on day 18 of pills. So, we're about 2 or 3 weeks away from the start of shots. It's starting to get real for me now. On a cool/scary note, I had 40 antral follies!!!! That's a TON of little eggs just chillin' there!!!!

I'm still nursing Beanie 1-2 times a day, so that's another concern for us. My prolactin levels were fine when they did the bloodwork, so it should be ok. However, they do STRONGLY discourage nursing during an IVF cycle, so I'm a bit stressed. I'm trying to wean her gently, but I don't want to force it. I won't let her nurse for at least 24 hours after the actual transfer, but other than that, I guess I'm kinda playing it by ear.

I also got my tentative schedule on Thursday, which was pretty exciting. It's super preliminary, but it gives us a good idea of what to expect. According to the schedule, I should be going for my retrieval on 3/3 and my transfer on 3/8. Things will probably change somewhat, but I think it'll be within a week of that.

Someone has Chicken Pox

If I told you that someone in my house had chicken pox, and you had to guess who it was, what would you say?

If you know us, I'm sure your first guess would be Beanie. She's young, and she's never had them, so that would be a good guess. It would, however, be wrong. She's vaccinated, and so far, uninfected.

The next logical guess would be me. I somehow manage to get every random illness and injury known to man, so that would also be a good guess. It would also be wrong.

Well, that only leaves DH! Yep, he has chicken pox! How does that happen? He's a 34 year-old man!!! Plus, he says he had them when he was six. Anyway, he has them AGAIN, and he can't hold Beanie for fear of infecting her, so I'm pretty much a single parent for the week. Oh well, we'll survive. (And, I'm having a blast making fun of him!!! hehe)

Gigantic update post

Ok, so I kinda suck at updating! I will now squish the last 2 years into one post and promise to be better from this point forward :-)

I did get pregnant from our IVF in November/December 2006. My pregnancy was pretty uneventful and textbook (shocking, I know!!!), and on August 16, 2007 I gave birth to a beautiful little girl. She was 7lbs 5oz and 19.5 inches. She was the most amazing addition to our life, and we are still in complete and total awe that God blessed us with such a gorgeous and sweet little person. We were, however, shocked that He trusted us not to break her!!


The next 6 months were interesting to say the least. She was a slow grower, and the pediatricians were constantly worried that she wasn't gaining enough weight. When you add that to bilateral hip displaysia, and some serious acid reflux problems, we spent A LOT of time with doctors. Thanks to Previcid (for the reflux) and a Pavlik harness (for the displaysia) things turned out ok. We also learned that she's just little. Totally healthy, a great eater, blowing away the developmental milestones, and very little :-)

Things continued to progress with our little superbaby, and we learned how amazing she really is. She was done with her harness by 4.5 months, and off her Prevacid by 9 months. She loves to eat, started sleeping through the night at about 6 months, and started walking around 10 months. By the time her first birthday rolled around, she was all over the place and starting to talk! She definitely knew what she wanted, and loved Daddy, Nonna, and Papa! We have been so blessed that my parents have not allowed more than 6 weeks to go by without seeing us since the day she was born! Also, Beanie is starting to look more and more like my little sister. It's actually quite scary!!!!

Now, she's almost 18 months old, and she talks up a storm. She says about 100 words spontaneously, and will try to repeat anything she hears us say. It's quite cute to hear her trying to say big words like "beautiful" and "watermelon" :-) She goes to daycare a couple days a week now, and she's flourishing there. It was really hard to send her, but it's been good for me to get to work a bit. Plus, she loves seeing the babies and playing with the water table, "duckies", and her little friends!

We're about to starting trying to have a little brother or sister for her, but I'll write a separate post about that!