Abu

On Tuesday I got my period. No lucky Christmas baby.

But far more importantly, Tuesday the zunzun and I flew to meet Mami in Miami, where we said our final goodbyes to A’s mom, beloved Abu to the zunzun, before she passed away peacefully, surrounded by her family and friends.

She never knew quite what to call me — she couldn’t bring herself to call me her daughter in law — but she counted me as family and she loved the zunzun with all her soul, and so it doesn’t matter what she said to strangers. The zunzun, noting the quantity of photos of himself in her house, told me last night: “Abu loves me!” So: message received. She had wanted to live long enough to see him start kindergarten, but the universe had other plans.

Tomorrow is the funeral service. We miss her, but everyone — including A –is holding up well.

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Have yourself a merry little spermsmas

^^I wrote that because after I thought it I couldn’t stop laughing.

Shot one is in the shoot. Shot two this afternoon. My sister (about to graduate nursing school) and my aunt (who was an OB-GYN nurse for years) did the IUI in my parents’ bed while the zunzun slept downstairs in our bed. There was some preparatory drama, but this morning all was pretty chill.

I actually feel really solid about this timing… The wait is on!

Happy holidays to you and yours!

Ladies and jennimo!

(That’s what the zunzun says. Mama and mami are ladies; he and his grandmother are jennimo.)

The zunzun is three today!

How’d that happen??

Will post photos, details, updates, but since we spent our day traveling Miami->San Francisco, I’m too bone tired to say more.

Happy birthday to this sweet boy we’ve got. Thanks to you readers who have been on board for all this. 💕

12 dpiui: spotting

Woke up this morning, peed in my testing cup receptacle, but ended up flushing it anyway because I realized I was spotting. Nascent cramping signals the impending arrival of the rest of where that came from.

Sigh. This wasn’t meant to be our baby, either.

In better news, we picked out a new donor…and then today I called the bank to ask some questions, and asked if there happened to be any remaining vials of the zunzun’s donor stashed away (I figured it was a long shot since one of the donor sibling moms was hunting for vials on the message board).

“We have forty,” says the customer service rep.

I just started laughing. “Four zero??”

Yup. So I guess he either did end up donating again or the medical alert scared a bunch of people off of him, because that’s a decent stash.

So yeah. We’re going to stick with him after all.

I called about my fibroids and left a message with the surgery scheduler, and depending on what she says, my sister is going to do an pseudo amateur IUI (she’s in nursing school, so has a general skillset, but hasn’t done an IUI before) for us at my parents’ house in December.

Those be the next steps! In the meantime, we are preparing for the zunzun to turn 3 in a few weeks! Who can believe it?!

Losing count

5dpiui?

I’m too busy to be preoccupied with this round. Plus, I think it’s fair to say nobody felt confident about the timing on this.

The zunzun “helped” with the second IUI. He was snuggling in bed with me when the midwife arrived (of course, he woke up early on a day we were hoping he’d sleep through the whole visit!). He asked to hold the vial, and we helped him hold it and warm it (“not in your mouth!”). He has subsequently been spotted carrying the empty vial around. The sentimental in me wants that to be a sign.

A and I have started to talk about next steps, a bit tentatively, but we’re definitely aware. I’ll get those fibroids out, I guess. And nothing going until January, because of travel schedules, and I guess we’ll look at new donors, and look at attending an info session about adoption, too, to see if or how that could work for us.

Today I had my postpartum visit with the sweet little boy born last week. A snuggly round little nugget, and I sniffed him and admired him ’til it was time for me to come frantically finish preparing to teach tonight. A study in contrasts.

Change of plans

We changed our minds and tried this month. A July baby would be pretty inconvenient for us, but that’s what babies like, right? Inconveniencing their parents? 😉

So today is 1dpiui. Well, since the second IUI. My body sent a lot of mixed signals this month, so who knows what the timing should have been. What ended up happening is that we did one Wednesday am and one Thursday am. We’ll see!

The zunzun saw a photo I took of my cervix to send the midwife. “Oh no!” he said. “The monster is going down the drain!!!”

He’s gonna be so psyched when we tell him that story in like ten years.

Yesterday I attended my first home birth — with the same midwife who does our IUIs. It was lovely, and resulted in a sweet little nugget of a baby boy with an identical birth weight to the zunzun. I loved being a part of it, and loved how it felt: the midwife, the assistant and me in a calm semicircle around these two people about to become parents. And then home to my big boy and my love, tired and feeling sweet.

Writing it down

The zunzun is getting too good at talking. His cute baby words are correcting into real grown language. It’s sad. I mean, it’s good. We want him to speak well. But each slipping baby-ism is a tiny heartbreak.

He never says “feep” anymore, even though we do. I refused to give him any fruit snacks unless he continued to call them “wunacks,” so now he self-corrects back to baby talk.

He just asked me to “scoop over.” I will be so sad when this one goes.

Trying again

…means memorizing the on-hold music at the sperm bank.

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Bust

13dpiui and it’s looking like a bust. Technically still CD29, but a handful of negative dollar store tests and all the indications of an impending new cycle makes it sure seem like our Perfect-Timing-conceived-on-Rosh-Hashanah-first-shot baby dreams are not going to be a reality.

Note to self: babies don’t care about conveniencing you. Remember?

And so the annoying next steps will begin as soon as the new cycle does: calling my doc to let her know that I’m not pregnant, and so would like to schedule a small procedure to remove two tiny submucosal fibroids from the ute. Under heterosexual circumstances, she wouldn’t do this procedure until we had some evidence that they were affecting my fertility, but since “trying for a while” is a really expensive experiment, she thinks going for it is a good idea.

Then we’re traveling in November. So next try: December. Feels like an eternity from now, but I know it will fly by, for better and worse. We’ll use both of our remaining stored vials for that try (two is easier to time than one, gives us more coverage, increases our percentages of likelihood, etc.). And after that, we’ll see, I guess…

In the meantime, A got hush hush news that she’s getting a big award, so we’ve been riding high on that!

As for next year (Isa!)…we don’t know! A might get an extension here. She might get another job. We might head back to the midwest and piece it together. Everything is up in the air right now. Trying to be cool and chill and figure out what the long term plan is: where we want to be, what we both want to be doing, how we can make that happen.

This morning the zunzun declared his tremendous love for Spiderman, and assured us it’s mutual: “I’m his best friend.”