Stuff you may or may not know…

Ray and I met in 1994.  We had never met, yet he carried my refrigerator up 4 flights of stairs to my dorm room.  I bought him a diet Pepsi in return.  He still claims he got the better end of the deal.  Nice…

We were married in 1997 and just celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary in December of 2007.  During that time we’ve gone through many of the usual ups and downs and a few that were uniquely ours.  The main down was our inability to get pregnant on our own.  It impacted our lives in ways we were unprepared for, but we worked through and have ended up a better team for it.

My crazy ovaries just don’t work right, so the crap advice of “just relax” doesn’t apply to me (or to any woman who is infertile-never, ever say it…but I digress).  We needed help and found a great doctor to pump me full of drugs and perform science fiction-inspired procedures on me.  After infinite tries, years of devastation, a heartbreaking loss and more needles than I care to recall, we found out in February that the last round of IUI had worked.  The baby is due on October 27th.

We barely breathed about it to one another, even though we were excited.  It was so impossible, so unreal, so unimagineable.  We dubbed it “Pinchy” because it felt like a little lobster digging in.  Even the 7 & 9 week ultrasounds seemed like a dream.  So we waited until we heard the heartbeat.  In April, shortly before my 34th birthday, we got to hear it.  Strong and steady and fast.  We began to spread the news, both still feeling a little trepidation (even though all the literature says we’re out of the scariest part of the woods.)  But we were thrilled to share our excitement.

Since then, the pregnancy has been largely uneventful. It’s an adjustment to suddenly fall in the “normal” category.  Our nuchal translucency scan came back great and our chances of chromosomal problems came back lower than my age would indicate.  We opted not to have any invasive tests (like amnio).  I had some morning sickness, but nothing like others have experienced.  One bad cold is the worst I’ve had to deal with.  Most days I feel great, although I’ll have a bad one once in a while.  We’ve traveled, gone to concerts and movies, cleaned house, played with the dog. Ray claims I’ve only been a little crazy and has only had to go hide in the garage once.  He is getting more excited about being a Daddy by the day and is already thinking about when we might be able to take Pinchy to a White Sox game next year.

I’ve had the idea to set up a blog since I found out the news, but again, I tend to hold off until we hit some magic milestone.  For the blog, it was 20 weeks.  The midway point.  We are on the downhill side of it after today.  I’ve started to show and am wearing 70% maternity clothes.  And there was the ultrasound…where we actually saw something that looks like a baby.  No longer a blob or a sea monkey, but an actual baby.   

Whoa.