Well THIS day of this year came a little too fast...

Last year I had an adoption mental health breakdown. Tomorrow is my one year anniversary of that mental break. I wrote this post the day after: http://at-the-watershed.blogspot.com/2009/12/here-is-where-i-confess-lot-of-crappy.html

I keep looking at my birthday (coming up on Saturday) out of the corner of my mind's eye. Twisting and turning it but keeping it at a distance.

I'm so thankful for how quickly the year flew by. That seemingly endless time between my 33rd birthday and being matched with Ariam is a distant memory. The rest of the year from March 1 - current day flashed by.

I'm thankful the pain and longing is far behind me.
But not so thankful to be standing at the edge of my 34th birthday.

I don't have a lot of time to face it, consider it, and come up with something poetic. But I think there is value in considering where to go from here given the information I received last year. Without stopping and evaluating from time to time I can see how life might just take wings and fly by now that Ariam is home.

So. Last year I found out that J and I together are "infertile." Separately possibly not. But together definitively so. And I can't tell you how insulting and irritating I find it when I hear "oh but now that you've adopted you'll definitely get pregnant." Sure, that may happen to some people. But it is not as if there is a magic correspondance between the two.

If we want to get pregnant we have to pay for it. And it is easily as expensive as adopting another child.
I'm not sure what we are going to do. I don't feel any panic at all about it. (Thank God!)
But I do realize that time continues to tick by and that my next birthday will be here before I know it. I don't think we'd try any fertility treatments after I'm 35 or 36.

So what to do? How do you make these decisions? Have any of you tried IVF after adopting?

I can honestly say that I would happily complete our family with another adopted child. It isn't about the child I'm raising. I think for me it is about the experience of pregnancy. It is something I've always wanted. It is something a woman's body is made for. I feel...incomplete? Maybe I won't always feel that way, and I don't feel like I'd be incomplete never raising a bio child. But right now I still have daydreams about that moment of seeing a positive pregnancy test. Of cravings. Of the big annoucement. I have daydreams about holding a teeny tiny newborn.

Sigh. I am plain old too tired to think about this very much or very often. Which may mean I have my answer. Who in her right mind being as tired as I am would enter into invasive, time consuming, exhausting fertility treatment? For now the answer is obvious because we don't have the money. But I think it's something that needs to be settled and either attempted or grieved by this time next year.

The End. No tears. :)
No panic. :)

And now we return to our previously scheduled Christmas glee and yuletide cheer.
This Sunday WE light the Advent candle up front at church. I get a little giddy thinking about it.

~A

Here is where I confess a lot of crappy fertility stuff and ask that you be sensitive in the comments

Held in emotions. I'm sure everyone has them. The older I've gotten the less acceptable it has become to: get teary eyed when I'm being confronted with a mistake, yell at my friends or sister when I'm angry or hurt, stamp my foot and roll my eyes when I'm not getting enough attention (I actually did that in the middle of a 7th grade performance by the way), or put my head down on my arm on the desk and sob.

The adoption books would say that I have learned to self-regulate. To not lose control and let it all go over every bump in the road.

But yesterday, wow, yesterday proved what holding it in for too long can do.

All I had to do was write an email back to our church's worship leader telling her no thank you, I don't want to do a reading at the Christmas Eve service. That's it. One sentence max.

Instead I found myself writing that I did not enjoy 2009, I would not AT ALL like to read aloud at the church service or engage in any way, that I have a ban on all things Christmas at the current moment and that unless she wants a sobbing mess at the front of the church terrifying all of the pretty children in their Christmas dresses I should be kept far far at the back. I skipped baby dedication last Sunday. Historically my favorite event at any church worldover. That should give you some idea of where I'm at with church events that involve kids and celebrating.

Have I mentioned that I really don't know her all that well?
But I dumped all of those pent up emotions all over her and then cried huge ugly tears all over the keyboard as I hit send. Very very ugly tears. Not Demi Moore in Ghost pretty tears that just slide one at a time.

The rest of the afternoon, as I sat at my desk (again, thank God for working from home), I half worked and half cried. Ok, well I half worked and I all out cried. Several, SEPARATE, huge ugly cries as I wrote other emails to some of you dumping all of the upset from this last week into those messages. Then a friend, a very good friend but one I haven't talked to in a long time, called me in response to a question I asked her and since I didn't recognize the number I answered the phone (of course pulled together in case it was for work.) The second I found out it wasn't a work call I lost it - crying, hiccuping, the whole works. Wow. Don't try that on a touch screen cell phone. The screen gets very very wet and slippery.

Several people said to me yesterday that I should just blog it out. Yesterday I couldn't. And I am torn about putting words like sp-rm here on my blog just in case gross freaky people end up here looking for s-x talk or something.

But here goes nothing. I am going to get creative with the dash symbol so fill in the blanks.

Last week - Tuesday morning.
The call telling us there had been a mistake and we don't have a baby waiting for us right now.
Bad day. Sad day. But sort of to be expected on the rollercoaster of adoption.

Last week - Wednesday morning.
My ob/gyn called.

Back Story - You see, something I don't think I have mentioned much here is that we have been trying to get pregnant. For almost a year. (AAI allows this - most agencies don't fyi.) When we started trying and I found out I had PCOS really soon into the process, we also decided to adopt. I'm not a girl to wait around and find out if I'm fertile or not. I have always known I wanted to adopt and all of the signs were pointing to it after I visted AHOPE last year in Ethiopia.

Throughout this "trying to get pregnant" situation I have been on some drugs, I have had some ultrasounds, I have taken some basal body temps, blah blah blah. Nothing too in depth but sort of escalating testing of different parts and fluids and whatnot.

It has not been overly concerning since BABY GIRL IS WAITING in Ethiopia (in theory.) And we are young! ish. And healthy! ish. So I refused to get worried. And to be fair, we both agree that timing is not ideal and it would be better to be pregnant next year. So we "tried" but did not stress out.

On Wednesday the ob/gyn called with Jeremy's sem-n analysis which we finally had done about a month ago after reading an article about how type 1 diabetes can decrease male fertility by quite a large percentage. (There is no definitive data but the studies that have been done don't look good.)

He had bad news. News that no matter how realistic I've tried to be I really had never considered. He also said that there was nothing more he could do for us. Which sounded really...final. He said that we need to see a specialist. We need IVF with ICSE. Yeah, that's right. We don't just need NORMAL IVF, we need a special, extra expensive, EXTRA procedure too. I have never actually been over in that IVF camp to begin with - spending all that money when you don't have a guarantee of anything. But let me tell you here - when a doctor says to you that getting pregnant any other way would be a miracle you sort of sit up and listen and really assess how badly you want to be pregnant!

So I blithely informed him "well, you see, we are adopting and probably getting a referral in 2010 so that's ok, we'll just revisit this issue in a year or so."

To which he very sternly informed me "actually, I see you are turning 33 on Friday of next week and I hate to tell you this but your fertility peaked at 27 and really hits a decline in a hurry at 33. When/if you go to a reproductive specialist they will tell you that you should have tried to resolve this by 32. Your eggs aren't getting younger. At the very least you should freeze some. You might have a 30-50% chance at successful IVF this year but they won't tell you the same in 2 years from now!" (Ok, I didn't not relay that word for word but you get the idea.)

I did some online research and he is right. While my ovul-tion problems are not insurmountable and J's fertility results are not all bad - together we make a wrong. And that wrong will be harder and harder to fix starting on my birthday tomorrow. Tick tock tick tock I can actually hear the biological clock. Mine has become a deranged cuckoo clock.

Whew - BTW I am doing so so well writing this. I could not have written it to save my life yesterday.

That is the crux of the story. Minus the two days I spent not speaking to J because he hinted that we should halt the adoption and go after the fertility stuff full force. Minus the enormous and emotionally draining conversation we finally had about it all. Minus all of the research and thinking and praying and crying. Minus the final conclusion we came to.

But that is all I will blog today. Because I really am doing a little better and taking deep breaths. And for Cindy I will take a walk and sing a little. And for Lisa I will consider Barbados. And for Jill I WILL wear the ergo you sent all weekend - possibly with a doll inside. And for Mimi I may take a Christmas card photo of myself wearing a snuggie and holding a giant chunk of chocolate that I've been working on for a week (ok, I'm on the 2nd or 3rd now) in one hand with a baby carrier on my back and my laptop under my arm. I cannot think of a more appropriate card to express what the last 6 months of 2009 have been like.

~A

ANTM, CPR, and Candles

AN*TM - you know, Am.erica's Next To.p Mod.el...do you watch it?

Now tell me this, how did Laura not win? How is that possible? So disappointed. Those producers are just lucky that I am emotionally too busy to send them angry emails.

I'm starting something new in this blog leading up to the holidays.
I'll still post about what's happening with the adoption of course. But I'm also going to end with one favorite thing. Something I love and why. If you do the same in the comments maybe we'll all get inspired for Christmas shopping.

Last night we attended an infant/child CPR class for three hours. It was the fastest three hours of my life. There was just so much to learn and practice! I have to admit that prior to this class I would have been terrified to do CPR on anyone. I think in the back of my mind I've always wondered if CPR really helps or if it's just something they tell you to do to keep you from completely freaking out in an emergency.

Ok, I am the first to admit that I was wrong. People who have someone performing CPR on them are something like 30% more likely to still be alive when the paramedics arrive. (That figure may be a little off but the idea is that you can actually keep someone alive by just doing ANYTHING.) There's technique (2 breaths, 30 chest compressions in 18 seconds, 5 cycles, etc.) but the 30% figure is for people who try anything even if they don't know what they are doing. Amazing. Then there's an even higher stat for those who do it "right."

About a year ago Jeremy and I were on a cross country road trip. We decided to take a scenic road through rural Alabama and it was just lovely as the sun was setting through fields and forests. Suddenly we came up over a hill and saw a car accident. The car had gone over a steep embankment and back up the other side, it had rolled, and as we pulled up we saw there were bodies laying all over the ground.

We couldn't figure out if the crowd was really helping so Jeremy parked the car and jumped out while I called 911. It turned out that nobody was doing anything - they were just gawking. To make a very long and gory story short Jeremy and I ended up being the "first responders" along with one other couple. One man was already dead, one had a huge hole in his head/eye, one was unconscious, and the last (my guy) was moaning and flailing and swelling behind his eyes. It was shocking. Now in the CPR class they kept stressing how in an emergency you should call 911 and start CPR - with the idea that paramedics will reach you in about 5 minutes.

We waited, in the dark, in a deep ditch at the side of the road, in Alabama, with dying men, for the longest half an hour of my life. And when the paramedics came they needed our help for another half an hour at least. We didn't try to perform CPR because it was obvious the one man was dead and the others were all breathing. But I often think back on that and wonder if there was something more we could have done (not that I'd have any clue what to do.) It stuck with me as a reason to make sure I know CPR.

After last night there is now not a chance in h.ell that baby would choke to death or stop breathing on my watch with my CPR skills. And anyone in an accident better watch out for me because I'm ready to practice CPR at the drop of a hat. Deep sleepers and shallow breathers as well as infant or child choky food coughers had better watch out for me because the part where you actually check for signs of life sort of went in one ear and out the other. I am ready to use my skills!!

Unfortunately I'm not sure I would be much use to J in an emergency. I had to practice the heimlich on him and I couldn't figure out what I was doing. He's so much taller! Standing behind him I couldn't figure out where his belly button was (that was kind of embarrassing and involved sort of searching around with my hands in front of a class of people trying not to laugh) and my arms were stretched so there wasn't much extra room to get momentum. We decided that it would be best if he didn't choke on anything, ever.

They gave us our first pacifier! And they showed us a lovely swaddling wrap thing but didn't give us one. (I was disappointed - it was so cute and soft and pink and probably way too small for baby but I was coveting it.) We also talked a lot about SIDS. So here is what I took away from the SIDS talk. 1. I will never leave baby in a teenager's care (I am convinced they just are not good caregivers and that is 100% based on recollections of my own days as a babysitter when I would always put babies on their stomach to sleep because I thought it kept them quieter and in a deeper sleep. AND let's add in a choking hazard - I would bribe toddlers to take naps by giving them grapes or raisins to munch on.)
2. Baby will be allowed a pacifier until she is 20 (sucking reduces SIDS.)

Hmm I'm sure there is more. We talked about bubble wrapping her and then tying a leash to one of our waists and around her.

I'm making it sound funny but safety is so serious. Choking, accidents, and SIDS kill kids all the time. One of the major concepts I left with was that no matter how many fancy safety gadgets you buy nothing can replace supervision and training your child. (And bubble wrap and leashes of course.)

That was my serious post for the day. If you haven't taken an infant/child CPR class - go. Sign up for one now. Ours cost only $45 for the two of us total and took 3 hours. It was through a local hospital and tailored specifically for adoptive parents. I cannot even believe I would have considered having a child without this class.

Mom and Dad - prepare yourselves because we are PRACTICING over Thanksgiving so you will both be up to speed and ready just in case.

Now AMANDA'S FAVORITE THINGS - #1: Vol*uspa (pronounced vuhl eh spuh) Candles

The $16 medium sized ones in the black ceramic container are the best and most cost effective. Last approximately one year and fill the house after just a few minutes. So so much better than Yan*kee Can*dle Com*pany candles and they have such creative scents. My favorite for the holidays is called Cardamon Fig and is most perfect for the kitchen. They are sold in lots of stores in Denver but also available online. Seriously I think these make the perfect Christmas presents. Not your average candle.






~A