Same-Sex Households
Dear Community,
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
PCP/TTC Wednesday
How is everyone doing? Any news to share?
QOTD:
1) How many vials of swimmers will you/did you buy at once?
2) If you're planning on more than one child, did you/will you buy extra of the same donor after you're pregnant?
3) OvWatch (www.ovwatch.com) or CBEFM/OPKs? (Or neither?)
married 03/08/08 -- ttc with PCOS (dx 2005) & DS
IUI #3 gave us the best 2nd anniv. gift ever: 2 babies! (born 03/09/10)
Peanut and Little Man are getting so big! 2 years old already!
finally blogging again at This Will Be: An Adventure
IUI #3 gave us the best 2nd anniv. gift ever: 2 babies! (born 03/09/10)
Peanut and Little Man are getting so big! 2 years old already!
finally blogging again at This Will Be: An Adventure
Re: PCP/TTC Wednesday
Just saving, saving, saving. Julie and I have been doing a lot of talking about the future, but no plans have been made. Her and I are both fairly young, so we just keep enjoying each other, and our puppy day by day.
We did decide that we won't put a time limit or time plan on anything, because when the time is just right for us. We are both confident that we will just now.
We are getting more and more serious about the fostering though. I am looking into startin some classes, in the summer. We'll see what happens.
QOTD:
1) How many vials of swimmers will you/did you buy at once? We haven't even discuseed this.
2) If you're planning on more than one child, did you/will you buy extra of the same donor after you're pregnant? Yes. Since we both intend to carry, this will keep them 'genetic'. Sounds horrible written like that but, it is still important to us.
3) OvWatch (www.ovwatch.com) or CBEFM/OPKs? (Or neither?) I have no idea, I will have to check this out. I'll let you know once i've taken a gander.
we're good. c should be starting her cycle early next week, and then we'll be up and running. we've decided on a donor and have a backup choice just in case, so we're ready to go as soon as her body is!
QOTD:
1) How many vials of swimmers will you/did you buy at once? enough for that month. 1-2, depending. at this point we don't want to pay the storage fee for the vials, and since there's plenty of availability for both of our choices it isn't necessary.
2) If you're planning on more than one child, did you/will you buy extra of the same donor after you're pregnant? once we get a positive result we'll buy some from the same donor for the next child. we may wait a little while, watch the availability, and buy some if it starts to get questionable, but we really don't know for sure yet. we should be okay waiting because it would be for a sibling so we'd have priority, but i'm not sure i want to risk it. i'm sure we'll talk about it more when we get that positive.
3) OvWatch (www.ovwatch.com) or CBEFM/OPKs? (Or neither?) neither. we're starting right away with clomid and trigger injections, so it'll all be timed.
Status quo over here - saving $, planning windows replacement, enjoying being newlyweds
Our first foster meeting is coming up and i'm really looking forward to it! The SW we're working with shot me an email the other day about twin boys who need placement (i've shared my obsession about twins, right?) but they were classified as "medically complex" and we're not ready to meet thier needs at this point. His response? Picture of a beautiful 7 month old baby girl with the brightest. eyes. ever. lands in my inbox - is he trying to hurt me??
in other news, i think A is starting to realize how soon our TTC date really is and its very cute to witness. ie: last night over dinner she started talking about some trips she wanted to take in 2009 (one was a cruise, another required a long flight) and I reminded her that we didnt plan anything because she would possibly be pregnant and we would want to see how she was, what the due date is, ect before booking long vacations. Her face was priceless as she muttered "wow, i forgot i might be pregnant next year" - i could tell it really hit her in that moment.
Which leads me to a question....how do you balance being prepared for a preganacy vs. putting your life on hold for a "maybe"? We all know how long it could take and we certainly dont want to stop living (and travelling!) until then, but we dont want to lock into things now that wont make sense if/when we do get pg. So how do you plan?? I'm such a control freak, the planning for the unknown is very tough....
QOTD:
1) How many vials of swimmers? haven't discussed it in detail, but i'm guessing 1-2 vials per month as needed to avoid storage fees
2) extra of the same donor after you're pregnant? not sure....figure it out when we get there? having genetically related children is of zero importance to me at this point, but things may change (or, if we get pg quickly, i certainly wouldnt want to jinx a good thing!).
3) OvWatch (www.ovwatch.com) or CBEFM/OPKs? FF (temping) and opks. current plan is to also start right out w/ the RE so there will be ultrasounds and monitoring w/ her
Blogs: Our Growing Family - CT Working Moms
1) How many vials of swimmers will you/did you buy at once? We bought 2 at a time. Our RE did 2 inseminations per month. We didn't buy more because of $$, we weren't overly concerned who the donor was (we had picked a few that we'd be happy with), and didn't want to get locked into a particular donor in case they had a low count, I wasn't getting pregnant, etc. That ended up being a good move on our part since we went through 4 donors in 9 tries.
2) If you're planning on more than one child, did you/will you buy extra of the same donor after you're pregnant? We probably would have - but after we found out we were having more than one, it never came back up!
3) OvWatch (www.ovwatch.com) or CBEFM/OPKs? (Or neither?) I used the CBEFM (clear blue easy fertility monitor.) It worked well (I still did it when I was on Clomid/blood testing/etc to make sure it was all corresponding. It was!)
Nothing new here. Just moving alone and in week 25. W had a bit of a scare the other day. She was feeling a bit uncomfortable and then saw her urine had a red tint. She later realized she had eaten a ton of beats earlier that day, which was a big relief.
1) How many vials of swimmers will you/did you buy at once? We did a total of 9 inseminations over three months, but we had a known donor, so as long as were we willing and able to go pick up this vial of swimmers, he was happy to provide it.
2) If you're planning on more than one child, did you/will you buy extra of the same donor after you're pregnant? For our next kid, which I plan to carry, our KD will no longer live in the area. We are trying to figure out how many vials he should produce for us to have stored. We are unsure.
3) OvWatch (www.ovwatch.com) or CBEFM/OPKs? (Or neither?) We used OPKs until the last month where W wanted more preciseness so we go the CBEFM. She only used it for one month, so since we have it, I will probably start using it shortly before we try to insem again.Sue and I are still narrowing down our donor list. We have it to about 8 or 9 and I think if we sit down this weekend we can make a final list with our top 2-3. We are on track for an october insem. I am trying not to put the cart before the horse since it prob will take several insems to get pregnant but I can't help feeling excited that this time this year I will have a baby!!
QOTD:
1) How many vials of swimmers will you/did you buy at once?We are think we will be getting 1 vial each month (due to $$) but may do 2 so that we can save on the shipping which is so expensive. We will save about $100 but need to see if we can swing it.
2) If you're planning on more than one child, did you/will you buy extra of the same donor after you're pregnant?It is important to us that the kids are genetically linked to each other and to each of us. So we want to use the same donor. We have not talked about prepurchase but I guess we will have to talk about it once we have a donor that works
3) OvWatch (www.ovwatch.com) or CBEFM/OPKs? (Or neither?)We will be using OPKs. I don't know if we will go with the digital or not.
sahm ~ toddler breastfeeder ~ cloth diaperer ~ baby wearer
Forgive me for coming late to the party...
QOTD:
1. We used a KD for most of our ttc, but we did buy swimmers for 2 months worth of tries when we felt the need to mix things up in the middle. I would advise against buying too many vials at a time. One of the tricks I picked up along our journey was that if you try several months with a donor with no luck, a change in donors may do the trick. I know of several women who had 3-4 failed attempts then switched donors and got pregnant on their next cycle. Coincidence? Perhaps. Most medical professionals say there's no such thing as sperm-egg incompatibility once you're using IUIs (the incompatibility usually occurs between cervical mucus, if there is one) but from my own experience, it is terrible to feel trapped while ttc. If you find yourself with a few failed cycles under your belt, you are likely to want to try anything and everything you've heard about ttc tricks - no matter how "wives tale-y" they seem - and one of those things, for us at least, was a burning desire to switch donors all of the sudden. That said, I was partially relieved when the new donor didn't work either, even though I knew it meant we were in for more interventions. I really didn't want to abandon our KD, but the only thing I wanted more than to be pregnant using his swimmers was to get pregnant at all, and if a new donor was what we needed - so be it. Geez, what a novel. Sorry!
2. Now I'm going to go back on what I said altogether. Well, sort of.
Once pregnancy is achieved, I would totally buy up a bunch of our donor's vials - as many as we could afford. In our case, because I did get pregnant using KD (and we have frozen embryos in storage), but we thought about it during our couple of donor sperm cycles. The purchase and storage fee would totally be worth it to me to ensure we'd have a chance at full siblings down the road. If we ended up with extra vials once our family was complete, we could just re-sell them and make someone else's day.
3. OPKs all the way for me. I never tried the OvWatch though. I used both CBEFM and OPKs for every cycle right up to IVF and there were only a couple of cycles (out of 15) where I felt having both was helpful (for cross-checking). If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn't spend the $$ on the CBEFM. The OPKs did the same thing with less cost and greater flexibility. The CBEFM has a restrictive time window and you can only POAS during 6 hours each day. Around ovulation, it wasn't uncommon for me to use 3-4 OPKs per day at 4-6 hour intervals.
And to Elise's question... my aren't I long-winded today! You have to find a balance. That said, I strongly advise against putting anything that doesn't cost you lots of non-refundable dollars on hold. That is one of my biggest lessons learned the hard way. For the first... I don't know, long time that we were trying, I held off making any travel plans or long-term commitments to volunteer projects, community ed classes, etc. This only made every BFN harder to deal with because I was so bitter at what I was already giving up. My breakthrough came in the form of realizing that women get suprised by pregnancies every day of the week and somehow, it all works out. Appointments and trips can be cancelled, classes can be dropped, etc. Once you're pregnant (and for many years afterward!!) you will have to make sacrifices - don't start any earlier than you have to!
I made that mistake and missed out on so many opportunities that now I actually can't do. One of the best things we did while ttc was go to Disney World. I'm so glad we went when we did. I wish we'd done more of those things before I started feeling lousy. I hope this doesn't come off sounding preachy. I am only able to say all of this in hindsight because when I was in it myself, I did it all wrong!
I'm so excited that so many people are going to be ttc within the next few weeks! This board is in for quite the baby boom, isn't it?
Kendyl