Did you know that last week was National Infertility Awareness Week? Or that infertility affects 12.5% of the US population? I saw a few blog posts about it, but didn’t get organized to add my $.02 until now.

I hesitate to declare myself part of the “infertility community.” I don’t have PCOS, I haven’t had any miscarriages, it only took me five cycles of trying to get pregnant with Noah.

On the other hand, getting pregnant is the same big, expensive, medical deal for me as it is for someone who spends six months or a year having sex with the intent of getting pregnant, and not succeeding. We go to the same doctors and we take the same drugs.

I’ve been lucky.

Since we’ve been trying to get pregnant, I’ve had jobs with great health insurance that included at least some infertility treatment. Still, here’s a rough breakdown of our out-of-pocket expenses:

From the beginning to Noah’s birth:

• 10 vials of Our Anonymous Donor’s sperm: $2850 in 2004. If we were buying the same category of donor today, it would be $405 per vial, so I’m glad we bought when we did. Also, we paid for this through my flexible benefit plan health savings account, the $5k you can withhold pre-tax. Who knew that sperm would be a “qualified medical expense?”
• ClearBlue Easy Fertility Monitor: $175, plus sticks to test with, $40/pack of 30, roughly $160.
• Doctor visits when we lived in DC: Roughly $1000. The doctor was out of network, we did three rounds of unmedicated IUI.
• Getting the sperm from the cryobank to the doctor’s office: Roughly $85 each time for 5 cycles = $425.
• Storing the sperm from January 2004 through May 2007: $1155
• Doctor visits after we moved to Atlanta: Roughly $500. I had coverage, the doctor was in network, but I had a $400 deductible and a 10% co-pay.
• Drugs: Roughly $50.

Total cost of infertility treatment resulting in Noah: $6315.

Total cost so far in the effort to have a second child:

• Evaluations etc for Jill, when we thought she was going to have baby #2: Roughly $1000. The doctor/facility was out of network, and we have a $1500 deductible EACH.
• Storage with the non-profit facility Jill was going to use: $10/m for 3 months = $30. (Because of the 3 ring circus of sperm transportation that I went through to move it to my RE’s office, they don’t seem to have entered it in their storage billing system.)
• Doctor’s visits for me: Roughly $1500. They finally agree that I’ve met my deductible, so we have to have hit that, but I can’t explain it all.
• Drugs: $105
• Bloodwork while out of area: $913 that I am still fighting with the insurance company about. Either they should pay it, or they should count it against my deductible. They should quit erasing it from their computers when they get confused.
• Second opinion doctor who was out of network but I have awesome insurance so that was still 70% covered: $560. (I haven’t gotten that 70% back, so I’m counting the whole amount. It’s still out of my pocket.)
• EDITED TO ADD more ovulation predictor kits and sticks for the Clear Blue Easy Monitor. And pregnancy tests. Not to be icky, but we in the ttc blogosphere call all of that gear “peesticks.” I would guess roughly $20/cycle, including the canceled & skipped cycles, let’s say $80.

Total cost of infertility treatment so far in round two: $4188.

Also? Add parking to most visits (all DC and the convenient Atlanta ones, but not the ones where I have to drive halfway to Tennessee). Let’s say $10 for each DC appointment and $3 on average for Atlanta. Call that $60 in DC and $45 here, or $72 in round one and $33 so far in round two.

That brings us to a current $10608.

If I get pregnant this cycle or the next, while it’s still 2007 and we’re still doing IUI, our additional out of pocket costs should be minimal, say $250 or less.

If we don’t, we’ll have one vial left and have to have a serious discussion of IVF. My insurance doesn’t cover IVF at all.

The RE practice with whom we had the second opinion consult told us, in great detail, that if we did IVF through them, it would cost between $12,000-$20,000.

Who wants to win a free trip to Miami to go to “O You!” courtesy of Revolution Health? O You is the Oprah Magazine’s upcoming live conference, featuring Suze Orman and lots of very cool regular contributors to O.

Revolution Health, which is a website founded by AOL founder Steve Case and in the interests of full disclosure, where I know some people and have a friend who is a consultant, is one of the big “O You” sponsors.

Revolution Health is having a contest where they’ll be giving away pairs of tickets, plus some cash, once a week for the next 5 weeks. You can enter the contest every day.

So who are these Revolution Health people, and why do I keep talking about them? (A number of you are joining me at BlogHer and participating in a focus group they’re sponsoring.)

Right now, they look to me like a large, attractive competitor to WebMD. The look and feel is very easy and intuitive, like early AOL software, but there’s not much of a participatory feeling in place.

What they hope to become is a tool that helps “Family Chief Medical Officers” (aka Moms, mostly) by providing “best of breed” information and tools to help us “take control of our well being.”

I don’t know exactly what that means, but I’m giving them a solid check-out, taking their money for my opinions at BlogHer, and would love to have them send us to Miami.

I had an idea earlier this week. A brainstorm, really.

It happened as I was thinking about Atlanta Pride, which is this weekend, and about BlogHer, a conference for women bloggers that I’m going to in Chicago later this summer.

I realized that what I really needed was a LesbianFamily.org t-shirt — and maybe some that other people would enjoy. And it turns out that with the help of CafePress, and the fact that we already had a really cool logo, I didn’t need a whole lot of design skill to put together something that actually looks good.

Or so I think, anyway. That’s the core of the design, although you can also get one that has the blog tagline, or one that says “Friend of the Family.”

The CafePress people give you 14 days to try out their “premium store” and then you either have to pay them or scale back to only one item per design, so I suspect the variety will diminish in about 2 weeks.

Also? 50% of the profits from this store will go to support organizations that work to protect gay and lesbian families.

Hopefully I’ll have action shots of the t-shirts this weekend.

The last few days have been spectacularly beautiful. All of the flowering trees have burst into bloom.

I love this time of year, but it makes me sad at the same time.

Whenever I see a flower or tree I don’t know, or a dogwood or tulip tree, I think of my Gran’mama. I also think about her when I’m walking with Noah and telling him what different flowers are.

I used to call her when I spotted an unfamiliar flower. “It’s a creamy yellow, with a little bit of green, and the blossoms look like they’re floating,” I’d tell her. And she’d tell me what kind of tree it was.

I don’t remember exactly when I couldn’t call her for things like that any more. Maybe 5 or 6 years ago? Her brain kept working most of the way to the end of her life, but the last couple of years were less solid. There were still good moments, they just weren’t what they had been. And she didn’t always remember them later.

(That’s how it was when she found out that I was engaged to Jill, maybe a month or so before she died. She was in the hospital, sleeping. I sat with her, holding the side of the hospital bed. When she woke up, she smiled at me and croaked, “What’s that on your finger?” It was my engagement ring. Someone, my mom or maybe my aunt, had already told her. The question was her invitation/acknowledgment. She hoped I would be happy and warned me (again) to keep our money separate. That was a favorite warning of hers, regarding marriage.)

Gran’mama had the most amazing backyard, when I was a little girl. It was full of brick paths that intersected so you could run around in circles and figure 8s until you couldn’t breathe, without getting bored.

Even better than the backyard, my grandparents had a greenhouse. I’m pretty sure my gran’papa built it onto their house — the door was through the master bedroom. I wasn’t allowed in there by myself, and when I was allowed in, I wasn’t allowed to touch anything. But I still loved it.

It smelled warm and moist and alive. It was full of breathtakingly beautiful orchids, which my grandparents sold to florist shops. Sometimes they would show us something interesting, unusual, or just beautiful.

So, spring.

It has been HARD this week to not stop and get coffee, or donuts, or a bagel. Wednesday and Thursday were the hardest. I constructed elaborate rationalizations as I approached the store where I would stop for donuts, the drive through bagel place, and worst of all, the elevator stop where I could step into starbucks in seconds.

But I held steady. I didn’t cave. I made a commitment and I stuck to it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about another money thing this week: taxes. Jill and I met with a “tax guy” for the first time together, a couple of weeks ago. While there are some details he still needs, he walked us through the basics, and it looks like I will be getting a ridiculous refund. We’re talking a big ass, interest free, loan to Uncle Sam.

So I need to change the number of exemptions I claim. I upped that number when I returned to work after Noah was born, but not enough apparently.

Jerry, the tax guy, ballparked the number I should be taking at triple what I currently take. Not quite comfortable with that, yesterday I increased it by 150% instead. And I did that after spending a few minutes with this extremely cool calculator that lets you see how payroll adjustments affect your take-home pay.

That calculator is awesome if you are at all interested in things like that — you can see what happens with more or fewer exemptions, by increasing or decreasing your contribution to your 401k/403b, what a raise would really be worth, and if you’re bitter like me, about being taxed on the imputed income of the value of your partner’s health insurance, what your paycheck would look like if your marriage were recognized by the federal government.

In my case, every two weeks, I would be bringing home an additional $111 dollars. Not chump change.

That’s without making any changes at all except to eliminate the “imputed income” related to my insurance.
(Note about the calculator: Add your state taxes to the “miscellaneous after tax deductions” to make the numbers match your paystubs, or at least come close.)

It turns out to be hard! I thought it might be, but it surprises me.

Day Two of my being disciplined about money during Lent: I thought that I had to go to traffic court this morning. When I arrived at work, I realized that I forgot to bring a book. The very first thing I thought was, “oh no! how can I get to a bookstore before court?”

(Yeah, I’m a geek. But the point here is the very first impulse was to buy an answer to the problem. Never mind that there is in fact a library 2 blocks from my office, and no bookstore between work and court, or nearly that close.)

Also, I spent half my drive to work arguing in my head about rationalizing a stop at the bagel place, or at the grocery store to buy donuts. Happily, self-disciplined me won. It helped that I had half a loaf of bread and half a box of cereal at the office. But my inner Queen of Rationalizing made some very good points, and I worry that she is not taking the coup well.

Does paying for parking ($3) at traffic court when I actually had the court date wrong count as frivolous spending?

Atlanta tickets must have been designed by the same people who created Florida’s butterfly ballots. Half the people in the courthouse atrium were wandering around asking each other how to figure out where you were supposed to go, and nearly every employee could be heard saying, “Your court date isn’t March 7th, that 07 is for the year.”

Sure enough, still closer inspection of my ticket showed — on a different line, nowhere near the March or the 07 — the number 28. My court date isn’t for another 3 weeks.

I did get two things in the mail that were post-bonus, pre-practicing financial discipline Internet purchases: Moo Cards and T-Shirts.

Thanks, David Brooks! I wouldn’t have gotten the t-shirts without your encouragement.