Between my birthday, which was Sunday, and the end of the calendar year, I usually get all self-reflective. I think a lot about the things that worked, and didn’t work so well, over the last year, and about what I hope for in the year to come.

37 was a surprisingly eventful year:

• Noah turned 1, learned to walk and talk, and transitioned from “baby” to “toddler.”
• We had a major change in our plans for growing our family, switching from trying to get Jill pregnant, to me going again.
• I started trying again, and it’s been quite the roller-coaster. Today is Day 5 of the “two week wait.” (Or as we in the ttc community say it, I’m 5DPO.)
• I had lasik surgery. I can see clearly, without glasses or contacts, for the first time in 29 years. Before the surgery, I could see clearly for 6 or 7 inches in one eye, and 8 or 9 inches in the other eye. I love the results. I haven’t had any problems, and the only ongoing stuff I have to do is put regular old eyedrops in my eyes in the morning, and occasionally at night.
• Jill and I went to my 20 year high school reunion.
• I hit my peak non-pregnant weight.
• I started exercising — I have been swimming at the gym 10 times in the last 3 weeks. I’ve increased my distance from .32 of a mile to .39, both in 20-22 minutes.
• My company went through a massive restructuring and laid off half the staff. My job changed less than most, although I have a new boss and a few new responsibilities.

Although I could not have imagined what this year would be like, I still like to think about what I hope for and imagine about year 38 & 2008.

As I’ve been thinking about it, what I keep coming back to is commitment. Commitment to my health, commitment to having another baby, commitment to Jill and Noah being happy and healthy, commitment to taking my writing seriously, and commitment to my own professional development.

Those things are also all about love — loving my family, loving myself, loving what I do. They’re about passion and vitality.

And aside from the almost-two temper tantrums, I think the next year is also going to be about fun. Most of the time, Noah is so much fun! I hear that gets better and better as it gets easier for him to communicate. Plus Jill got us all season tickets (partial season plan) for the new Atlanta WNBA team, so we’ll have some pre-planned social outlets. (With other families like ours, and with eye candy!)

I hereby declare that 38 is going to be all about bringing on my passion and vitality, in all aspects of my life. That, and having a baby.

I’m going to break that down into some more concrete bites. During the year of 38 and/or 2008, I will:

• Have a healthy pregnancy and a healthy baby.
• Keep up with my swimming and have gone swimming 100 times by the time the baby is born.
• Earn at least $1000 from my writing, including blog ads. (This one is going to be a stretch!)
• Implement my ideas for improving the flow of my day to day work. (This one I need to keep vague here, but my point is that currently I let the immediate demands get in the way of planning and implementing a system that would make those demands easier in the future.)
• See to it that Noah is in a day care program where we are confident that he is happy, safe, and learning, in an environment that respects families like ours.
• Find a way to have a date with my wife at least once per month.

And if all my will and intentionality and planning and hoping and loving for this new baby don’t work? I will get my BMI into the normal range before I turn 39.

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.

Possible TMI Alert: This post will discuss weaning, aka, the end of nursing. If that is a topic that freaks you out, either in general, or you don’t want to think about me in that context, come back tomorrow. Or go read my last current events rant.

Ok, so, we’re working on weaning Noah. He’s been down to only nursing at bedtime for a few months now, with occasional exceptions. (Maybe once more every 10 days, post meltdown tantrum.)

My latest step has been to limit the amount of time we nurse at bedtime. I’ve spent a week or so shooting for 10 minutes on each side, usually succeeding on one side and making it to under 20 on the other.

A few days ago, I got more firm about that.

It didn’t go very well. Bedtime suddenly took over an hour. Neither of us really knew how to handle getting Noah to sleep without me nursing him until he was asleep, then putting him in bed.

In the mean time, Noah was on a strike against dinner. He’d eat nothing or a token bite, and then be legitimately hungry at bedtime, which of course, made limiting the nursing even more unpopular.

So we tried letting him have a bedtime snack of string cheese. (Why cheese? Because a long time ago, I read something on BitchPhD, about cheese bacteria not causing cavities (read the comments, they’re very scientific), which is why she lets her son have cheese as a bedtime snack and might be why the cheese course evolved as the final course in fancy dinners. Also, Noah likes it.)

On the third night of that, Tuesday, I reached the end of my rope. Jill and I made a plan: stories, then diminishing amounts of nursing, then into the crib. If he cries, we check after 3, 5, 7, and 10 minutes.

Wednesday, that worked beyond well. In fact, there was no crying, there was just falling asleep.

Yesterday, it worked a little bit differently, but also well.

Noah snuggled in my lap and we read his new favorite book, “That’s Not My Train!” We even read it all the way through in the traditional page order, and then read 2 pages over again.

Then Noah said, “Bed? Bed?”

“You want to go to bed? Do you want to read the airplane book?”

“No.”

No sooner had Noah’s feet landed in the crib than he began asking, “Cheese? Cheese?”

Feeling both a little guilty and a little disoriented over the fact that we’d just skipped the nursing part of our bedtime ritual for the first time ever, I said I would go downstairs and get Noah a piece of cheese.

When I left the room, he was playing quietly in his crib, in the dark.

I should so not have returned with the cheese. I think. Except then I would have lied to him which I don’t want to do.

Anyway, there was some fussing when I left the room after providing the cheese. It escalated to full blown crying about 5 minutes later.

When I got upstairs, it turned out that the choo-choo had fallen (or was thrown) out of bed. I returned it with the warning that if it fell again, he wouldn’t get it back until tomorrow.

“Cheese??? Cheese???”

Like a sucker, I went downstairs for more cheese.

And when I tried to leave again, there was much more crying and fussing.

I went back on our five minute rule, saw the whole stick of cheese in the crib, took it, agreed to give (half) of it back, gave a short in-crib snuggle, then left again.

There was about 2, maybe 3 minutes of crying.

I got to watch Ugly Betty in its entirety. For the first time this season!

I’m a little blue about string cheese being a substitute for me, but it is what I wanted. It is, I suspect, what I need to do to get pregnant again. And it is nice to be able to come back downstairs after a much shorter bedtime ritual.

And I know that helping Noah learn to fall asleep independently is good for him. I’m doing the right thing for him and for our family. But I’m a little blue about it.

I am officially not pregnant.

I knew that I wasn’t, having taken 4 home tests since last Wednesday, but there was the tiniest glimmer of hope that maybe the dollar store tests weren’t sufficiently sensitive to pick up the small amount of HCG. The RE’s blood tests are more sensitive, though.

We now have 3 shots left of the donor we used with Noah. I don’t know why, but 3 seems like a lot less than 4. I’m scared it won’t be enough.

And I had the most unproductive, irritating conversation with the phone nurse yesterday. (Who incidentally, never did call me. At 3:15 pm, knowing that they quit calling back at 4 pm, I called needing to know my results. It is so not-nice to leave infertility treatment patients hanging like that.) My regular nurse is out of the office until Wednesday. Let’s call the phone nurse Nurse Indecisive.

If you’re interested in more technical details, they’re below the fold.

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I’m still kind of wiped out from the retreat, or more specifically, from Noah’s bad sleeping on the retreat. He was up at 3:30 or 4 on the first night, and rather than let him wake up the whole lodge, I brought him in to sleep on the twin bed with me. The second night he woke up completely and inconsolably and hungry at 2:30 am, and was up for at least an hour.

So:

• I think it might be time to get Noah out of the crib and into a big boy bed. He’s so heavy that he wakes up when I put him down, and then we have some back and forth with the screaming before he settles down.
• The atmosphere at work is less funereal this week than it was last week, although it seems like a lot of people are “mailing it in.” When I arrived at 9 this morning, I got a parking space that a month ago I would have needed to be there by 7:45 or 8 to get. But if I knew I only had 10 more days of work, I’d probably be doing the same thing.
• Hormone levels etc are looking like a go for TTC this month, although probably a few days later than I thought. The 200mg of Clomid produced an E2 level of  210 today, and there were 4 follicles: 17mm, 15mm, and two 13mm. Today is CD12; the doc & nurse today thought I’ll surge over the weekend and that it’s even possible I won’t surge until Monday. My gut feeling is that I’ll surge on Friday.
• I did a test recipe yesterday that turned out amazing. We’ll be taking a batch of these (among other things) to the new gay dads of twins at our church.

Awesome Parmesan Breadsticks, modified from Cooking Light:

• 1/3 cup regular flour
• 1/4 cup whole wheat flour
• 1/4 cup grated parmesan cheese
• 3/4 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon seasoning (either fresh black pepper, rosemary, herbs de provence, or something else you think sounds good)
• 1 teaspoon olive oil
• 5 tablespoons water

Mix dry ingredients, add wet ingredients, stir until dough forms.

Place dough on floured surface and knead 4 or 5 times. Divide dough into 18 parts (roughly 1 inch balls).

Roll/stretch each ball into ~8 inch worms.

Bake at 450 for 10 minutes, or until bottoms are browned.

Total time: Less than half an hour.

This message is being auto-posted while I am retreating.

Never. Never. Never in all my life have the dual meanings of the word retreat been more perfectly aligned in my life.

Retreat in the active “run away” sense: Work. While I have confidence that things will work out in my department and area, there’s no denying that it’s been a stressful few weeks. Monday was awful, and Tuesday was worse.

Having a three day weekend at the end of this week? Excellent timing, and I think I speak for every single person employed or no longer employed by my company.

Retreat in the “calm quiet away from it all” sense: There are so many “about to get started” things going on for me this fall, it’s almost like going back to school, but without the tuition. It really is a good thing that I’ll be able to take some quiet time out from the day-to-day and weekend-to-weekend.
There’s the part where I have a new boss and am on a new team, and that we don’t know exactly what changes may happen within my personal responsibilities, if any.

There’s the part where I’m going to start teaching Sunday school to 4 and 5 year olds, some ridiculous percentage of whom have a parent who is an academic theologian. (That was intimidating when I was thinking it, but then I remembered that my closest friend has a parent who is an academic theologian, and I bet she was just like the rest of the kids in any Sunday school she might have attended.)

The fact remains that I probably am less familiar with the bible than any of the other people teaching Sunday school at my church. I’m 90% not worried, but the other 10% seems to be in charge of blogging.

And then there’s the part where I’m taking the fertility meds and hoping/worrying about trying to get pregnant. I know that I’m making all reasonable efforts to do this “right” … but last time it took 5 cycles, and every single one of them that didn’t work was heartbreaking. And if it works, then there’s the fairly intense prospect of growing an actual human baby, right there inside my very own (ha!) body.

Anyway, like I was saying, I’m off having a nice quiet RETREAT from thinking about all this stuff. Or in order to think about this stuff. Or in order to get to know more people. And learn something about the bible, I hope. Something that might interest children.

And at 8 am on Tuesday I have my mid-cycle check to see if it looks like a go for medical babymaking this month.

Some of you are probably curious for the post-reproductive endocrinologist visit update. I hope so, anyway, because practically all I have done since then is play “mental rubics cube” with the information he provided. You know, if we did X then Y, but if we did A, then B, what about P then Q? Which steps make the most sense, and in which order?

It isn’t graphic, but just in case you feel like knowing more about our babymaking thoughts is too much information, the rest is “below the fold.”

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