TTC: Month 1

So...I'm kind of doubtful about this month. I just don't think our timing was very good, etc. I'm ok with that, though. If I got pregnant this month, I would be due in the middle of May, and I'm supposed to be teaching lessons up until May 13th. So, really, I'll be more relaxed if I don't have to worry about trying to keep the baby in while I finish up the year. :-) I will be looking for pregnancy symptoms over the next couple of weeks, though, just in case. If not, then we'll just look forward to next month!

My doctor's appointment went surprisingly well. The nurse who took the blood samples was great. She found a vein and managed to poke it right the first time, which I honestly don't think has ever happened to me! I think my veins are small and hard to find, so normally I end up with about three needle pokes and a big bruise.

The blood test results were good: my thyroid is fine, but I do have high cholesterol (both the good kind and the bad kind), which I think just runs in my family. I'm not worried about it.

I had Travis take some pre-pregnancy pics of me last week, because I want to do a belly shot each week and then do some kind of virtual flip book at the end of the pregnancy. And I just think it will be fun to watch my belly grow! So here they are:

I'll be back next month, unless I end up getting a positive in a couple of weeks!

Just a General Update

It's 1:00 am and I have more energy now than I've had all day! Go figure! Also, our air conditioning quit on us today, so it's at least 85 degrees in here right now. There's no way I'm getting any sleep tonight.

I was planning to wait another couple of weeks to do another post, but...well, I just felt like doing one now. :-)

As TTC time gets closer and closer, I've had lots of distractions, which is great. I stayed at my Dad's while Travis went to Delaware with his family a couple of weeks ago. I decided to stay in town for various reasons...partly so I could teach the few lessons I had scheduled, partly because I thought it'd be fun to hang out with Dad for a few days (my step-mom and little brother were out of town for the week), and also just because I wasn't ready for another 12 hour road trip so soon after the drive back from PA. I was glad I was there to make sure Dad didn't just eat peanut butter toast for a week straight! :-)

Last weekend we went camping with a bunch of friends (about 20 of them!). It was a lot of fun, besides being stung by a wasp!! We were right on a lake, so we got to swim endlessly, and make campfires and have s'mores while we listened to and sang songs for hours. Ah, the simple life.

I've also been getting ready to start lessons back up as the students start school this week and next. Travis started setting up his classroom yesterday, and he already seems exhausted! I guess it just takes time to get back into the swing of things...getting up at 6:45 and all...ugh.

Lately I've been in a I-want-to-have-hobbies sort of mood. I've been practicing the guitar a lot this week -- I was inspired by the campfire music last weekend. I took a guitar class in college and have pretty much stayed at the same fairly low skill level ever since. I would like to be more adept at it. I also have been feeling like doing crafts. I have a sewing machine that a very generous someone gave me a while back. I've made curtains, neck pillows, little change purses, and a pair of undies, of all things. (They're the comfiest ones I own!) But nothing lately. I can't wait to make baby things! :-)

I decided that I should have a check-up before I get preggers. I want to know if I have a problem with my thyroid...I mentioned before that I wasn't going to worry about it, but I decided I might as well get it checked out. Now, if there are two things I can't stand, it's blood work and pap smears -- I didn't realize until after I made the appointment that I'm going to have to endure both in one day. God help me. The appointment is next Tuesday, and Travis can't come with because he'll be teaching. So think of me! Happy thoughts, please.

I am having such a hard time keeping this a secret from our families! I wonder if any of them are suspicious...I think a few of them are. Anyway, I will try to resist the urge to update again until I'm in the "two week wait" (which should be in less than two weeks!).

Goodnight!

Some Fun Stuff I Bought

Hi again! First of all, I just wanted to say that I'm not sure if I'll end up doing a blog post every week or not. I guess it will depend on how things go and whether there is anything to update you on. I will definitely try to do one every week once the TTC-ing has paid off. :-) I don't have too much to talk about for the past week, except some fun purchases!

I have realized lately that it seems whenever I have a life changing event approaching (or hopefully approaching), I like to have things that I will get to use when it happens. Example: when Travis and I had been dating for less than two months, I was so excited and so sure we would get married that I went online and didn't just browse, but bought a wedding dress. Practical? No. Fun? Heck yes. Turned out to be a great deal and a great dress. Anyway, it just makes the event -- whatever it is -- seem closer and more real.

Fast forward to last week. I was ordering some more vitamins on Amazon, and of course I wanted to get the free shipping you get when you order $25 or more. I was about $7 short, so I decided it would be a good idea to order some of those pregnancy test strips that are way cheaper than the kind you buy in a store. I got 25 of them for like $5.50.

Since I still had to spend more money to get the free shipping, Travis and I picked out our future baby's first onesie. So cute!

The test strips came in the mail today. They're really tiny! I tested one out, which seems stupid, but I really wanted to see what a negative result looks like so I would know later on if it was positive. It was very obviously negative. The control line was very clear, and the test line was completely nonexistent. So, if I take a test next month and there's any kind of visible test line, no matter how faint, I will know that it's a positive result. And these test strips are supposed to be much more sensitive than others, so you can use them earlier. I know I won't be able to wait long!

Ok, so then I was innocently perusing Old Navy's maternity clothes online -- you know, just for fun. :-) I saw this top that I just had to have...it was on sale, and I was afraid they wouldn't have it in stock much longer. Does it look too much like fruit stripe gum or something?

Anyway, I hated to pay shipping for just one item, so I had to buy something else, right? They had some really adorable onesies for $1.97, so I bought one of those too.

Can you tell I'm hoping for a girl?

I really hope I get pregnant, otherwise what will I do with all this stuff?!

I'm not buying any more! It's time to hold off on the spending for a while. I still think it's fun to look at it and daydream, though. :-)

Stay tuned for more updates!

About Me And Why I'm Writing This Blog

This is me and my husband Travis. We met in the Fall of 2007 when I was student teaching at the school where he was an art teacher. We didn't get to know each other, though, until the following Spring. And once we did, it was an immediate relationship that felt so comfortable and so familiar. It sounds trite, but we both felt like we had always known each other. We got married on June 28th, 2009.

We have talked about our future children since the beginning of our relationship. We've always been on the same page about kids. Before we got married, Travis asked me how long I would want to wait before starting our family. At the time, I didn't feel anywhere near ready. "Oh, five years!" I said. He was in agreement, but I think he knew we would most likely decide to try sooner. Once we were married, we discussed it again and decided, "Well, maybe more like two or three years..."

Travis currently works as an art teacher at an elementary school, and I teach private piano and violin lessons. We are happy in our jobs, but as you might imagine, we don't make a fortune. In the year that we have been married, we felt financially insecure almost constantly. Things always came up that we could barely handle. There were many contributors to this, including my decision to teach private lessons rather than teach in a school. I have stuck by that decision anyway (and Travis has, too, thankfully) because I really love working with students one-on-one. When I worked as a substitute orchestra teacher for three months before we were married, I felt emotionally beaten down every day. I wish I could handle it, but I just can't. Another factor was (and is) our mortgage payment. Travis bought this house a couple of years before I knew him, and it seemed affordable to him at the time, but now it just eats up all our money, and we have nothing to show for it. The value of the house has decreased, and we owe more than it's worth. We've been trying to sell since March.

Right now, though, we're doing better, and it looks like it's going to stay that way. We've both picked up some extra work this Summer, which we couldn't do last year because of the wedding and honeymoon. Also, I'm getting more and more new students. I think last year I started out with eight or so. By the end of the year I had about 15, and I know I'll start this year with at LEAST 20. In addition, this is Travis's fifth year teaching in South Carolina, so at the end of the year his student loans will be forgiven, and what he has already paid on them will be reimbursed. If we could just sell our house, we'd be in great shape.

I should add that Travis's and my parents have been so generous to us, and we are eternally grateful for their help. I really hope we can pay them back someday.

Now, back to the baby discussion (hmm, do you think our parents would accept grandchildren as payment?). There have been times in the past six months or so that I just thought I would go nuts if we couldn't have a baby soon. This started in February, when I missed a couple of my pills. A month later I became convinced that I had been pregnant and had an early miscarriage, which I am still sure of, though I never had a positive pregnancy test. I was beside myself, because I knew that if the pregnancy had stuck, we would've been fine and happy and everything would have worked out, BUT I also knew that we couldn't possibly do that to ourselves on purpose anytime soon. Financially, we were in no place to have a child.

A couple of months after that, my birth control pills were taken off the shelves for some reason. They were a generic brand, and the brand name would have cost $40 a month, even with insurance. I had read a book about FAM (Fertility Awareness Method), and we decided this would be a good time to try that. (I highly recommend the book, by the way. It's called Taking Charge of Your Fertility, and I think the information in it is indispensable to any woman, trying to conceive, trying to prevent, or just curious.) The first month off the pill, I was again convinced that I was pregnant, just because I ovulated so early that we couldn't have timed things better if we had been trying.

False alarm.

I don't remember much about our conversations, but at some point when I was feeling anxious to have a baby, I asked Travis if we could consider trying this Fall so that I would be due in the Summer. At that point, we both felt like it was sort of an unrealistic goal, but we agreed to keep it in the back of our minds. We've always talked about Summer being the best time for us to have a baby, because neither of us will have to be working. Also, because of the nature of my job, I wouldn't get a paid maternity leave, and I'd be likely to lose students if I had to take two or three months off in the middle of the school year.

In the mean time, I investigated the possible causes of my miscarriage. I knew that often there is no identifiable cause, and that there may not even be a problem, but I wanted to rule it out. I noticed some abnormalities in my cycle that could be problematic, and ventured to fix them. I was and am sure beyond a doubt that these problems were caused by my having been on the pill. I got another book, Fertility, Cycles and Nutrition, that has been incredibly helpful to me. I ordered a vitamin/mineral supplement (Optivite) that was recommended in that book and in TCOYF (Taking Charge of Your Fertility). I've been taking it religiously in addition to getting regular exercise. I've seen amazing improvements, and I've only been on the vitamins for a month. My only concern at this point is that my waking temperatures are often very low, around 96.8, which can indicate low Thyroid function. But I'm not too worried about it at this point.

I went to Pennsylvania for a month this Summer, and for two weeks I was there without Travis. At one point when I was talking to him on the phone, he said, out of nowhere, "I really wanna have a kid." I was kind of taken aback. I said, "You mean...soon?" He joked around and didn't answer, so I asked him if we could try this September, and he said, "Signs point to yes." I was so excited I couldn't stand it. He said he still wanted to think about it a little more, but I barely heard that part.

Just in the past few days, I think we've come to a definite yes. The only thing holding us back had been thoughts of moving to the mountains of North Carolina at some point. We took a trip to Asheville recently and fell in love. I think we've decided not to worry about that yet. I didn't want to be having a baby and finding jobs and a baby-sitter and a place to live all at once. It will be easier if we wait to move, and we also can't imagine telling our families, "Hey, we're gonna have a baby! But we're gonna take him/her three hours away and you'll hardly ever get to see us!" That would go over well. And I'd much rather wait to move than wait to have a baby, and I think Travis is totally with me on that.

So, thus begins our journey! Only one more cycle and we can start TTC (Trying To Conceive). And we'll tell our friends and family about this blog soon enough, but I don't want anyone to get excited yet...I want to surprise them! :-) What a huge secret that is to keep, though! Because of that -- because I can't contain my baby excitement -- I am writing this blog. I hope you enjoy!