A baby came out of me.

Well, it seems we have some catching up to do. So... I'll just go ahead and dive in.

After we returned from our trip to the UK in 2012, we started trying to have a baby again, but after our previous round of trying and succeeding and losing, I wasn't much in the mood for blogging about it. I was sort of in disbelief that it would ever actually happen—even after we got pregnant that fall. Even after we hit 12 weeks and everything looked great. It wasn't until we hit the 5-month mark that I allowed myself to start believing we'd actually have a baby at the end of it.

Still, on and on we trucked through the pregnancy, and baby ran out of fluid in my uterus during her 41st week. My doc said we needed to get the show on the road, so they started to induce, but my body decided to take it from there on its own, smart body that it is. 

As I contracted and dilated away, Thayer and I hung out in our dimly lit, wood-laminate-floored, warm-colored birthing room, ordered "room service," and watched several movies I could barely pay attention to on account of all the stabbing in my reproductive system. (For the record, the movies were The Truman Show on VHS, Adventureland, and I think The Social Network. On account of my Jesse Eisenberg problem.) The nurse finally gave me some pain meds through an IV and I blissed out instantly and couldn't keep from grinning. This labor stuff was no sweat. 

Unfortunately that bliss lasted, oh, 5 minutes before it wore off and I was cringing and huffing and puffing again. It was time for the epidural. I was stoked.

I'll pause here now and say: I had always intended to give birth in a hospital, with a doctor, with an epidural. I know it's controversial because these days everybody is really into "natural" birthing, at home, with a doula, without pain meds, with a written birth plan, etc etc. For me, though, coming up with a birth plan sounded about like my worst nightmare. My idea of the ideal birth was hanging out in a giant medical facility with a bunch of folks who had seen thousands of births and would tell me exactly what to do. Home birthing without meds? That's wonderful if that's your thing. It's not and never was my thing, though nearly everyone I spoke to during my pregnancy assumed it would be my thing and talked about it as if it were the only way to go. But I learned to perfect my closed-mouth smile, say "oh" in very interested tones, and change the subject.

And so, just as I'd planned, the tiny needle went into my back and became one of several tubes running to and from my body, and I was perfectly happy about it. So damn happy I even went to sleep. It was an oft-interrupted sleep, what with the nurse clicking away on her computer next to me and checking on me every now and then, but I daresay I slept better than Thayer did, flat on his back on the clammy, vinyl window seat they call a spouse bed. 

Seventeen-hour story short, morning rolled around, I progressed steadily, and my doc was back on duty by the time I was ready to push. Serendipity! I pushed for about an hour, and I'll go ahead and spare you the details and just say it took loads of energy and strength, but I couldn't feel any pain—again, just as I'd hoped/planned. Then, at 10:34 a.m. on June 13, Helen Kay slid on out, purple and grimacing in a silent scream that soon became audible, tiny and fragile as it was. 

My whole body convulsed in an uncontrollable sob when I saw her face and knew it had been her all along, squirming in my belly, kicking my ribs. She was as wrinkled as her 87-year-old namesake, and Thayer and I stared, dumbfounded, at her, barely able to believe she really existed, barely able to believe what we'd just done.

That was five weeks ago. She still really exists. And she's awesome.

Up and down and up...

So, I went to a nurse practitioner last week to see if all was going well with Poppy. We've been calling it Poppy because when we first found out we were preggos, it was the size of a poppy seed. It has a better ring to it than "rice grain" or any of the other comparable sizes it can grow to be.

Back to last week. The NP did an ultrasound and it looked like this.

WTF?

That round black spot at the bottom? Poppy's house. Or sac, rather. It was too early to see Poppy itself, but the sac was promising. It meant we weren't hallucinating and the four pregnancy tests we took were not kidding.

To be sure we were all good, they drew my blood twice, two days apart, and tested it to make sure the HCG hormone levels were increasing as expected.

The nurse practitioner called me last Friday afternoon to tell me that the HCG level had dropped, actually, which meant "the fetus hadn't thrived" and I would miscarry. She said if I didn't get my period by the following Friday, I should come back and they would give me what I call "the magic miscarriage pill" so that my body could restart and we could get on with our lives.

It was hard to digest. I went and cried in the bathroom stall at work, and then my friend Kristin came in and we cried together in the bathroom stall at work. High school styles. Then, later, I went home and hung out in bed for a few hours, alternately reading Entertainment Weekly and bawling my face off. Then Thayer cooked dinner and we watched Dirty Dancing and I felt a little better. The next day we went to the beach, because it was nice out and I was feeling melancholy like this:

Sad Girl on a Beach

But after a few hours of chilling with our friends the Bentons and jumping into the freezing cold Puget Sound, I felt like this:

Girls Alive on a Beach

I'd decided not to coffee or booze it up, because it just felt wrong while it was still in there. It felt disrespectful somehow. So I waited it out, feeling stranger every day that I was pregnant with... nothing. That I was just waiting to miscarry.

Today was the day I went back to the doc. The day of the magic miscarriage pill. I've been dreading today all week. Thayer, too. We were going together. To hold each other's hand and bear it together: the confirmation, the visual proof that it was gone.

And gone it was, as the nurse practitioner searched and searched with her ultrasound wand and could find nothing. "No, it's not there anymore," she said.

And then--

Her brow furrowed and her eyes got wide and she mumbled, "Well now, of course, as soon as I say that..." Goosebumps covered my entire body, and I squinted my eyes and thought as hard as I could, Please don't say anything unless you're sure. 

"Yes, there it is. There's the sac. And there's a heartbeat."

It was hard to see with all that water in my eyes, but I saw Thayer's hand cover his mouth, and his eyes turned pretty dang red too, if I'm not mistaken. And I'm not.

"Well, I guess the roller coaster continues!" she said after we WTF'ed all up and down that clinic room.

I had another blood test, and my HCG levels are sky-high. We're on track. We are on track. I thought today was going to be the gateway to a record shitty weekend, and instead, here we are. Still pregnant. And beyond stoked about it.

Penguin house

See that penguin-shaped black thing left of center? Now see that tiny white dot in the penguin's belly? That is Poppy.


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Round 2 WIN

That title says it all, non? WE WON. We just found out that we won round 2 of the sperm shooting and the prize is a poppy-seed sized baby!

BUT FIRST! Other things happened, like the actual sperm shooting which was on July 25th. Then more other things happened, like my birthday on August 2 wherein I turned 31. Woohoo 31! Seattle bestowed one of its precious few sunny afternoons on me that day, which was very sweet of it. Thayer and I had dinner and drinks in Post Alley with the Bentons, and that Thayer -- he showed up with a pretty little blue Tiffany bag for his wife. That man is a keeper, I'm telling you. And no, not just because he's good with the gifts, although, I mean, look how shiny this is!

 It has an H engraved on it.

A few days after that, I thought I got my period, so that made me grumpy. To combat the grumps, I met my good friend Cynthia for happy hour on the deck at the super posh Edgewater, which looks like this:

and we pretended to fit in with the clientele there while drinking a few of these:

 Why yes, Mr. Belvedere, I will have another.

As far as consolation prizes go, it wasn't too shab. Add to that some deep fried asparagus spears, and the band-aid was pretty much in place! ("What?" you say. "Deep fried asparagus spears?! Surely such a delectable treat does not exist!"  Au contraire, friends. It does. At the Edgewater.)

On Friday I had some of my favorite peeps over for birthday celebrations on our patio, and it was delightful, and life went on.

Until Sunday when I realized that that period I got a few days before? Kind of a nonstarter. I was pretty sure it was the same caddywompus as I'd experienced the month before, but even so, I wanted to take a test and rule out pregnancy so I could continue moving on.

Luckily, we had just such a test lying around the house, so whilst Thayer was out buying car parts with our friend and current house guest, Michiel, I snuck off to investigate.

What I got was not the minus sign I'd expected. What I got... was this:

Am I hallucinating that plus sign?

When Thayer got home, I could not contain my inner freak-out. He was digging through a drawer looking for a tool or something, and I went and stood next to him, practically bouncing with adrenaline.

Thayer: Hi! What's up?

Me: SOMETHING.

Thayer: [looks curious] What's going on?

Me: Something CRAAAAZZZYYYYY is going on!

I proceeded to drag him into our bedroom to show him the phantom plus sign, to which he responded with bug eyes and justifiable confusion. Neither of us were satisfied with that pathetic ghostly plus, so off Thayer went to the store for more tests. He came home with what my good friend Amy later referred to as "the dummy test." 

Here is what the dummy test said.

 Come again?

That was when I texted Amy with my findings to ask her what it all meant. She is a nurse practitioner after all, and like any medical professional with a bedside manner worth her salt, she gently informed me, "It means you're pregnant, you idiot!"

Pssht, whatever. I took another test the next day. It agreed with the other tests.

Now, you're probably thinking, Oh, Hayley. It was sooooo obvious. Why would you take three tests? Tsk tsk, so foolish.

I will have you know that this particular neurotic behavior is perfectly common among women! Even Amy the nurse practitioner medical professional took multiple tests including the dummy test. And if you there, reading this, are a woman who has gotten pregnant... well, you did it too, didn't you. DIDN'T YOU?

So that brings us to today, three days after THE DISCOVERY. We are stoked, to say the least, but we're also trying to temper our excitement because we know it's so early that anything can happen. It doesn't feel quite real yet -- no symptoms or anything. It feels like it could all just go away in a moment. But we hope it stays. 

We hope the little poppy seed clings on.

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Round 1 bust

Well, there's no gentle way to report the news that Round 1 was a no-go. Over the two weeks that we waited to test, I wanted to spill the beans to EVERYONE I SAW OR SPOKE TO that we'd begun trying to make a baby, but it is at this point that I appreciate having kept it on the down low. Telling the few in the know that the answer is no is no fun at all.

TMI territory? Depends on your sensitivity level. You've been warned, at any rate.
I can probably count on one hand the number of times I've been happy to see my period. You may know that I've not often had partners with whom I needed to be concerned about accidentally getting pregnant. Thus, I've had very few PHEW! experiences with the monthlies. Mostly my take on it has been like a "Ugh, you again."

But never before have I been so intent on denying that it was happening. This time I tried my very hardest to pretend it was something else, but alas. To use a terribly cliched and uninspired phrase, It was what it was. Ew. You just winced a little, didn't you. Promise I'll never say that again.

Now, you're probably going, "Girl, you're upset because it didn't work THE FIRST TIME? Please."

To which I say,  "I KNOW, RIGHT?"

It's ridonkeykong. Intellectually, I knew the odds were against beginner's luck, but that didn't stop me from secretly believing I would have beginner's luck.

And dudes, it's friggin' difficult to reign in your sky-high hopes about this, you know? To come at it from a level-headed mindset? Yeah right.

Next up, Round 2. Ovulation predictor kit is in full effect and next sperm shooting will be near the end of July. Takes forever, non?


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Round 1 begins

This week has been super exciting so far, and it's not even So You Think You Can Dance night yet.

First off, lots of excitement around my new business venture. I went live with my Red's Edits website and Facebook page yesterday, and the feedback has been so wonderful I could float away by the sheer strength of my own giddiness. Thank you, family and friends, for this powerful burst of support. It is seriously motivating.

The other source of excitement: on Monday we had our first sperm shooting appointment. As I mentioned last post, I was tracking my cycle. This means I was hastily doing several ovulation "predictor kits" every morning in the midst of my regular daily routine. Hey, the more predictor kits, the more solid the prediction, right? I mean, isn't that what they say? No?

I'm not actually so neurotic that I would go out and buy multiple predictor kits, okay? It just so happened that a good friend was kind enough to bestow two of her kits upon me. But one of them, a fancy little compute-y gadget, was already calibrated to her cycle, and the instruction booklet advised not to put all my eggs in its basket. As it were.

So Thayer went out and got me my own kit, and I continued using all three just for funzies. Plus the P-Tracker app on my iPhone, which is basically a glorified calendar.

Well. P-Tracker was convinced Sunday would be my lucky day, and what do you know -- Sunday morning all my devices were a-bling with ovulatory excitement. They were all very psyched for me, what with their double pink test lines and their digital egg graphics.

Next day, I called the doc and the fertility clinic sperm storer-thawers and told them it was game on. I went in that afternoon and picked up "THE SPECIMEN."

Half my future baby might be in there?

I know what you're thinking. "Surely they didn't just send you off with the vial all exposed and unprotected like that!"

Oh, come on. Of course they didn't.

They sent me off with the vile cradled in the safety of this foam coffee cup stuffed with tissues.

It was not actually hot, as the lid so thoughtfully cautioned.

So, off I went across the skybridge to the medical tower next door, sperm lockbox in hand. Thayer met me in the waiting room there--ten minutes late. I was so afraid the doc would come out and summon me all business business business. "We wait for no man!" she'd say. And Thayer would miss it all.

Instead, Thayer and I waited there together for another half hour or so.

Finally we were called in and the doc was friendly and supportive and sweet as pie. I hopped up on the exam table, glamorous as can be, and Thayer patted my arm while the doc proclaimed everything "gorgeous" and shot the sperm. Only slightly ouchy. Over in a flash.

And then she sent us off with sincere well wishes, but not before advising us not to start preggo testing for AT LEAST TWO WEEKS.

That's a joke, right? I'm supposed to chill out for two weeks not knowing what's going on in there? This is the year 2011, is it not? You're telling me there's no fancy robot that can tell me the verdict instantaneously? I'm calling bullsh*t.

To celebrate and calm down and divert our attention, we went out for pizza, because only pizza can solve problems such as these.

Here's happy Thayer on the drive to the pizza:

 "You're a dork," he is saying, because...

Here's happy me on the drive to the pizza:

 This upside-down thing is totes going to work, guys.

Well, dear readers, that's it for Round 1. I'll let you know how it went IN TWO WEEKS when our ancient detection methods start picking up signals.

In the meantime, I'mma see if Frank and Stu have any special animal sensing powers. I bet they do. They'll tell me for sure.