The plaid boot has spoken! The winner of the Purim Basket Raffle is Dora from My Preconceived Notions. Congrats!

The really sad thing is that Michell, the blogger that we were raising funds for, had some shit hit the fan at her clinic. Basically one price was quoted to her for a cycle and now they are saying it is going to be more. As in A LOT more. She has done a lot of thinking on the matter and feels she needs to walk away from the FET at this time.

If you have donated you should have received an e-mail from me, if you did not please let me know.

It really just hurts that in addition to the wonky circumstances our body presents to us in terms of fertility, that all of these outside things can derail us. I had many, many set backs. As I am sure some of ya’ll have had. Please do take a moment and send Michell some love as she wades through all of this.

REPOST: Putting this yummy goodness all up in your face on Fat Tuesday. If you donate before lent I bet there is some clause that will allow you to eat all of these sweet treats if you win the raffle.

So I promised you something awesome and here it comes. Brace yourself. YOU, yes you, can get your hands on a fantabulous purim basket made (with so much love that it will make you ignite like that scene from Like Water for Chocolate) by Mel. Yes, OUR Mel.

For the cost of a donation (note the new donate button to the left) your name will be entered into a pool of contenders. Donate $10 or over and your name will be entered TWICE. You will have until midnight next wednesday tomorrow (February 17th) to donate/enter and then I will put all of your names in one of my plaid boots and draw a name and announce a winner next thursday.

Donations are going towards the amazing Michell’s FET funds. Michell is a dear friend and a kind and loving member of the ALI community.

(*The basket will be mailed out via USPS so sadly it won’t hold up for international delivery. Live over there and still want to donate? Please do! I will give you a proper, “this person rocks!” shout out on the blog and everyone will see how kick ass you are.)

So I promised you something awesome and here it comes.  Brace yourself. YOU, yes you, can get your hands on a fantabulous purim basket made (with so much love that it will make you ignite like that scene from Like Water for Chocolate) by Mel. Yes, OUR Mel.

For the cost of a donation (note the new donate button to the left) your name will be entered into a pool of contenders. Donate $10 or over and your name will be entered TWICE. You will have until midnight next wednesday to donate/enter and then I will put all of your names in one of my plaid boots and draw a name and announce a winner next thursday.

Donations are going towards the amazing Michell’s FET funds. Michell is a dear friend and a kind and loving member of the ALI community.

(*The basket will be mailed out via USPS so sadly it won’t hold up for international delivery. Live over there and still want to donate? Please do! I will give you a proper, “this person rocks!” shout out on the blog and everyone will see how kick ass you are.)

Quickie snowed in fundraiser moment:

See the snow-globe on my header up there? Want one of your own for your blog but don’t want/need a new header? Want to commemorate your first snowmageddon with some flashy blog bling? For the next couple of (snow) days I will make you a custom snow-globe badge for your sidebar. All I ask is for you to make a donation of $5 or more towards my little personal fundraising project for Michell’s FET. Act fast while I still have power!

If interested leave a comment.

So there is a blogger that I know (& you too) that is *this* close to being able to afford an FET but on her own it would take her about a year to afford it. And obviously the being sidelined because of (lack of) finances sucks ass. I have some time and am feeling very called to help this blogger not only because I adore her, but because I think it would be a wonderful way to start the year and a way to help put back some of the kindnesses that have been shown me and my little family.

I’m curious- is there anyone else out there that is willing to donate their time to brainstorming with me? Alone this sort of stuff can eat away at you and I just want this blogger to know that she is not alone.

THANK YOU to all that have left comments & e-mailed me. I have set up a google group for us to start planning. If you know of anyone else in our community that would like to participate (every little bit helps) please send them to this page or this page.

(image: John Atkinson Grimshaw — Spirit of the Night. 1879)

What started as a sort of fly by the seat of our pants holiday revealed itself to be a wonderful and exciting and action packed extravaganza of fun, new family, and road tripping. I have tons of photos to cull through, tons of moments I want to share, and an entire suitcase of laundry to start.

Details, photos and a big, “you’ll never guess what I got in the mail” reveal moment to come…

So while I chop away at the mound of to-do before I can properly sit and write, tell me how your holiday was. What was the BEST part?

GUEST POST:

From the time I was a small child, forced to rely on the newspaper and non cable TV to fill my hours, I’ve always liked first person stories–and biographies especially. In fact, one of my first adult reads at 10 years old was Mommie Dearest. What, you may ask does that have to do with our dear Calliope?  Clearly, it’s not the bad stuff, but rather I got hooked on her blog because of the compelling story she has been telling, first of her quest to get pregnant, and caring for her Grandmother with Alzheimer’s, and then of her pregnancy with W and all of the lovely parts of parenting, and the sorrow of losing her grandmother. All of my favorite bloggers are the ones who respond to comments, and Cali does that in spades.

As she said in her post on my blog, one thing we have in common is our use of Donor sperm.  She comes at it from being a Single Mother by Choice, and I come to it by necessity.  Nearly at the end our quest to have a child through pregnancy, we found out that my husband has a balanced translocation .  Most people who have ever heard of this know it as a Robertsonian translocation, but alas, there are different types. Essentially, my husband’s 1st and 5th chromosomes have swapped where their long and short arms are. Works for him, but when his genes try to combine with mine (which are in a more conventional arrangement), the result is too many in one spot, not enough in another.  It took us so long to find out because we didn’t fit the profile. What typically happens is that everything is fine up through some point in the 1st trimester, and then miscarriage. For us, it didn’t work that way–I would have these unconfirmable proto pregnancies, and then pfft. In IVF, we’d get a great fertilization rate, and then lose nearly all the eggs (i.e. ended up with 3 out of 14). And in the end, it is probably that these two chromosomes make it very hard for an embryo to get beyond a very early stage of development.  As you can imagine, 2.5 years in, and a whole lot of crappy feelings about myself, my eggs, my extreme defectiveness, etc, it was a huge shock to realize that maybe I was ok. Just maybe. But of course, that opened up a whole ‘nother can of worms.

In April when we found this out, we were both in shock.  At first it was a relief, now we knew what had been holding us back, and then it because very dicey because we were at the beginning of an IVF cycle and trying to negotiate within ourselves and with each other, how to use the donor sperm. We should have waited. We were so shocked and so desperate that we didn’t really think it through, or feel it through.  One particularly awful moment happened when we were on the phone with our doctor, and talking about picking the donor, and I said “After all, he will be the father of our children.” The only thing that saved that moment, and trust me, it was barely saved, was that I said “our” instead of “my”. Oy. God that was awful.  It was a shock to realize how much there was to get my/our heads around.  We picked and rejected one donor, and then picked another, one that we’ve stayed with for our IUI’s and one IVF.

My smart husband insisted that he needed a few months to let this all marinate and sink in and to get used to all of this. It was pretty hairy. I was raring to go because I was feeling like the biological clock that had been bonging “TIME” in my hear for years got an amplifier, but I also knew that this was about us, not me. Honestly, this whole infertility treatment process was about us, but because so much of it happened to me, and because of how I lived it, it was a strange experience to not be center stage anymore.

And, of course, my husband was right WE needed time.  I needed time to make sense of our children having a genetic father and ‘real’ father.  One thing that a friend of mine said that was extremely helpful was that no matter the genetic connection, it is the mother who creates the father (or doesn’t, in the case of excluding the father). By that she meant that because of the mother’s primacy to the infant, the father, genetic or not, can be excluded to the point of not having a place to be a father to the child.  That was one of those moments that helped me to understand that yes, we would be different, and yet, we would be the same as many other families.

Fast forward through one at home insemination, one failed IVF, one IUI with low progesterone, and screech to a halt November 9th.  I had been deep in preparations for a donor egg and donor sperm cycle. I had given up on my eggs, clearly they were also part of the problem.  However, in a moment of super thriftiness so as to not waste a precious endometrian, I decided to take a pregnancy test the morning of my beta, a rarity for me, as I am not a POASer, and it came up positive.  The Beta was fabulous, as was the second beta.  My Husband, was thrilled, I was thrilled (when we weren’t scared out of our minds…oy).  In the moment of the positive test and fabulous beta’s it was Our baby.  In the following days, a couple of people, admittedly who aren’t on the blogosphere and don’t talk about these things as much and as carefully as we all do, asked how Husband felt about it not being “his”. And I was sort of taken aback. Of course it’s His.  Not genetically, but in all other ways.  It’s not a bad question, and it’s not even insensitive, for me it served as a yard stick of how far my thinking and feeling has come in this arena. I can’t think of it as any child but his child.  Many times I forget that we used a sperm donor, and I wonder if our baby will look like him with his big brown bedroom eyes, and then I remember, “Oh, right…”  At some point in the future, our feelings will shift and resettle. Feelings always do.  But right down to the core of my being I know, this is His baby. This is Our baby.

Have any idea who the guest blogger is?? Take a guess in the comments section and I will tell you at the end of the day where I guest posted (if you haven’t already found out!)

I really appreciate all of the extremely thoughtful comments on my last post. The truth is, this story, as most real life is, is complicated. Friends that have known me for years have trouble keeping track of all of the complicated. And while part of me wants to cut open my heart and share as much as I can about this part of my life I also know that this is a story with several players. In fact I play only a small part. I am the baby sister and before I came to be there was an entire universe of chaos already in motion.

Basically it isn’t for me to share in its entirety. But I will share some of the stuff that is unique to my perspective. But you should know that my perspective is very limited.

I have a sister. I have a father. I would not know either of them if I saw them in the grocery store. My father and his family were responsible for raising my sister. My Mother and her family were responsible for raising me. Our upbringings were extremely different.

This is where it gets kind of hard for me to write about because I feel so much sympathy for my sister. If you knew what she had been through you would as well. Her life and the exposure to many unsavory and cruel elements brought out a tough survivalist mentality.

For most of my life I had this technicolor futuristic vision that one day my sister and I would meet, as adults, and be able to get to know each other. Be friends even. We had a handful of meetings in our youth and none of them ended well. And yet still I hoped that time, distance from the circumstances that were out of our control, would create a bond.

This is where I remind you that I am a hopeful person by nature. I think the best of a person for sometimes too long. I am the person that would pick at the scab of an infected friendship and hope for fresh and new skin underneath even though the picking of such things usually is the beginning of a mess and an even bigger scab.

I am needy. I am clingy. I am forever searching for happy endings.

And I have been hurt. Many times I have been hurt by my sister.

When I wrote in my last post that I search for her every two to three years that is almost a sort of personal growth moment for me. I used to search more often. It used to be a bit of an obsession.

But you have to understand I have this crazy ideal reunion moment in my mind. And I know this is not what it would be. I know this. Trust me.

I guess what brought about the flutter of hope emotions was that the search discovery (yes, via internet) yielded something that touched me. A baby registry! Oh and how my mind raced to the possibilities. I even entertained a paragraph of thought where I fantasized that she could even be blogging. And maybe she was a reader of my blog. And she didn’t know it was me. And then, and then…

Yesterday morning I voted in my own poll. And I voted that I should send a gift and hope for a reconciliation. But by the time I was getting ready for bed last evening the ebb and flow of emotions had me a bit more stoic.

For starters, like many of you mentioned, I have no way of knowing, for certain, that a baby registry equals, well, a baby. I also had to think how I would feel if my sister had found my registry and sent something for W.

What it all adds up to is a sort of harsh truth that I need to accept. I am the one doing all of the searching. If she had any interest in being in contact with me I am VERY findable. Maybe there is a reason why she is off the grid. Maybe I am just picking at a scab that should just be healed and left alone.

I know that I will always pine for some sort of relationship that could never happen. That is just who I am. But now that there is a way to get in touch I am pausing in, I don’t know, some sort of respect of privacy?

Well there is no way to sugar coat the very bad. It is, after all, Very Bad. So here goes: This afternoon Mother was called in to a meeting and told that she is now a part of the “economic reduction movement” at her place of employment. Translation: she is now sans job. It is so shocking, so surprising, so not at ALL what she had been led to expect. She is devastated and crushed. It is brutal.

I am in denial.

I am also hugely pissed off at her now former place of employment. A “family company” that totally took a shit on our family at the very worst of times. I am annoyed that her boss wasn’t even in the room when it happened. I am enraged that she was given no hint of a notice that this could happen, and that she was actually falsely led to believe that her job was secure.

I don’t know how, but somehow we will manage. I physically hurt for the sadness that Mother is sitting in right now. She has shouldered the full burden of this family and I know that she is caving in with defeat right now.

But hey, at least this means that we don’t have to stay in Florida…sigh. Got good mojo to spare? Please beam it towards Mother. We are just numb with shock and fear.

(Warning: The very Good is about Snork)

I thought about doing a Snork update on a different post, but that seems wrong. The Universe dealt us a day where Mother had job shit, I had a 32 week ultrasound, and we toured a nursing home for GM. It feels like all three of us have our own personal tornadoes going on and as Mother aptly pointed out on the long drive to the fancy scan place, we are having a “perfect storm”.

So the Snork? He has grown! He is in the 80% percentile and measuring just over 2 weeks ahead. Except for his head. Like Alison I seem to have a kid with a mighty large noggin. Our boys are totally going to kick ass on Jeopardy. Snork’s head is measuring at 36 weeks. He is face down and both of his feet are up over his head. Oh & his foot? 3 inches Weight? Estimated at 5lb 2oz. Yikes.

New images are up at the Snork Files page.

Check me out, all posting 3 times in one day. But I wanted to get you guys informed. Mel, of the kick asssss Stirrup Queens blog, is up for a very awesome award and WE (as in us internets) can help her win.

Click on this cute icon that Jen made and vote! You can vote once a day. So click now and then do it again tomorrow…and so forth.