Still Here, Still Ovulating

I ovulated again.

I would like my medal please.

That's 3 cycles in a row!!!

And this time...CD28!

Still a disgustingly long cycle, but I will take 28 over 33.

So, I'm just over here, being all fertile and shit.

Feels kind of awesome, but also not sustainable.  Like, how many more times can I do this before the oves crap out?

As always, our timing was impeccable.  I don't know how we do it since my husband is a traveling fool, but each and every ovulation he just happens to be here.

And now we wait some more.

I feel slightly less crazy than I did the last 2 cycles.  Could be because we have guests coming tomorrow, staying for a week, which means I won't have a chance to sit around peeing on things.

Could be that the early miscarriage last cycle has made me oh so unexcited to pee on things.  Both positive and negative pee sticks are equally as scary post miscarriage...I remember that clearly from the first time around.

Could be that this cycle doesn't feel like THE ONE and I'm uninterested in getting my hopes up.

In other terrifying news, we've put our house up for sale, we're moving to the 'burbs and my husband is quitting his job.

Life is so up in the air right now.

But here we are, still here, still ovulating...and still waiting.

Weaning - 23 Months

Or perhaps a more apt title to this post should be: I Don't Think We'll Be Weaning By Age 2.

Oh yes, we're still nursing.

Since I seem to be ovulating, ALBEIT REALLY REALLY LATE EVERY CYCLE (CD25 and no ovulation yet!!!) I decided to quit worrying about weaning the kid by the time he's 2.

If I'm ovulating I'm not going to the RE.  If I'm not going to the RE I'm not getting Clomid.  If I'm not getting Clomid I don't have a real reason to wean.

I honestly never thought I would be nursing a 2 year old.  One year old?  Of course!  18 month old?  Sure, why not.  But 2???  Never thought it would happen.

What a hippie.

I'm still banking on another pregnancy to force me to quit...because really I don't see us quitting JUST BECAUSE.

Jett's actually started to cut back on his nursing, much to my surprise.  We were holding steady at 4 times a day when out of nowhere he seems to have completely cut out the post nap nursing session.

So we're down to morning, night and pre-nap.

Amazingly cutting down to 3 from 4 times a day seems to have finally tweaked my metabolism.  I was one of the lucky few who dropped all my pregnancy pounds and then some with just nursing and I'd been holding steady at 10 lbs below my pre-pregnancy weight.  I could eat anything and the scale wouldn't budge even a pound.

But now, with that one nursing session dropped suddenly I've gained a few pounds!  It's kind of sad that I'll now have to go back to paying attention to what I eat but it's also kind of a relief because it felt like my body wasn't ready for another pregnancy.  How could I possibly sustain a pregnancy and nursing at that weight?!

Maybe now that we're heading back up to a more sensible weight I can hold onto a pregnancy?  We shall see.

In other news, my kid is about to turn 2!  How the hell did that happen?!

The older he gets the more I want more babies just so that they can become cute toddlers like him.

He didn't want to eat the chicken but he really wanted to suck on the bone.

Sigh.  Why can't baby making be easy?

Another Pregnancy Another Miscarriage

I was pregnant again...very briefly.

Looks like Baby C was nothing more than a chemical pregnancy.

When all hope looked lost for an ovulation this last time around I ovulated on CD33 just like the previous cycle.

Obnoxious that I'm ovulating on CD33, but hey...at least I'm ovulating and at least I'm ovulating regularly.

Anyway, my cat informed me that I was pregnant and so I took a test at only 10 days past ovulation.

How, do you ask, did my cat tell me I was pregnant?

He started sleeping with me again.  Most of you won't remember this but during my pregnancy with Jett my cat started sleeping up next to me instead of at the foot of the bed or in his cat bed.  Well, at 8DPO he started sleeping with me again so at 10DPO I took a test.

Lo and behold...it was positive.

I took a test every day from that point on and the line got darker up until 13DPO.  Then at 14DPO it was definitely not any darker, but not lighter either. 

But I had a sneaking suspicion that this pregnancy was not going to continue.

That night my cat didn't sleep with me.

And at 15DPO the line was so faint that it was almost non-existent.

And later in the day...it was gone completely. 

My cat is my new early pregnancy detector.

So, there you have it, 3rd pregnancy ended almost as soon as it began.  I would have only been 4w1d when the line disappeared, if I was a normal person I wouldn't have even known I was pregnant.

I wish I didn't know.

That's 3 pregnancies, 2 miscarriages and only 1 baby.  My statistics are looking dreadful.

Though my ovulation statistics are looking AMAZING.  Only 5 ovulations but 3 pregnancies.

So there's a bright side.

At least, I'm going to pretend there is.

I'm sad.  But I'm not as sad as I was with the first miscarriage.  This is just a drop in the hat compared to that.

But it sucks, it really really sucks.

Not only am I plagued with infrequent ovulation and LONG cycles that make getting pregnant anything but simple but apparently getting pregnant isn't all I have to contend with as we add a 2nd miscarriage into the mix.

Now just waiting for my period...and onto the next cycle.

What Do You Mean Weaning Was Easy???

Today I decided to linkup with these mamas over here for their One Year and Beyond series.

Today's topic:  Weaning.

Hot button topic for me.

Over and over again I hear the same thing when the topic of weaning comes up (and let's be honest, I'm nursing an almost 2 year old everyone asks me when I'm going to wean at this point) I hear how easy weaning was.  They stopped offering one feed, kid hardly noticed, they got rid of another, kid still didn't notice, etc etc until they were fully weaned like a week later.

And all I have to say is, WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT WAS SO EASY???

Weaning has become one of the most challenging aspects of motherhood to date for me.

All efforts to wean have been thwarted by my toddler.  We began the weaning process 9 months ago and we've whittled it down to 4 (sometimes 3) nursing sessions a day. But it has been anything but easy and it feels like we're a long way from completely weaned.

He is fiercely determined to continue breastfeeding.

We started at 1 year with Don't Offer, Don't Refuse.  I stopped offering but he kept asking and since I wasn't refusing we were still nursing roughly 8 times a day, every few hours through the day (he was sleeping through the night at that point so that's 8 times DURING THE DAY!)

Since that landed us exactly nowhere and I was looking for my period to start we began being a little more proactive in our weaning approach in that when he'd ask I'd try distraction, water and food.  If he still wanted milk I would give it to him.

The result?  We'd have several mini-meltdowns every day because he REALLY REALLY wanted the milk and toys, games, food and water WERE NOT THE SAME AS MILK and he knew it.

I even tried sippy cups of almond milk because he understands that we put milk on our cereal but no...he definitely knew milk in the sippy was not the same as milk from the boob.

After a few days of this I gave up on weaning because EVERYONE ELSE SAID IT WAS EASY and this was so far from easy that I decided something wasn't right.

If Jett was SO DETERMINED to continue nursing perhaps it wasn't the right time and I should let it go for awhile.

So I did, I let it go.  I quit trying so hard and I let him have milk whenever he wanted it.

And he wanted it all the time.

At some point, 18 months?  I got a little fed up with the situation and decided I wasn't going to nurse in public anymore, so we started our nursing rules.  

Jett likes rules.

If we were at the park and he wanted milk then I would explain that we only nurse at home and if he wanted milk we were going home, this actually worked as he rarely wanted to leave the playground/park or wherever we were and even if he did by the time we got home he'd completely forgotten he wanted milk.

FINALLY, some progress.

We've continued with the rules, which amusingly Jett does really well with.  He's a big rule follower.

We've made some more progress and now the rules are: milk is only for wakeup and bedtime.  And he gets it, he understands.  If it's an hour before bedtime and he wants milk and I tell him milk is for bedtime, HE GETS IT and he waits.  Which means WE'RE FINALLY DOWN TO 4 NURSING SESSIONS A DAY.

Obviously the next step is getting rid of the daytime nap nursing sessions...but I'm not sure how to create a rule around that, milk is only for morning and nighttime? 

So here we are 21 months and still nursing with the deadline of wean by 2 years old that I gave myself looming overhead.

Someone, anyone, please tell me that there's someone else who's had trouble weaning???  It can't possibly be THAT easy for everyone!

Frustration

CD31.

No signs of ovulation.

Frustration isn't quite the right word to describe how I'm feeling, but it'll do.

I naively and hopefully thought when my period showed up in March that meant we had 5 months, ie. 5 cycles to try to conceive naturally before we headed to the RE for some Clomid come August, Jett's 2nd birthday and our deadline we gave ourselves to be preggers with Baby #2.

But it looks like once, one ovulation, was all my body was willing to give.

Lefty is starting to get all achy again, and do you know what that means?  It doesn't mean ovulation, it means CYSTS!  Oh yes, my troubled troubled left ovary seems to be working on some cysts again. 

I knew when we conceived Jett that we have gotten unbelievably lucky in that a) I ovulated and b) we timed things right to actually conceive a baby, but in the back of my mind I always figured if I could ovulate once I could ovulate twice...I guess I was wrong.

At least things were timed right for my one ovulation, we tried and we know it wasn't an opportunity wasted.  That would have ate at me.

I'm not against Clomid, Clomid worked well for me at a very low dose and even helped get me pregnant the first time...but this time I'm still nursing which means if I can't ovulate and we can't get pregnant...I have to officially wean Jett.

I'm not ready for that yet.  And Jett definitely isn't ready for that yet.

I know 21 months is a good long time to nurse and it's well beyond how long many people nurse...but I wanted the end of our nursing relationship to be on OUR terms...not on the terms set by my body's inability to ovulate and our desire to have children closer than 3 years apart.

Thinking about it makes me want to cry.

And the pregnancy announcements just keep coming.  From all angles, friends, family, Facebook, bloggers, all the mamas at the playground, everyone is pregnant it seems and so very many of them with babes Jett's age...or younger.

Like so many of us I pretended that once we had the first baby all future pregnancies would be easy and in fact Jett's conception led credence to that fallacy as my first pregnancy was hard to come by but the second was easy peasy!

The hope that future pregnancies would be easy only makes the reality that much more devastating.

So here we are again, almost exactly 3 years later, waiting for my body to do what it's supposed to do and being devastated over and over again as 30 day cycles become 60 day cycles and 60 day cycles become 90 day cycles.

And infertility rears it's ugly head once again.

One Cycle Down

Well...I'm not pregnant.

Aunt Flow turned up just 12 days after I ovulated resulting in a 44 day Cycle, which is better than 48 days but means that my luteal phase is now only 11 days long.

It used to be 15...that's quite a change.

Anyone else have significantly different luteal phase post baby?

I know 11 days is still long enough to achieve a pregnancy, but...barely.  I think 10 is the minimum.

I must admit I was really REALLY hoping I was pregnant and I may have peed on like 17 different pregnancy tests starting at like 7 DPO.  Crazy right?  I peed on one and that was it, I couldn't stop.

I just couldn't help myself, it has been SO long since I peed on a pregnancy stick.

Luckily the stark white negative was not nearly as crushing as it used to be.

But still...wouldn't that have been nice and so EASY to not have to wait 30 more days FROM NOW just to ovulate?!

Have I mentioned how much I hate these long cycles.

At least I ovulated.

Bright side people, bright side.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure I've only got a few chances at this the old fashioned way before the oves get all cysty and useless again.

So, one cycle down...wish me luck that cycle 2 is the lucky one!!!

And in other news this little cutie has definitely hit his language explosion.

He says mama and papa correctly and ALL THE TIME now...so cute.  He also says milk when he wants milk instead of just using the sign, again...so cute.  He repeats almost anything we say and is adding to his vocabulary daily.

LOVE this age.  Can they just stay 20 months forever?

Ovulate - Mission Possible

You know how bloggers find out they're pregnant and then disappear for awhile because they can't think of anything else to blog about and they're not ready to tell the blogosphere about their pregnancies?

Well that's not what happened to me.

I'm not pregnant.

Or...if I am I won't know it for a few weeks.

I've just been really busy NOT ovulating.

But finally, FINALLY CD35 and I THINK I may have finally ovulated 2 days ago.

Oh how I hate these long cycles!

To think that "normal" women would have ovulated and had a period or found out they're pregnant already by now.  28 day cycles???  Who has those?  The rate this one is going if I did in fact ovulate it would mean a 48 day cycle.

If I'm not pregnant I'm going to cry, I have to wait 48 days each and every time?!

Anyway, right around CD28 I started to lose my shit, got all depressed and pissy, and then CD29 gobs and gobs of EWCM showed up.  I took like a thousand OPKs and while I'm pretty sure the darkest one of them isn't officially a positive, it was close enough for me as I've only ever had one positive OPK and it was a Clomid cycle.  I don't think OPKs like my fucked up PCOS hormones.

Jett was made with a negative OPK.

What do you think?

Did I get a Positive?

I peed on a digital one at some point in there but it was a negative as well.  But at least one of those looks like it's the same color as the test line right?

The next day all the EWCM went away and the line lightened, so even if I didn't ovulate something was ALMOST about to happen and...there's hope I guess. 

More proof that I only ovulate immediately proceeding a pregnancy.

Anyway, this morning FertilityFriend finally concurred that I did in fact ovulate, so...now it's more waiting.

 

My husband was away for the vast majority of this cycle but conveniently was around for the exact 2 days that my EWCM showed up and as you can see, things were ahem...well timed.

Everyone cross your fingers for me that those temps stay up and this isn't a "fake" ovulation!!!