They attached! (Well at least one of them.)

Most people already know that we found out Saturday that we are pregnant!!! I think I am still in shock. I'm like "technically" pregnant but it doesn't feel real until I'm barfing! We were walking through the Boise farmer's market and I gave my phone to Aaron because I wanted him to answer it because I was too scared. The nurse told him to put her on speaker and then said our numbers were great and that we are pregnant! My first "beta" count, which is my HCG levels was 15 on day 8. She said they look for it to double every two days and on day 10 it was at 80! Then two days later (yesterday) I was at 565, so I am definitely pregnant! yee-haw!

Attach Feti, Attach!

The feti are in me! (Feti, being plural of fetus) Although I know they aren't even fetuses yet, but we still call them "the feti". Anyway, just wanted to post the cool pics we got of the embryos before they did the transfer. I did a blood test today and they'll do another one Saturday and then will be able to tell me if my eggo is preggo. I'm SO tempted to go take a pregnancy test, but I don't even know if it would work and don't want to get the wrong answer. So I'll be patient. Maybe.

49 shots!

I counted on my calendar today and today marks the 49th shot I've given myself. And I just found out yesterday that these horrible progesterone shots I just started continue for months after I get pregnant! I'm trying not to think about that because they kill!
So everything went well with the egg retrieval. They put me under for the surgery and they said they got 15 eggs. He said 60% will fertilize and then half of those will be "good". So we're looking at having about 5 embryos when all is said and done. Hopefully we'll implant two and freeze the rest. :) Science is so crazy, right? My future children are chillin' in a petrie dish right now. What a trip! ha ha.
They plan to do the transfer tomorrow around 1:00, which I won't be put under for, but I'll be given some Valium, which I'm stoked about. ;) I'm just glad it's almost over and I know the two-week wait will be horrible waiting to see if it worked, but we're just really confident that it WILL! I have felt all your prayers, which I am so grateful for!

My daily poke and prod

And shame on you if you think that title is dirty! (heh heh)
So not many people read this that I don't regularly communicate with, except maybe Jonathan (allegedly) but I'll update anyway about what's going on this week. Basically I have to go into the Dr. office every morning for my daily poke and prod. I get blood drawn to check my estrogen levels and I get an ultrasound to check the size of all my "follicles" which are the soon to be eggies. (And don't be fooled into thinking it's a nice ultrasound like you see pregnant women get. No, this is more "invasive" shall i say? Gal pals will get it.) This morning the tech said my uterine lining was gorgeous and I said "I get that all the time." She was not amused.
Anyway, my follicles are not developing as quickly as anyone would like, so I'm on the max dose of hormones and we're still a day or two behind for the egg retrieval. I have 14 eggs right now, so that's fair, not great, but good I guess. They said anything over a dozen is good. When she said that I pictured my eggs in a Styrofoam egg carton. So they don't know how much more hormone I need so I have to call the pharmacy in Arizona every day and have them overnight the drugs, which are like $400 a day. Yikes. So pray that these eggies start maturing quickly!
Lynzi is coming today to help me. yay! We thought the retrieval would happen Thursday or Friday so she's coming today, so we'll just get to have fun for a few days except I'm ordered to keep things at a "slow pace" which I've taken to mean, no rigorous house cleaning. I think it's starting to smell. ;)

I don't know of the hormones are making me crazy or just the waiting and stressing. I think it's just the stress. (And the dirty house, which I'm going to try to slowly clean today.) Stay tuned.

She tried to eat the remote

Oh how the little things crack me up. Brighton fell asleep as I was working at the table and she was on the couch eating a gogurt. I took the gogurt out of her hand when I noticed she was asleep. About a half hour later she wakes up and I'm peeking in on her. She reaches down and grabs the remote control and with her eyes still closed starts going to town trying to eat the remote. The entire thing was in her mouth and she was just sucking away. Then she threw it on the ground and went back to sleep. This just happened so it might not be as funny tomorrow, but it's halarious to me!

Well since I'm here I might as well do some journaling. I just got back from a fun week in Idaho Falls where my entire family was there. I LOVE that. 4th of July is seriously a close second to Christmas at our house. It's probably just that we're always together that makes it so special. Bright had SO much fun just spending time with cousins and I love that she's old enough to play with them now. When I was in labor I was trying to picture happy thoughts and three things kept popping into my mind:

1. My mom walking through the hospital door. I REALLY wanted her there and knew I'd feel a lot more calm once she got there.

2. My friend Katie and I sophmore year of college having a blast. Just random memories to make me smile.

3. A 2-year-old Brighton with my whole family at the 4th of July fireworks. Of course she looks nothing like I pictured. I pictured her with really dark, really curly pigtails. But I just couldn't wait to see my own daughter experiencing what I had loved growing up.

One highlight of the trip was doing a 5K race with Lynzi. Lynz is awesome and has lost like 85 pounds and looks incredible. She has the tiniest little waist now! So her goal was to run a 5K and I just went along for the ride. It was a rush!

Another fun thing was boating with the fam. After spending two days on the lake we were almost out of gas and ready to go but Tami and I really wanted to do a crazy tube ride. We decided we are the only two grown women who LOVE tubing. ha ha.. Or maybe just the ones who'll admit it. So we're going wild and laughing and screaming like kids when all the sudden my dad goes over the wake going Mock-10 and Tami goes FLYING off... well Lynzi and Heather were supposed to be watching but were apparently engrossed in their conversation and NO ONE saw her fly off. I start screaming (which I had been doing anyway) for like an entire minute and finally they look and I'm doing the turn-around sign and they STILL don't realize Tami was gone until I pointed to the vacant space next to me. There Tami's little head was (she actually does have a really small head) bobbing in the water just waiting for us to turn around. It's a good thing the lake was pretty empty that day or she likely would have been decapitated. It was dang funny though.

Pictures:

4th of July! God Bless Idaho! I mean America!

Brighton pondering on the consequences of our forefather's actions and our resulting independence from a far away tyrant.

Eh, life's too short:

I just had my permanent eyeliner done, so I look a tad freaky.

Oh Also, happy Anniversary to US today! 5 years! Crazy!

My InVitro FAQs

I'm not the most private person out there. Those years of "Sounds" Musicals and District Musicals, getting dressed in a big room with a bunch of other women made me quite immodest in general. And growing up with my awesome parents and siblings where no subject is "taboo" made me pretty open about my life. I like it that way.
Anyway, so that explains why I want our friends and family to know what we are going through with our infertility issues. Coming up in just a few weeks we're going through with In Vitro. I should know if that's one or two words, but I really don't. So here are my FAQ:

FAQ #1: "Why don't you just 'let your love blossom' and see if you get pregnant on your own?
Answer: While "let your love blossom" is probably the best euphemism I've heard for "doing it" lately, we were told by the fertility specialist that we have a "snowballs chance in hell" of getting pregnant. I've never met a snowball who went to hell and came back to tell the tale, so I'm getting those aren't good odds.

FAQ #2: "Well how did you get pregnant with Brighton then?"
Answer: Who the heck knows? The Dr. guesses that when we got pregnant 3+ years ago, Aaron probably had the minimal number of sperm needed to get pregnant. Probably 20 million or so, and then over the last three years they've just gone down so much and now he literally has about 20. His last sample they found two motile guys. That's also why we're doing it so soon. We really can't wait longer because if his numbers are decreasing that much, there might not be ANY left in a few months, let alone years.

FAQ#3: "So how does it all work?
Answer: Basically I go on all sorts of crazy drugs. Three injectable drugs, two pill forms to make my body produce multiple eggs in one cycle, instead of just one. (Not really produce, but just develop into a mature egg.) So after I've been on the drugs for the set time they'll start doing ultrasounds every day and when all my eggs are mature I go in for an out patient surgery where they take out as many as I have, hopefully 20 or so. Then since Aaron has limited spermies, they'll literally poke a tiny hole in the egg and inject each sperm into each egg. Then they incubate for a few days and then they put them back in me! Yay! Then we just hope they implant to my uterus. That's pretty much the jist of it.

I'll have to be on total bed rest for two days and then modified bed rest for 10 days. If you know me, you know it's really not that hard for me to take it easy so I'm guessing it won't be too bad. :)

This all will happen around the middle of July, so I'll try to keep everyone updated. I'm guessing I'll be partly psycho with all the hormone drugs, so you might want to lend Aaron some support right now! LOL.

Love you all! Please pray for us that this works!

EW! Spider season

I hate spiders more than almost anything. I know most women, well most people in general, hate spiders but I'd like to say that my hatred for them goes a little deeper than most.
To me, there's nothing scarier than trying to kill a spider and having it escape, only to live another day. In general, I believe they are more afraid of us than we are of them but the tides turn when they survive a homicide attempt. Don't trick yourself into thinking that they just run away. They're still in your house but NOW.... it knows what you look like! It used one of it's 57 eyes to catch a good look. It's going to send a spidey-signal out to all it's eight legged friends that there's a would-be killer on the loose and it's not going down without a fight. That creeps me out big time. I also think it sends out a spidy-signal right before it gets killed (if the shoe makes the connection.)
Once I heard that the average person eats like three spiders a year in their sleep. I can't get it out of my head. Every time I dream about being attacked by spiders (which is probably like once a month) I'm convinced I'm dreaming that because I either ate a spider or am being crawled on by a spider.
I lived in this house in Salt Lake one summer and it was right at the mouth of some canyon. (Don't quiz me on which one) but it was Spiderville. (Oh and I'm also convinced that every spider in my house is a hobo, if it's not a daddy long-leg.) So we had all these hobos everywhere and I had to vacuum every night just to calm my head about spiders but it made it worse because I literally vacuumed up like three spiders a night. My brother-in-law Mike came over and sprayed for spiders for me and I swear more varieties of spiders came out of hiding than I'd ever seen before. I shutter at the thought. One night my roommate came home at like 1:00 a.m. and there I was, huddled on the couch with my knees pulled into my chest because I was too creeped out about the spiders to walk to my bedroom.
Oh, then there was the time this past fall that there was the BIGGEST gi-normous spider EVER by my front door. When I spotted it, it stopped moving and held perfectly still. I swear we were having a standoff... I wasn't moving... he wasn't moving... we were eye to eye. Actually I was clear across the room on a chair. I probably stared that monster down for 20 minutes, trying to get up the courage to put on my boot and stomp on it. Finally I approached... slowly, don't want to startle it... when I got close enough to it I realized that the thing was as huge as giant dead maple leaf! Oh wait, it was a giant, dead maple leaf. See how paranoid I am?

I'm not even going to post a picture of a spider to go along with the post because then I wouldn't be able to open my own blog.