William The Transsexual Parakeet: A Story (With An Important Payoff)

Kate and I do this thing. She makes me tell her stories for her. Not just things that happened that we both know about: she makes me tell her childhood stories, her college stories, all of them. I'm the storyteller, which is hilarious if you consider that she's the one who wants us to blog every damn thing. Wants me to blog every damn thing, more like.

But anyway, today I'm the storyteller. And this is her story, but I'm telling it for my own purposes. So make of that what you want.

Anyway, when Kate was seven or so, a shed got delivered to her house. And in that shed was a tiny little parakeet. She and her mother and her little brother (who was about four) spent a good deal of time trying to catch that parakeet. Actually, Kate's mom did most of the work, aided by the ever-well-behaved Kate, and disturbed by the less-well-behaved brother, who desperately wanted to pet the pretty birdy. But, in the end, the bird was captured and brought inside. Kate's mom refused to let the kids name the bird for about six months or so, until she had exhausted every possible avenue for finding its original home. After all hope was lost, the kids named him William.

Several years down the road, William became sick. So he was taken to the vet, for the first time ever. At the vet, it was revealed that William was, in Kate's words, Williamette: they had a lady bird on their hands. William/ette's condition did not improve substantially, and about six months later s/he Flew To The Great Shed In The Sky, so to speak.

So, it is in honor of this bird, who managed to live for a time in both genders, who appeared without warning and shocked everyone by sticking around, that we christen the Non-Hysteri-Keet.

Blogosphere, meet Willa. Willa, meet Blogosphere.

Why Willa, and not William? Well, because we've basically decided that it's too hard to play the gender-neutral pronoun game all the time, and that our personal default pronoun is female, so she should have a vaguely female name. However, we picked Willa in part because it references the chromozonal question mark: Willa might be William might be Williamette, and all is well. We'll know when we know, or we won't, and it's fine.

(Oh, and alternative sources for the name include this and this. Look, the one walked the line between genders and wrote one of my favorite novels, and the other is a mysterious production of parents who shouldn't have been able to procreate AND had magical powers as an infant. Either way, it's good.)

What, you want a real story of yesterday morning's positive? Well, maybe I'll tell you. But not today. Willa's mama is demanding dinner, and her mom has some Guy Debord to read. The world continues turning, but it's one Keet heavier round these parts.

Valentine's Day Massacre (Kind Of)

Since Em tagged me to talk about the enormous NOT PREGNANT we got Thursday morning on the CBE digital test, I suppose I should actually talk about it.

We knew at 9DPO that it was too early, but wouldn't it have been so cool to find out we were pregnant on Valentine's Day? Oh well, not to be. I make it sound so matter of fact. In actual truth, I went a little nutty for a few hours. I sat on the couch and almost cried and felt like sitting in the corner and not going to work. However, work is crazy and I pretty much can't take days off at the moment and if I take a day off every time a piece of technology tells me I'm not pregnant, I worry I will soon run out of sick days.

Work was also not very pleasant. I called Emily ever hour and told her how I didn't feel well and she was very nice to me. Later in the day, my hysterical symptoms picked up again, which is leading me to wonder if in fact we did just test way too early. We have decided to wait two days and test again on Saturday. So I guess we shall soon see.

Happy Freakin' Valentine's Day

To quote the renowned C.G.B. Spender:

"Life... is like a box of chocolates. A cheap, thoughtless, perfunctory gift that nobody ever asks for. Unreturnable, because all you get back is another box of chocolates. You're stuck with this undefinable whipped-mint crap that you mindlessly wolf down when there's nothing else left to eat. Sure, once in a while, there's a peanut butter cup, or an English toffee. But they're gone too fast, the taste is fleeting. So you end up with nothing but broken bits, filled with hardened jelly and teeth-crunching nuts, and if you're desperate enough to eat those, all you've got left is a... is an empty box... filled with useless, brown paper wrappers."

--From "Musings of a Cigarette-Smoking Man," Episode 4x07, The X-Files

I'd just like to say I bought a good box of chocolates. Mostly caramels and turtles and truffles. Kate appears to be enjoying it.

Oh, and that test this morning? A negative, which at 9 dpo is not shocking. And so drama-causing that I'm tagging the wife to tell y'all about it.

The Hysteri-Keet

We're calling her the Hysteri-Keet.

HK for short.

No, we don't know yet if Kate's pregnant. We won't know until tomorrow at the earliest; she'll be taking an early pregancy test just because it is the first possible day, and it's Valentine's Day, and how amazing would it be to find out we're having a baby on Valentine's Day? Most likely, we won't know until next week.

But her symptoms have been so pronounced that we've been joking about her hysterical pregnancy since last week. This is an example of the traffic game: we can't talk about her pregnancy, about an actual embryo, until we know we actually have one. So it's a hysterical pregnancy we've got here, and we wanted to be able to talk about it by name.

So we named her. She'll get a new name once we know if she's real or hysterical. Kate's thinking of calling her Gabby or Zoey, after her childhood parakeets.

What have we learned about the Hysteri-Keet in the past week? She likes salads. And pasta. And spice cake. She makes her mama feel positively evil around 9PM every day. She demands naps. And every night, we snuggle up in our bed, which is the one place where we've agreed we won't play the traffic game, and I wrap my arms around my wife and our little hysterical daughter and say goodnight.

I have no brain, so Title Goes Here

It seems like forever since I last posted. It's actually been a week. I don't have any reason, except I've just been feeling really weird. As Emily note a few days ago, I've been having A LOT of phantom symptoms. The ones that seem to be staying with me are bloating, heartburn and crying jags. I'm having noticeable cramping today, although until today it had been four days or so. I'm 6 or 7 DPO depending on how one counts it, so I don't know what's up with me. Some women may cry at tissue commercials (Em is one), but I'm a bit of a stoic. I don't usually cry until pushed beyond my limits by something actually deeply sad. And here I am, feeling suddenly as if weeping is the only thing to do and then an hour later making jokes about the crazy lady who is clearly taking me over. It's just so odd.

From the beginning, Em has been against POAS before I've missed my period, but today when I was doing one of our many daily phone check-ins, she asked me when the earliest I could test was. We bought a 3-pack on CBE Digital tests from Costco.com when we were ordering our next batch of OPK's, so the first day those early response tests might work is Thursday. Thursday is also Valentine's Day. We don't put much stock in the Hallmark holiday, but it kind of makes me want to go wild and use one just for fun. I guess we shall see.

My closing question: Has anyone else had this many crazy symptoms all at once? Em is starting to get concerned. I'm just bemused.

Symptoms My Wife Has Had In The Last 3 Days

• Nausea
• Dizziness
• Heartburn
• Bloating
• Warm Stomach
• Diarrhea
• Mood Swings
• Cramps

She would like to say that she realizes she's insane.

It Begins

I came home yesterday, tired. My exam had finished up at 6 on Monday; I had immediately shared celebratory shots of Absolut Citron with Uncle, which did a good job of counteracting the caffeine-and-all-nighter high I was running on. I took a nap, was awakened around 9:45 to knock up the wife, watched some X-Files, went back to sleep. Woke up in the morning around 11, watched more X-Files, rescheduled my chiropractor appointment so I could vote, went to therapy, went to my class (taught by a pleasant, easily distractable old man who really doesn't do anything to direct the discussion), got out early and went to that chiropractor appointment, got dinner at my favorite Mexican place, went to what I thought was the first Arabic class of the semester only to discover that, last week while I was cramming for the exam, they had all met without me. Got out of class at 10, walked exhaustedly to the subway, listed to my Lupe Fiasco/Shakira/Jay-Z playlist of the moment six times (or however many, I didn't pay attention except for mentally choreographing the trailer to the X-Files movie about colonization they're never going to make to the sounds of Hello Goodbye--there's lots of Dana Scully with AK-47s), wandered in the door, dropped my shit, and said hello to my wife.

Who promptly burst into tears.

She didn't feel well. She was having cramps. Her stomach hurt. Everything hurt. She didn't know why she was crying. She didn't know anything. She was just crying.

And as I sat there, holding her hand, saying everything was ok, petting her hair, telling her to call her mother if she wants to, and all of that, I thought: oh, shit. She can't be more than 24 hours pregnant. Honestly, at most there's a little fertilized egg in there trying to figure out whether it wants to implant. And that's if she's pregnant at all. And she's hysterical already.

And all of a sudden I'm realizing precisely what I meant when I told my therapist that I was going to have to deal with her hysterical pregnancies two weeks out of the month from here forward.

She calmed down. I held her and petted her and we laughed about the mood swings and I told her everything was OK. She's still crampy and bloated today, and I swear to God she looks fatter. (My wife, she is the opposite of fat.) Who knows? Maybe these are the best signs every and she's totally pregnant. Maybe her body is reacting to encountering sperm for the first time by screaming in horror. Maybe it's a psychosomatic reaction. But this is how it's going to be from here forward.

I think I'm ready. I hope so, at least.

Calling the Child

The sperm was finally delivered at 3:45pm on Saturday, after a phone call to FEDEX, being put on hold for ten minutes while they tracked the package down, being told that it was in Erie, NY (7 Hours from our house) and then having it arrive ten minutes later with no explanation to how that was possible or why it was almost four hours late. Sigh.

Having gotten negatives on the two OPK's I took on Saturday, I kept on testing on Sunday. Towards the end of the evening, all my signs were lining up and Em and I agreed we would do the first insemination at midnight after I peed on one last stick. That stick had a very faint line, but we decided to go ahead with the insem because the book I've been reading for months said that the worst thing you can do is wait too long, waiting for an OPK to read positive.

I had readied myself for this first time to be comical and badly done and a complete miss, so I was quite happy to discover that we appear to be good at this. We filled the bedroom with the candles in vases that we had used for the centerpieces for our wedding, brought our Quaker marriage certificate into the room, to represent the loving family and community that we were calling our baby into to and starting the thawing of the spermies. It went well, Emily was really skilled at using the syringe and I rotated like a turkey for an hour afterwards. After the first thirty minutes or so, we opened the bedroom door and let the cats in and told Jesus that he should come visit. And it felt so right, our little commune, the queers and the cats, all together, calling this baby to us.

I was slightly concerned that we had done the first insemination too early but when I tested at 2pm today I got a very strong positive, so I think we got the timing down pretty well. We're going to do our second insemination around 10pm and then we will officially be in our first ever TWW!

Waiting

Waiting is really the hardest part of ttc at times. At the moment I am waiting for two things. I am waiting to pee. I have to wait until 2pm in order to get an accurate reading on my CBE OPK. This is the first stick of this cycle, this cycle being the first time that isn't practice! The excitement is mounting.

I am also waiting for FEDEX. We paid a lot of money for Saturday delivery before 12pm. And it's 1:45pm and I am sitting here waiting for my box 'o sperm, and reloading the tracking site every few minutes. According to FEDEX, my box has been in a truck in Brooklyn since 9:11am. So where the #@$% is my delivery? Not that I'm obsessing or anything.

What, You think I'm inseminating my cat?

I did something very exciting earlier this week. I called the sperm bank and asked them to take two vials of sperms out of our storage container and FEDEX them to our house. Due to my cycle this month, it has to be a Saturday delivery, which is more expensive, but you do what you have to do.

It was the next day before I realized that they are shipping us sperm and thawing instructions, but we are responsible for getting the syringes. Em and I met after work and went to a pharmacy nearby in Manhattan. No luck. They had 10ml or 5ml syringes, which don't work for us. We need a 1ml needleless oral syringe. I really didn't think this would be difficult to get at a pharmacy. So we pushed on. We took the train home and went to the local Walgreen. They too only had 10ml and 5ml syringes.

We pushed on to the RiteAid a few blocks down the street. And there is where the story becomes much more entertaining than previously. I walked up to the pharmacy counter and asked if they carried 1ml needleless oral syringes. The woman at the counter thought for a moment and then asked, "Why do you need it?" I wasn't expecting the question, so it took me a moment to reply, "For a home insemination." I tried to pitch my voice towards her so the three people waiting to ask questions weren't involved in my business any more than necessary. She asks, "Who are you inseminating?" And this is where I stood with my mouth hanging slightly open for a second, not quite knowing what she meant. What, I'm inseminating my cat? (Now that is something I would never want to do!) I told her that I was inseminating myself. And she freaked out. She kept saying, "Oh no! Do you have a doctor? Oh no!" I assured her I had a doctor who said that it was completely okay that I do this. "Don't hurt yourself," was her reply. In the end, she and the pharmacist took ten minutes trying to take apart insulin needles and I told them it was very kind of them, but I would look elsewhere.

Emily then brilliantly remembered that our neighbor Sean who runs the local pet store/animal rescue had given us 1ml syringes when we first adopted Sara from him and she needed to be dosed with medicine. So I headed to his pet store. I asked him if he had any 1ml syringes and he said he didn't have any in the store, but he walked thru to the shelter and came out with a handful of syringes. I thanked him and asked him how much I owed him and he said not to worry about it.

So there ends the story of how we got a four months supply of syringes for free after an evening spent trying to purchase them.

We have a date!

Today, Emily and I sat down and looked at my charts for the last three months, trying to determine when we need the sperm to be in our house. After some back and forth about the semantics of what before and after ovulation means, we have agreed upon a date. That's right folks, we have set a date for delivery. And that date is:

Saturday, February 2nd!

Yes, in less than a week, we will have little frozen spermies in our house. I find that truly bizarre. And quite exciting. When we decided on the date, I felt this sense of calm descend over me. I felt like I was coming off an adrenaline high. Having something about this first try be concrete is just so lovely. Now, I just have to call the sperm bank and figure out the details of delivery.

24 Hours in Pictures

The Katester informs me that there's this thing? Where you take a photo every hour you're awake of a day? One of the bloggers she reads said we should do it? Yeah, so I did it.

Here is:
FRIDAY, JANUARY 25, IN CRAPPY CAMERAPHONE PHOTOS

MIDNIGHT

We're watching a lot of TV these days that comes on late at night. A Daily Show (not The Daily Show; The Daily Show has writers, A Daily Show has Jon Stewart and Jon Oliver fuckin' around without a script), followed by multiple re-runs of Sex and the City, followed by the midnight Simpsons episode, and by the time we've worked through all of that the 2 AM X-Files is on...It's pretty terrible for us. Plus, Uncle's schedule keeps having him get in around 12:30...so we just stay up to be together. So this is what midnight looks like in our house: my wife, in her fleece pajama pants and robe that my mom got her for Christmas, clutching that remote like her life depends on it.

ONE AM

My comprehensive exams start in a week: Friday the First. For those not in academia, comps are a series of absurd hoops that grad students need to jump through; they ensure that you have a basic grounding in the core texts of your field, and they compel you to spend a whole weekend of your life writing pointless essays. Because of this, I'm spending all my time lately reading articles I don't find particularly interesting, so I can write pointless essays about them in a week's time. 32 pages worth of pointless essays. On the left is an article by Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan about democratic consolodation. On the right is my EndNote entry for said article. On the couch in the background you can see Sara's leg.

TWO AM

Oh, and did I mention our projected insem date is somewhere between Monday the fourth (the last day of my exam) and Wednesday the sixth? So we're a little obsessed. At 2 AM the wife felt the need to read to me about insemination timing.

I coulda done a three AM shot, but it would have been of me in bed in the dark, trying to fall asleep.

EIGHT AM

Kate had to leave for work early, so I got up to see her off, pack her lunch, and generally be wifelike. After she left, I picked up her bathrobe and put it on. I've been doing that a lot lately. This is a bathroom-mirror shot, if you can't tell.

NINE AM

Incidentally, all of the shots from this point forward? Could have been mirrors of the one AM shot. Instead, I photographed other things. There was some sort of Serious Cat Dramatics happening in the house this morning; I think there were more squirrels than usual on the back porch. Both Wicket and Sara kept tearing back and forth between back door and kitchen window with puffy tails. These R Srius Cats.

TEN AM

Because every morning needs some Dana Scully in it. Her hair looks so freakin' good in the ninth season, which is funny because the show is breaking my heart. Why even bother pretending it's the X-Files without some Mulder/Scully longing gazes and witty repartee? And Invisible Mulder? Not cute. I CAN HAS VISIBLE MULDER NOW PLZ. (Funny, I think that's what Scully's thinking the whole season, too.)

ELEVEN AM.

Finally I get around to breakfast. The smoothie of the week is strawberries, blackstrap molasses, maple syrup, soy milk, and plain cow's-milk yogurt. It's not disgusting, and it's healthy. Apparently.

NOON
Time to get dressed. I bought that shirt at the beach last weekend. This is roughly my fashion MO on school-or-other-official-days: ribbed tank top, button down shirt, sweater over top if it's cold enough, cool looking jeans. Hair alternates between up in a bun and clipped, and pulled in a low pony-tail. I like up better, but pony-tail is winning these days because 1) cold=hats=hair should be down and b) my hair is just a little too long and I run a severe risk of a big poof of hair puffing up like a rooster's comb. Need a haircut.

ONE PM

Workin' on the train. A different article this time. Also I kept having to pause in my reading to dance in my seat to "Dirt Off Your Shoulders," which is only recently on my iPod.

TWO PM

And I arrive at 'Snice, a vegetarian/vegan coffee shop in the West Village. I was meeting my exam study group. We are a motley bunch: different regional foci, different theoretical foci, different tastes in caffeinated beverages. You can see the edges of them through the glass. I got the seat by the door. It was cold.

THREE PM

'Snice has the most amazing freakin' cupcakes. They're vegan and covered with icing like I used to eat out of the can that I kept by my bed when I was a kid. We almost had them be the cupcakes at our wedding (for our gluten-eating guests), but the vanilla ones are healthy-looking: you know, they look like they have nutritional value. We didn't want to scare our guests, so we went with Crumbs' less healthy-looking but almost as yummy cupcakes. But I got one today. And a Cuban with soy ham and lots of mustard. And a large hot chocolate, which had entirely too like chocolate in it. Basically, I want liquid chocolate pudding.

FOUR PM

Once something passes two hours in length, unless it has a lot of shiny bells and whistles, I've lost my attention span. This is my "I'm done studying for my exam today" face. Taken in the bathroom at 'Snice. Luckily, we broke up the session about 20 minutes later.

FIVE PM

I got home around 5:30 to a very exciting piece of mail: my very first journal article is published! My copies have arrived! It's a graduate-student women's studies journal; the article is the first published thing I've gotten out of my undergrad thesis. That was my squee of the day.

SIX PM

My evening needed some Dana Scully in it, too. On second thought, those Doggett and Reyes kids are OK. I like there being Mexicans on TV, even when they're played by white girls. And there's a baby around. But still. I CAN HAZ. Etc.

SEVEN PM

Kate gets home from her super-stressful day, and we have to go out tonight (more on that below). Dinner is tomato soup with shredded cheese melted on top. This is a loser's way out of a meal, but she will eat it and it contains vegetables and/or fruit.

EIGHT PM

Our evening was spent at the Park Slope Food Co-op, where we've been members since we moved to the city. It's the largest member-run co-op in the country; there are about 30 paid employees, and 14000 active members, who all work one shift a month (roughly) and do all the major work of the store, from stocking to checkout to designing the newspaper and running the office. Kate's shift started at eight-thirty, but mine didn't start until 9, so I grabbed some much-needed groceries in the break. In this basket: cream cheese, frozen peas, soy milk, tortilla chips, peanut butter, and other necessaries.

NINE PM

Then I took my place at the cash register. Checking out groceries and taking payment are different jobs at the co-op, in order to reduce the number of people who handle cash. I handle cash. We just got a new system, that makes our lives much easier.

TEN PM

Providing plenty of time to do my homework. This is for class, not for exams. It hurt my brain due to the dumb. Sigh.

ELEVEN PM

Then we took the bus home. And came home. And watched TV (not the X-Files: I want her to stay married to me, after all). And ate cheese puffs. And blogged. (Photos not included of that. No one wants to see my in my little brother's red hoodie and blue cotton panties. Not even my wife; she hates this hoodie.)

Kate promises to do this soon...on a day when she won't just be taking photos of what she's watching on TV all day, which is what tomorrow is expected to be.

Revolution

As we begin this baby adventure, other parts of my life are going completely crazy. There are so many ways in which I can't talk about them on the internet, but suffice it to say, I finally have something to focus on that is taking at least as much of my concentration as the baby project, and that is saying something. So wish me luck on a scary, but ethically and morally correct course of action. At least I'll be able to tell our little Commune Child that they were conceived in the midst of a revolution.

We're off to the races!

Yesterday was a big day in the world of the Commune Child. It was CD1 of the cycle that we start inseminating. We had been trying to convince my body that it wanted to wait until Tuesday or Wednesday, but Monday was the day and so we go with it. We wanted to push the first possible insemination date a little further past the end of Emily’s Comparative Politics Field Exam, which runs from February 1-February 4. Looking at the year’s worth of data that we have gathered about my cycle, with CD1 on January 21, our possible insemination dates are February 4, 5 or 6. We will just have to hope that this month I go long!

This is all so very exciting and real. When I walked into my chiropractor’s office this evening, Dr. G. said, “Aren’t you just so excited about it!” Em had seen her earlier in the day and had mentioned that my cycle had started yesterday. I do love the interconnectedness of our lives. I think it’s a good environment to bring a child. Now we just need the universe to agree.

Theory and Practice

I find as the time for the first insemination gets closer and closer that it is more and more difficult for me to focus on anything else. I mean, I get work done and I sleep at night, but this baby thing is really taking over my brain. A year ago, when Em and I were gearing up for our wedding in May, I was just starting to take my BBT and taking prenatal vitamins. Em and I had agreed to not talk in any practical ways about children until after the wedding was over. At the time, even with the wedding on the horizon, I felt like I had baby on the brain all the time. Now, looking back, I clearly had no idea how much more baby on the brain I could get.

I think that the difference between then and now is that then it was all so very theoretical. We didn't really chart yet, we didn't have a donor picked out, we were so new to this whole aspect of our lives. Now, a year later, we have extensive charts for the last nine months, we have sperm in storage, just waiting for a phone call to come winging its way to us. We are just so much more present in the baby-making moment. There is still the aspect of the theoretical in that we aren't actually pregnant yet, but we are starting ttc in less than four weeks. How on earth am I supposed to be focused on anything else at this point?

Friends Gossip

Today was my last day in a position of some noticeable authority at my place of Quaker worship. I'd be more specific but we are trying to maintain some level of anonymity and if I said exactly what I've been doing for the last 13 months, I think that it would be a lot easier to figure out who I am. That having been said, I am both relieved and saddened to be leaving this position. This last year has been difficult, but also rewarding.

Em and I decided this fall that I should step down at the beginning of the new year because the position requires a serious time commitment each month and also requires up to three hours of sitting in one place without moving on wooden benches while being watched by many people, and if, as we are hoping, I get pregnant in the next few months, my ability to do this will be compromised. I felt that it was better to step down at a time when someone new could be relatively easily appointed, as opposed to waiting it out and discovering the problem in the middle of a term of service. It seems more respectful of the meeting community. However, I've enjoyed getting to know the meeting better and being more involved.

In an amusing side note, the members of our meeting are such gossips. I mentioned, I thought discreetly, to one member of our meeting my reasons for not continuing in the position and within a few weeks, five different members of the meeting had either asked me if I were pregnant yet or talked about how exciting it was that Em and I would be "increasing our numbers." We have declared that we are very happy that they are all so excited, but that we will let them know as soon as we feel comfortable sharing a possible pregnancy with them.

The Traffic Game

We have this game we play. Whenever we are in the car and the traffic is looking really good and we are pleased by our progress, we never say, "Oh, wow, look at how well the traffic is moving, we're making great time." We say instead, "I'm sure that any minute now the traffic will slow down considerably and the trip will take longer than we planned." This is because of a theory that we hold that if you talk about how well something is going and presume to suggest that the future will continue to be good, something bad happens because you tempted the gods. This game doesn't always work, but a lot of the time it does and we can't explain it so we just go with it.

When we started talking seriously about having a baby, we realized that this was another situation where we needed to play the game. We couldn't say, "Of course, Katie will get pregnant really quickly so we need to plan for an October baby." That would just be asking for God to notice us and make it take forever for us to conceive. It's not that I believe in a vengeful God, I'm just really careful about jinxing my life. So we say instead, "We should buy 8 vials of sperm because we will certainly need all of them. We should stock up on OPK's because we are in this for the long haul."

That being said, there is this little bit of me that just keeps thinking about how I will be pregnant in just a few months of trying; about how I will be on maternity leave this time next year. (I will leave for another day the description of how good the benefits are at my job. Seriously, Em jokes that I work in Sweden.) And even as the little, quiet bit of me fantasizes about how big I will get over the next year, another part of me is realistically planning to be in this for the long haul. Because Emily and I have not found life to be easy and without trial. Death and serious illness seem to stalk us. So I try to nurture the little bit of myself that is thinking that this baby thing is going to be easy and straightforward, because deep down, I am so convinced that this is going to be one more thing that is really hard.

Missing My Girl

I've always theoretically known that this baby-making process is a two person project but these past few days have really brought home the practical aspects of that truth.

Emily has been away on an academic trip since January 1st, and already I am feeling her absence. Well, clearly I'm missing her. We are one of those codependent couples who spend a great deal of time together and rarely travel alone. Don't knock it, it works for us. But more than just missing her on an emotional level, I'm missing her on a very practical, TTC level. I chart pretty much every sign that we can figure out and she is away right in the middle of my cycle. For the first time since we started charting over six months ago, I am having to figure out how to monitor my own cervix. Let me just say, she makes it look easy. I really didn't comprehend until I had to do it by myself how tricky it is to read my cervix with anything resembling consistency and accuracy. All I can say is it's a good thing that this month is the last of our preparation months and we aren't actually inseminating this month or we'd be in trouble. Sometimes you can't appreciate your wife as much as you should until she's on the other side of the country.