We've officially started our IVF cycle! I must say this whole process is pretty crazy, exciting, scary and not without its share of painful moments. Giving myself 2 shots a day in the stomach just isn't all that fun. Not to mention all the blood draws, ultrasounds and the ever dreaded egg retrieval. Thankfully I have a great doctor and an amazing husband to help get me through this. Hats off to Chris for being able to put up with my wide range of hormone meltdowns! With a little luck and a big blessing from up above, we should hopefully get a positive pregnancy test sometime in late March. It's been a long, hard journey to get here and I know how truly blessed I am to be able to do this.
FYI....I won't be posting a lot of details about this whole process on this blog site. So if you want to read all the nitty-gritty details, feel free to read my IVF blog. The link is on my 'Friends and Family' blog list.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Our Cruise
On Feb. 6th, Chris and I left for our 5 night cruise to Cozumel and Progreso, Mexico. What an awesome trip! This was our first 'real' vacation together and we had a great time......for the most part. We left from Galveston, TX which was really convenient because it's only a 3.5 hour drive away. The port was totally disgusting and smelled like oil, but to see a cruise ship for the first time was amazing. We spent 2 full days at sea and I still don't think we had enough time to fully explore the boat. It was really neat to wake up in the morning and look out the window and see nothing but ocean. We went to a beach party in Progreso, snorkeled in Cozumel, show several really neat shows on the boat, went down water slides, ate tons and tons of food, met some news friends and spent a lot of time just laying out on the deck enjoying the fresh air. The snorkeling was really neat. I've never seen water so clear; it seemed like you could see forever! To see tropical fish up close was amazing. The only bad part about the whole trip was the way back to Galveston from Cozumel. We had really rough seas and the boat was rocking back and forth soooooo much!! It was so bad they had barf bags set up everywhere and the cleaning crews were pretty busy cleaning up after people. Even some of the crew were sick. We spent most of that day in our room to try and minimize the sea sickness, but I still got sick and spent most of the night hugging a trash can. I couldn't wait to get off that boat and onto dry land!! With the exception of the last day we had an awesome time. I really enjoyed getting to spend so much time with Chris. (No cells phones or computers, how nice for a change.) This vacation came at the perfect time because 2 days later we started a whole new adventure.
Who's ready for vacation?
Enjoying some fun fruity drinks before we left port:
The pool deck at night:
The inside promenade:
We did this waaaaay to much:
I conquered the water slides and it was really cold!
The never ending dessert bar, so good:
Cute towel animals:
At the beach party in Progreso:
Our ship in port in Cozumel:
Heading back to the boat in Progreso:
Snorkeling in Cozumel:
Say cheese:
Chris diving down to get the fish:
A lobster under the coral:
Who's ready for vacation?
Enjoying some fun fruity drinks before we left port:
The pool deck at night:
The inside promenade:
We did this waaaaay to much:
I conquered the water slides and it was really cold!
The never ending dessert bar, so good:
Cute towel animals:
At the beach party in Progreso:
Our ship in port in Cozumel:
Heading back to the boat in Progreso:
Snorkeling in Cozumel:
Say cheese:
Chris diving down to get the fish:
A lobster under the coral:
Sunday, February 21, 2010
House Projects
Thanksgiving weekend we randomly decided to scrape the popcorn ceilings in the kitchen. We've been talking about doing this since we moved in 4 years ago but I never wanted to tackle the mess. Some how Chris convinced me it would only take a few days to scrape the ceiling, repaint, clean-up and put it all back together. So, Chris, our friend Jason and I started a project that quickly got out of control and took a lot longer then Chris thought. Part of that was because we also decided to take out the old lights and replace them with recessed cam lights. Tom was a huge help with doing those! All in all, the project took over a week but it looks 100 times better then it did and the new lights look awesome! We still have painted it yet.....
This is how we lived for a week!
Bye bye popcorn
As if that wasn't fun enough, some how Chris again convinced me to scrape the ceilings in our living room and formal dinning room. I don't know how I was so stupid! But during our Christmas time off from work we took on this new challenge. And again we decided to not only do the ceilings but to also demo our fireplace and put in tile and repaint the mantel and to finally mount our rear speakers in the ceilings. This project did start off easier since we learned a better technique and process from the last time. We had the ceilings scraped in no time and were ready for sanding, mudding, sanding again and texture. We soon found out that our vaulted ceiling had lots of problems and it took many days for Tom and Chris to fix the seams and tape, float and mud the ceilings. While we were waiting for all that to dry we worked on mounting our rear speakers in the ceiling. And again it took a lot longer then we thought. Poor Jason ended up spending many hours in the attic, but we did finally get them in and I love it! No more speaker stands for the dogs to knock over and no more speaker wire! The fireplace was pretty fun to demo and only took about an hour. We even got to use a jackhammer! When it came time to finally paint everything we ran into a few problems. Apparently we bought 2 different colors of white and didn't realize it until we had already painted everything. The ceiling, mantel and the beam all got 4 coats of paint. We still need to paint the ceiling in the kitchen and formal dinning room, but I really have no desire to get into that mess again! We're also taking break from scraping ceilings!
Prepped and ready to go
All the spots are from the dust in the room
The fireplace after we took off the limestone and the new box we built for the tile
I don't have any after pictures yet, but I will post some soon.
This is how we lived for a week!
Bye bye popcorn
As if that wasn't fun enough, some how Chris again convinced me to scrape the ceilings in our living room and formal dinning room. I don't know how I was so stupid! But during our Christmas time off from work we took on this new challenge. And again we decided to not only do the ceilings but to also demo our fireplace and put in tile and repaint the mantel and to finally mount our rear speakers in the ceilings. This project did start off easier since we learned a better technique and process from the last time. We had the ceilings scraped in no time and were ready for sanding, mudding, sanding again and texture. We soon found out that our vaulted ceiling had lots of problems and it took many days for Tom and Chris to fix the seams and tape, float and mud the ceilings. While we were waiting for all that to dry we worked on mounting our rear speakers in the ceiling. And again it took a lot longer then we thought. Poor Jason ended up spending many hours in the attic, but we did finally get them in and I love it! No more speaker stands for the dogs to knock over and no more speaker wire! The fireplace was pretty fun to demo and only took about an hour. We even got to use a jackhammer! When it came time to finally paint everything we ran into a few problems. Apparently we bought 2 different colors of white and didn't realize it until we had already painted everything. The ceiling, mantel and the beam all got 4 coats of paint. We still need to paint the ceiling in the kitchen and formal dinning room, but I really have no desire to get into that mess again! We're also taking break from scraping ceilings!
Prepped and ready to go
All the spots are from the dust in the room
The fireplace after we took off the limestone and the new box we built for the tile
I don't have any after pictures yet, but I will post some soon.
Friday, January 29, 2010
Thanksgiving and Christmas
The holidays were fun and crazy and full of lots of family time. We had our usual feast at my parents house with everything except for Lizzy and Brandon. Just like every other year, we all really enjoyed the food and over ate. The next morning my Mom and I did our annual Black Friday shopping. We didn't get very much, but we sure had a great time going to all the stores and shopping at 1:00am.
This is the one picture I can find right now........My, my niece and sister Katie:
Christmas was wonderful as always. We had our annual family progressive dinner, Lizzy and Brandon were here, we had time off work, nice and cold weather, snow on Christmas Eve, lots of game playing and treat making and I really enjoyed the holiday season. It was so fun to watch my niece and nephews open their gifts this year, they really understood Santa and were so happy to open presents. I loved being able to spend time with Lizzy and Brandon. It's sad we don't get to see them very much, but we sure love the time we get. This year we got my parents a Wii and we had lots of fun playing the Wii Fit and Mario Cart. Christmas always seems to come to quick and never last long enough.
Apparently we take games very seriously in our family.......
Katie's kids:
Opening presents:
Grandma got the perfect gift:
This is the one picture I can find right now........My, my niece and sister Katie:
Christmas was wonderful as always. We had our annual family progressive dinner, Lizzy and Brandon were here, we had time off work, nice and cold weather, snow on Christmas Eve, lots of game playing and treat making and I really enjoyed the holiday season. It was so fun to watch my niece and nephews open their gifts this year, they really understood Santa and were so happy to open presents. I loved being able to spend time with Lizzy and Brandon. It's sad we don't get to see them very much, but we sure love the time we get. This year we got my parents a Wii and we had lots of fun playing the Wii Fit and Mario Cart. Christmas always seems to come to quick and never last long enough.
Apparently we take games very seriously in our family.......
Katie's kids:
Opening presents:
Grandma got the perfect gift:
Blessings in Disguise
The end of October and early November brought some unexpected changes for us. We finally got around to doing our health exams for the adoption paper work and had some interesting results. We found out that I have hypothyroidism and will have to take a daily pill for the rest of my life. (I know, that sounds like a lot of fun.) In during research about hypothyroidism I discovered that a common side effect is infertility. That got me thinking about whether or not that could have been the underlying reason what none of the previous fertility treatments had worked.
Just a week before our health exams, Chris and I had a heart to heart conversation about the whole adoption thing and why he's been dragging his feet. He told me that he's been having this feeling that we'll have a baby of our own and that he just didn't feel right about adoption right now. Me being the nice person that I am told him (in not such a nice way) to suck it up and get going on the paperwork.
That next week Chris' employer informed him that they would be changing insurance providers and he had 5 days to get the paperwork turned in. I jokingly told him to find out if the new insurance had infertility benefits because it seems like no one ever covers it. After many phone calls back and forth with the HR people we found out they have some coverage but we couldn't confirm to what extent. To make a really long story short, in 2 days we had to decide whether we wanted to take a risk and hope they covered infertility, cancel my insurance and join his plan and lose the excellent benefits I already had. We went with our guts and picked to use his new insurance. As it turns out we picked right; they have excellent infertility coverage! What a blessing!! Now we can head back to the fertility doctor and pick back up where we left off.
I almost forgot to mention that Chris wasn't ever supposed to be on any insurance plan. They made a clerical error 6 month ago and added him to the insurance. Once they figured what had happened, out of the kindness of their hearts they left him on the plan. And during that 5 day window of adding and changing insurances, we were supposed to on a cruise celebrating our 8 year anniversary. What we thought was terrible luck with our vacation planning ended up being a blessing. It's crazy how many wonderful things happened in just a 2 week time period! It just goes to show that we may not see what God's plan is, but he sure does!
Just a week before our health exams, Chris and I had a heart to heart conversation about the whole adoption thing and why he's been dragging his feet. He told me that he's been having this feeling that we'll have a baby of our own and that he just didn't feel right about adoption right now. Me being the nice person that I am told him (in not such a nice way) to suck it up and get going on the paperwork.
That next week Chris' employer informed him that they would be changing insurance providers and he had 5 days to get the paperwork turned in. I jokingly told him to find out if the new insurance had infertility benefits because it seems like no one ever covers it. After many phone calls back and forth with the HR people we found out they have some coverage but we couldn't confirm to what extent. To make a really long story short, in 2 days we had to decide whether we wanted to take a risk and hope they covered infertility, cancel my insurance and join his plan and lose the excellent benefits I already had. We went with our guts and picked to use his new insurance. As it turns out we picked right; they have excellent infertility coverage! What a blessing!! Now we can head back to the fertility doctor and pick back up where we left off.
I almost forgot to mention that Chris wasn't ever supposed to be on any insurance plan. They made a clerical error 6 month ago and added him to the insurance. Once they figured what had happened, out of the kindness of their hearts they left him on the plan. And during that 5 day window of adding and changing insurances, we were supposed to on a cruise celebrating our 8 year anniversary. What we thought was terrible luck with our vacation planning ended up being a blessing. It's crazy how many wonderful things happened in just a 2 week time period! It just goes to show that we may not see what God's plan is, but he sure does!
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Debbie's Wedding
In November Chris' mom got remarried to a wonderful man and we were blessed to be able to attend the wedding. She got married the week before Thanksgiving and they flew Chris and I to Holland, Michigan for a short weekend getaway. This was my first time there and it was so cold and so beautiful. They live 5 miles from Lake Michigan and I had no idea just how big that lake was. I also got to meet Chris's grandma for the first time. Holland is such a cute little town and we happened to be there the weekend they have the town open house. Downtown Holland transforms into a cute little Christmas town and it reminds me of a Norman Rockwell picture (complete with carolers!) I'm so glad we got to be apart of Debbie and Ron's special day and we're very excited to have him part of the family.
Fall
In the fall we welcomed cooler temperatures! My Mom, Wendy and I took my nephews and niece to Sweet Berry Farms for a fun filled afternoon. We fed the goats, picked flowers, took a hay ride, painted pumpkins and climbed in the hay bales. We had a great time. For Halloween everyone came over to my parents house for the customary movie outside and treat or treating. This year wasn't so great; poor Bryleigh blistered and burned her fingers in the fire pit, my parents dog got sprayed by a skunk and stunk up the entire house and my mom and I ended up missing most of the treat or treating. Luckily the kids had a great time and they got lots of candy.
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