As I write this, sperm is very slowly hurtling itself through my cervix towards an egg. Though I have not got a positive ovulation test yet so I hope they pace themselves.
Not feeling too good about my timing this cycle. I am day 15 today and usually have a positive opk today and ovulate on day 16 but also had a day 17 and 18 too. I really do hope they pace themselves in there because it is the only donation I am getting this cycle!
Tuesday, 1 April 2014
Friday, 28 March 2014
Insemination
Everytime I decide to do a blog post something dramatic has changed. Well the change this time is that we are now living up North rather than in London. It means we have a bigger house and are nearer to my family which is a positive step. Even if we do miss our life in London. We have also bought a extra cute puppy.
The only thing that hasn't changed is that we are still not pregnant. We found a new donor up this end and are currently back to trying after a bit of a break to move. We have decided that ideally T will get pregnant first due to being 3 years older than me but that due to the fact that we have been trying for a while now, I will also try where possible just to help increase our chances. We just want a baby in our life now and we don't care who has it.
When we first started seriously thinking about trying and looking for a donor back in October 2012 we had this idealistic picture that T will try to try get pregnant in Jan 2013 after our civil partnership and it will wonderously happen fairily easily and that we will have candles lit and it will be romantic and beautiful. Then once our bundle of joy comes along once it was around 1, I would start trying and the same would happen again. In actual fact what has happened is that T had 8 inseminations to no avail and then found out that she has raised Prolactin and low progesterone and after a couple more tests in now on medication to help and in a major lack of patience moment, I also started trYing and have so far done 2 attempts.
This is how we found it in reality
1) There were no candles or romance, just some awkward small talk with our donor followed by what do you do while he is wanking off in the next room. Cue loud music.
2) Donor leaves and this is followed by a major sense of responsibility to not kill off the little swimmers inprisoned in the sterile pot which has to be some how sucked up into the syringe.
3) Once the swimmers were successfully sucked up, you then had to try and get rid of the weird gross semen bubbles that appeared out of nowhere without a)losing the lot of them b)not getting rid of them and shoving alot of air up into your bits...tho this seemed a bit extreme and probably not enough air to do much damage but the worry was there. 3)feeling time constraints as every minute sperm are losing the battle in there.
4) Nowhere does it mention sperm bubbles
5)once you successfully have the sperm contained you then have to keep them warm...or do you...some stuff says that you should keep them sat there to allow to liquify more for 10-15 mins whereas some literature says that you should keep them at body temperature to keep them alive...then some stuff says that if you keep them too warm then they will speed up too quickly and die. What the fuck do you do? = ACT QUICKLY (while trying not to panic or freak out at how disgusting semen is)
6)You get your partner into position and then have to locate the cervix because you don't want to miss or let too much come out... you locate the cervix but then have to try work with the syringe one handed
7) The syringe is in!!! How quick do you press the plunger down? In your head you think well a guy probably cums quite quickly and with force so quickly would make sense but then the other part of your brain is thinking SHIT what if they bounce straight back out? Should I leave the syringe in? If I leave the syringe in will this then block the cerival opening and prevent the sperm from getting in? I heard a tale of a woman plunging prematurely and missed the vagina altogether in her blind panic!
8) You fuck it and just inject the bastards in as slow as humanely possible and leave the syringe...but then your partner starts laughing and her pelvic floor pushes out not only the syringe but some spermy goodness comes running out.
9)You have to go find tissue or a sanitary towel or something to stem the flow and then panic about whether any actually made it anywhere near the cervix and curse at your woman for not having kept it in place
10) you stockpile all the cushions and pillows in the house under her arse with the not so good one on top in case any semen seep through and you have to throw it away and never speak of that cushion again
11) You try and produce an orgasm while trying to not get sperm on your fingers or contract too much that further troops are lost to the pelvic floor and your brain is nowhere near that sexy place but you have to keep trying because an orgasm helps suck up the little bastards into your uterus where they need to be and trust me after the above, they need all the help they can get.
12) you think about using a soft cup to keep it all in there but then again you worry about putting it in wrong and covering the cervix and subsequently push all the swimmers away so they are held back by a latex wall and any who are knocking around the opening get distracted by the plastic sheath that now encloses them and thats the last thing you want. Distracted sperm!
So thats it. That is the insemination all whistles and bells...and candles and romance.
The only thing that hasn't changed is that we are still not pregnant. We found a new donor up this end and are currently back to trying after a bit of a break to move. We have decided that ideally T will get pregnant first due to being 3 years older than me but that due to the fact that we have been trying for a while now, I will also try where possible just to help increase our chances. We just want a baby in our life now and we don't care who has it.
When we first started seriously thinking about trying and looking for a donor back in October 2012 we had this idealistic picture that T will try to try get pregnant in Jan 2013 after our civil partnership and it will wonderously happen fairily easily and that we will have candles lit and it will be romantic and beautiful. Then once our bundle of joy comes along once it was around 1, I would start trying and the same would happen again. In actual fact what has happened is that T had 8 inseminations to no avail and then found out that she has raised Prolactin and low progesterone and after a couple more tests in now on medication to help and in a major lack of patience moment, I also started trYing and have so far done 2 attempts.
This is how we found it in reality
1) There were no candles or romance, just some awkward small talk with our donor followed by what do you do while he is wanking off in the next room. Cue loud music.
2) Donor leaves and this is followed by a major sense of responsibility to not kill off the little swimmers inprisoned in the sterile pot which has to be some how sucked up into the syringe.
3) Once the swimmers were successfully sucked up, you then had to try and get rid of the weird gross semen bubbles that appeared out of nowhere without a)losing the lot of them b)not getting rid of them and shoving alot of air up into your bits...tho this seemed a bit extreme and probably not enough air to do much damage but the worry was there. 3)feeling time constraints as every minute sperm are losing the battle in there.
4) Nowhere does it mention sperm bubbles
5)once you successfully have the sperm contained you then have to keep them warm...or do you...some stuff says that you should keep them sat there to allow to liquify more for 10-15 mins whereas some literature says that you should keep them at body temperature to keep them alive...then some stuff says that if you keep them too warm then they will speed up too quickly and die. What the fuck do you do? = ACT QUICKLY (while trying not to panic or freak out at how disgusting semen is)
6)You get your partner into position and then have to locate the cervix because you don't want to miss or let too much come out... you locate the cervix but then have to try work with the syringe one handed
7) The syringe is in!!! How quick do you press the plunger down? In your head you think well a guy probably cums quite quickly and with force so quickly would make sense but then the other part of your brain is thinking SHIT what if they bounce straight back out? Should I leave the syringe in? If I leave the syringe in will this then block the cerival opening and prevent the sperm from getting in? I heard a tale of a woman plunging prematurely and missed the vagina altogether in her blind panic!
8) You fuck it and just inject the bastards in as slow as humanely possible and leave the syringe...but then your partner starts laughing and her pelvic floor pushes out not only the syringe but some spermy goodness comes running out.
9)You have to go find tissue or a sanitary towel or something to stem the flow and then panic about whether any actually made it anywhere near the cervix and curse at your woman for not having kept it in place
10) you stockpile all the cushions and pillows in the house under her arse with the not so good one on top in case any semen seep through and you have to throw it away and never speak of that cushion again
11) You try and produce an orgasm while trying to not get sperm on your fingers or contract too much that further troops are lost to the pelvic floor and your brain is nowhere near that sexy place but you have to keep trying because an orgasm helps suck up the little bastards into your uterus where they need to be and trust me after the above, they need all the help they can get.
12) you think about using a soft cup to keep it all in there but then again you worry about putting it in wrong and covering the cervix and subsequently push all the swimmers away so they are held back by a latex wall and any who are knocking around the opening get distracted by the plastic sheath that now encloses them and thats the last thing you want. Distracted sperm!
So thats it. That is the insemination all whistles and bells...and candles and romance.
Thursday, 22 August 2013
TWW
It feels like you never know how desperately you want a baby/a family until you are staring the 'TWW' in the face. Systematically counting down each 'DPO' and obsessively ticking off the symptom checklist.
Today I am 8dpo on my first month 'TTC'. My wife has been trying for the past 8 months and this month we decided to both give it a try. We are using a known donor and doing home insemination and due to some fuck up in the earths finely tuned balance, we were both ovulating around the same couple of days (fucked up because it will also mean we are pre menstrual at the same time- which in turn breeds all sorts of hormonal crazy in our relationship, on the occassion that our cycles choose to merge together...only to diverge quite soon after when it realises that rather than a biological wonder, it is a biological hazard.
So far this delightful TWW I am experiencing
Nausea
Extreme hunger
frequent urination
indigestion
cramps
Gas
Food aversions
Night time waking
and a google obsession (not a new thing however)
and guess what.....I am quite probably going to start bleeding over the next few days and it will be back to square one.
The part of me that ebays cute baby clothes remains vaguely optimistic every month and then becomes rapidly depressed once 'AF' shows up...for it to die away and become optimistic once more when them two dark lines come up on the 'OPK'
But for now I am going to sit here and eat my victoria sponge (I AM CRAVING IT), because hey ho. I am either pregnant or pre-menstrual so it is justified.
H x
Today I am 8dpo on my first month 'TTC'. My wife has been trying for the past 8 months and this month we decided to both give it a try. We are using a known donor and doing home insemination and due to some fuck up in the earths finely tuned balance, we were both ovulating around the same couple of days (fucked up because it will also mean we are pre menstrual at the same time- which in turn breeds all sorts of hormonal crazy in our relationship, on the occassion that our cycles choose to merge together...only to diverge quite soon after when it realises that rather than a biological wonder, it is a biological hazard.
So far this delightful TWW I am experiencing
Nausea
Extreme hunger
frequent urination
indigestion
cramps
Gas
Food aversions
Night time waking
and a google obsession (not a new thing however)
and guess what.....I am quite probably going to start bleeding over the next few days and it will be back to square one.
The part of me that ebays cute baby clothes remains vaguely optimistic every month and then becomes rapidly depressed once 'AF' shows up...for it to die away and become optimistic once more when them two dark lines come up on the 'OPK'
But for now I am going to sit here and eat my victoria sponge (I AM CRAVING IT), because hey ho. I am either pregnant or pre-menstrual so it is justified.
H x
Tuesday, 27 November 2012
Sperm hunt
Ok so alot has changed since I last blogged.
We cancelled the May wedding and are now getting married in exactly 46 days!! We have decided to just do it with 10 immediate family members at a registry office and then head to hotel/spa for the weekend. This saves on the hassle of planning a big wedding and the expense of it all. I just want T to be my wife and we can still have everything we wanted, just with less guests which is fine by us, as we were not very keen on all the attention anyway. Maybe when they legalize gay marriage we will be in a different position and go for a bigger celebration.
One of the other big motivations in our change in wedding plans is that we have decided we want to start a family sooner rather than later and if we got married in May then that would be 6 months less of trying as for legal security we want to be in a civil partnership prior to trying.
We were initially going to go to a clinic and do egg sharing, but after discussing it we have decided that we are going to find a Known donor and do artificial insemination at home for a few months and hopefully it will be successful and it will be awesome, but if it isn't successful then we will have at least given it a go and in the meantime saved up enough money to pay off pesky overdrafts from our student days and have enough to pay for egg sharing if it comes down to that.
We have found two potential donors that we really like the sound of so far and we have arranged dates to meet them for a coffee. We are meeting one guy on Monday and he is currently the favorite (from emails and such like) so we are hoping we click with him. We have made it quite clear that we don't want the donor to have a role in the childs life aside from perhaps contact when the child turns 18, as we want to be the parents and we don't want a third party. We hope that we will be enough for our children and when they grow up they don't resent our decisions to not have the donor involved.We want our children to know where they came from but we don't want them involved in raising them.
Trying to conceive (TTC)is actually so exciting, overwhelming and slightly depressing when you consider your own lack of sperm and the success rates etc. We are currently in the midst of charting ovulation. T has to do her temperature every morning and record it on the chart and we also keep an eye on such delightful things as cervical mucous and cervix positioning. It is a minefield of amazingness really- last month you could see where T's temperature dipped and when her cervical mucous changed and it is really cool in a gross way. Perhaps the fact I am a midwife makes me more fascinated and less squeamish, but either way!
Hopefully by the end of January we will have little swimmers swimming towards the egg
Fingers crossed
xxxx
We cancelled the May wedding and are now getting married in exactly 46 days!! We have decided to just do it with 10 immediate family members at a registry office and then head to hotel/spa for the weekend. This saves on the hassle of planning a big wedding and the expense of it all. I just want T to be my wife and we can still have everything we wanted, just with less guests which is fine by us, as we were not very keen on all the attention anyway. Maybe when they legalize gay marriage we will be in a different position and go for a bigger celebration.
One of the other big motivations in our change in wedding plans is that we have decided we want to start a family sooner rather than later and if we got married in May then that would be 6 months less of trying as for legal security we want to be in a civil partnership prior to trying.
We were initially going to go to a clinic and do egg sharing, but after discussing it we have decided that we are going to find a Known donor and do artificial insemination at home for a few months and hopefully it will be successful and it will be awesome, but if it isn't successful then we will have at least given it a go and in the meantime saved up enough money to pay off pesky overdrafts from our student days and have enough to pay for egg sharing if it comes down to that.
We have found two potential donors that we really like the sound of so far and we have arranged dates to meet them for a coffee. We are meeting one guy on Monday and he is currently the favorite (from emails and such like) so we are hoping we click with him. We have made it quite clear that we don't want the donor to have a role in the childs life aside from perhaps contact when the child turns 18, as we want to be the parents and we don't want a third party. We hope that we will be enough for our children and when they grow up they don't resent our decisions to not have the donor involved.We want our children to know where they came from but we don't want them involved in raising them.
Trying to conceive (TTC)is actually so exciting, overwhelming and slightly depressing when you consider your own lack of sperm and the success rates etc. We are currently in the midst of charting ovulation. T has to do her temperature every morning and record it on the chart and we also keep an eye on such delightful things as cervical mucous and cervix positioning. It is a minefield of amazingness really- last month you could see where T's temperature dipped and when her cervical mucous changed and it is really cool in a gross way. Perhaps the fact I am a midwife makes me more fascinated and less squeamish, but either way!
Hopefully by the end of January we will have little swimmers swimming towards the egg
Fingers crossed
xxxx
Thursday, 11 October 2012
The Three B's
This week has been an excellent week. Firstly we decided that we are going to start trying for a baby next year as soon as we have got married and perhaps start the necessary testing beforehand in April as we are planning to do egg sharing ivf, if T is accepted on to the program. If not, financially we will have to try IUI instead. T is definitely hopefully going to carry the first baby, as she is 3 years older. I am happy to wait my turn :) It is very exciting. Life is too short and I want as much time with our children as possible, as working in a hospice has really showed me how you never know what is round the corner and how family are the thing that matters most in this life and are the one thing that are with us until the end of time. Not how many bedrooms our house has. I shared a bedroom with either my sister and at times my brother and sister until I was 11 and I had the best childhood ever. We also lived in a caravan in my grandparents backyard until I was 7. We will be living in a lovely 2 bed by the time our baby is old enough to care anyway. For the first year until we leave London and try for baby number 2, he can bunk up in our room :D
We also have booked our honeymoon, which is awesome as we have spent weeks trying to figure out where to go and how much money to spend etc. Our ideas varied from an all inclusive 2 weeks in mexico to a caravan in Cornwall. We really want to keep costs down so we can afford the IVF! In the end we have opted for a middle ground and are hiring a villa on the coast in Sardinia and hiring a car to drive around the Island. It looks gorgeous. The beaches are white and the sea is crystal clear. It is costing us £950 for the villa, flights and hire car. Pretty reasonable really as it has a jacuzzi overlooking the sea and everything and it is also private so we will be able to relax better.
Going for a week also means we can fit in going to the fertility clinic and a couple of nights in Paris in to our 2 weeks annual leave. We are not taking more time off to allow for baby making days off. While we would love to get pregnant on our first go, we are being realistic and anticipating more of a journey.
The three b's have also thus commenced this week. BRIDAL. BEACH. BABY diet! We are on a definite health kick now so that we are in optimum shape to give ourselves the best chance. We have swapped cake for fruit and the sofa for long walks. We r also gonna start playing tennis and swimming :) I am pretty sure cake will worm itself in occasionally, but so long as we keep focused then I am sure we will get there. Damn BMI charts. We went on a lovely 4 mile round trip walk into Greenwich last night and rewarded ourselves with a starbucks when we got there :) It is well worth the walk for both the coffee and the amazing view of Canary Wharf
Lastly I am starting my new job on Monday. This is quite terrifying but also very exciting. Gone are my student days. I am so glad to be in the adult world now even if I lose my student discount :)
I AM GONNA BE A TOTAL BREAD WINNER
This is what I am looking at whenever I want chocolate (mmmm)
I can't wait x x x
We also have booked our honeymoon, which is awesome as we have spent weeks trying to figure out where to go and how much money to spend etc. Our ideas varied from an all inclusive 2 weeks in mexico to a caravan in Cornwall. We really want to keep costs down so we can afford the IVF! In the end we have opted for a middle ground and are hiring a villa on the coast in Sardinia and hiring a car to drive around the Island. It looks gorgeous. The beaches are white and the sea is crystal clear. It is costing us £950 for the villa, flights and hire car. Pretty reasonable really as it has a jacuzzi overlooking the sea and everything and it is also private so we will be able to relax better.
Going for a week also means we can fit in going to the fertility clinic and a couple of nights in Paris in to our 2 weeks annual leave. We are not taking more time off to allow for baby making days off. While we would love to get pregnant on our first go, we are being realistic and anticipating more of a journey.
The three b's have also thus commenced this week. BRIDAL. BEACH. BABY diet! We are on a definite health kick now so that we are in optimum shape to give ourselves the best chance. We have swapped cake for fruit and the sofa for long walks. We r also gonna start playing tennis and swimming :) I am pretty sure cake will worm itself in occasionally, but so long as we keep focused then I am sure we will get there. Damn BMI charts. We went on a lovely 4 mile round trip walk into Greenwich last night and rewarded ourselves with a starbucks when we got there :) It is well worth the walk for both the coffee and the amazing view of Canary Wharf
Lastly I am starting my new job on Monday. This is quite terrifying but also very exciting. Gone are my student days. I am so glad to be in the adult world now even if I lose my student discount :)
I AM GONNA BE A TOTAL BREAD WINNER
This is what I am looking at whenever I want chocolate (mmmm)
I can't wait x x x
Tuesday, 2 October 2012
The other side.
I am not really one to discuss my feelings, or show them, but H managed to crash through all my defences and actually open up about my feelings and my future plans. She has been nothing but wholeheartedly supportive in every decision I have made and I'm incredibly grateful to have her in my life.
Meeting her was actually the best decision ever. We met briefly on a dating website, I say brief, it was within 24 hours and we had already decided to meet in person. I guess something made us gravitate towards each other constantly. And now I can't really imagine ever being apart.
I may not be the the typical girl in planning weddings but i am so excited about the day I get to call her my wife. Scary, exciting, can't actually wait.
There are so many things that I want for our life, and its amazing how I've found someone who feels the same. <3
T
Monday, 1 October 2012
Shitty looking blog
T thinks our blog looks lame. How dare she. I spent a good 5 minutes on the template. She is a techno geek so is going to revamp it at some point. I look forwards to seeing the pimping. I am not sure if I lack the skill or the arsedness. Probably both. I am sure I could master the art though. I am soooo excited that it is October. I love Autumn. I love the colours. I love walking along the Thames with coats and gloves with coffee. I love Halloween, bonfire day and awaiting December so we can put up decorations and wander around Christmas markets and winter wonderland at Hyde park. I also can't wait to see the Snowman at the theatre and go to the carol service at St Paul. Bring on Autumn and Winter. I also love cuddling up on the sofa with a good book and hearty food. Mmmmm.
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