THAT moment

July 22, 201620 Comments

The Pudding Club Diary @ 16w3d

Chris and I had THAT moment last night. THAT moment when you realise you have the summit in sight, when the pain, tears and anxiety were ALL worth it. And we haven’t even met our little one yet.

As I was getting undressed for bed I pointed out my ‘bump’ and it’s definition. Chris went to put his hands to it. I let him…which is not a usual occurrence because if you are a follower you will know my personal issues with my stomach and understand that I still struggle with this. But I also know I have to let Chris feel the little one too. The day before, I lay in bed before work just staring at my naked tummy for about 20 minutes watching little Rocky squirming around in there. I still haven’t really felt Rocky move, but I definitely have seen him/her moving in the past week or so. That evening as Chris reached out to my tummy – he exclaimed…”I can feel Rocky!!”. We looked at each other, and we were both teary eyed in that moment. It was a moving moment. Silently we knew what this meant. It was real. It wasn’t on some computer screen…it was physically real, in our hands. Our baby is alive and wriggling.

So amazing 🙂

Time

January 4, 20164 Comments

Today I am reflecting on time.

time quote.jpg

This week I turned 33 years old, and so I decided to celebrate all the threes, 33! I had a few friends over for an afternoon tea party and we learned how to knit. Yup….you may have been mistaken into thinking that I was actually having my 65th Birthday Party. But haven’t you heard? Knitting is totally hipster.

This is how I imagined my friends and I to be like at my Birthday party. Very Cool.

Thinking about turning 33 I realise that I am quickly heading towards 35. Yeh, yeh, that is two years away. But 35 is the age that women apparently ‘may find it more difficult to get pregnant’…note – it can be difficult, not impossible. And that is to be said for a woman who was supposedly more fertile than myself. So, if the next round of IVF is successful and we do decide to have a second child I would definitely be past 35 if we ever tried to conceive again. Not exactly what I had in mind! But time is never going to be on my side and I can’t cheat it!

Today as I did a bit of early spring cleaning, I took down our four photo frames Chris and I put together for our Wedding day. They were starting to curl and look a bit raggedy.

Our photo collage we put together for our wedding day…we look so young!

I peeled the photos off the frame and I noticed the lack of wrinkles on my face in some of the photos. A couple were from over eight years ago when Chris and I first met. As I look in the mirror today I see my slightly more pronounced furrow lines and wonder how much my life experience impacts these lines. Often we associate wrinkles with ‘wisdom in life’, and I sure feel like that. Since I met Chris we have done incredible things in our lives. If I were to die today I would think I had led a pretty amazing life and would go with a smile. But experience and wisdom doesn’t simply come from the good things in life, it’s also the bad things. I think it’s difficult to truly appreciate the good things without experiencing some pain. So when I see those furrow lines in the mirror I don’t just see time fading, I see time enriching me.

“The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.” – Jean Paul Sartre

With infertility, I want time to pass quickly, I’m always waiting. The dreaded two week wait (How many of those have I written about on this blog now??!), waiting to start treatment or waiting to end treatment! But I don’t want it to pass so quickly that my furrows grow deeper and I realise too late that infertility made me accidentally press the pause button on gaining that life experience and wisdom – the good, bad and ugly.

So as I move forward into 2016, my new year’s resolution is to embrace time and make every bit of sand in that hourglass of life count for something.

On occasions I forget that there are two of us on this journey

February 26, 20151 Comment

I was really mean to Chris the other night. I mean really mean and I feel bad about it. We were in bed together and just about to switch out the lights when Chris asked

“Can I touch your tummy?”.

Now, I hate, hate hate my tummy being touched after eating dinner, I just hate the feeling, something probably related to my Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS). But even so, Chris wasn’t just being polite….so with a slight quizzical look said

“No!! Why???”

Chris rather coyly replied

“Because…..well….there might be a baby in there!”.

Oh. I can’t remember exactly what I said next because I had mixed thoughts at the time. But I know whatever it was, it wasn’t very thoughtful. I argued that that he shouldn’t get his hopes up because the chances of our success were low. Then we argued about the statistics of IUI vs natural conception. And so we rolled away from each other after our mini dispute agreeing to disagree and the lights went out. After about 30 seconds in the dark, I felt guilty, terribly guilty. I have been trying to not get my hopes high with this IUI because I’m afraid of them just being put back down, again… so there I was, trying to put Chris’s hopes down too. In the darkness, I quickly apologized for being mean. He said it was OK. I couldn’t get to sleep for an hour or so after this brief incident because I was lamenting on why I felt so guilty. Really it’s because I realised I had not considered him and his feelings, I was selfish and temporarily forgot that actually there are two of us on this journey together and I am not alone.