letting 'er drift

I'm back from my weekend away. The best part was the hour I spent sitting at the beach listening to the waves and the seagulls. I miss those sounds so much, and I felt more relaxed and connected to myself for that single hour than I have in months, I think. I tried to memorize every miniscule detail so I could recall them at home, but they are already starting to fade. M and I have decided to go back in a couple of months, and you can be sure I'm going to carve more beach time into that trip than I did into this one.

AF showed up yesterday morning, just in time for my day o' travel to come home. She was a full day late, and since I'd left my thermometer and pregnancy tests at home, I had no negative input to keep my hopes in check. M and I were both positive that I was going to come home AF-free, take a test, and sit back and listen to our own personal Hallelujah Chorus as our second line came into focus. No such luck. True to form, Clomid is making this another period from hell, so that's just a little icing on my cake.

I celebrated AF's arrival by packing up my monitor, OPKs, and thermometer. We won't need those where we're going. (Cue cheesy 80's sci-fi music.) Besides, we're on a break right now - something we haven't been on since July of '07 if you count our HSG cycle and January of '07 if you don't.

I scheduled our IVF consult for March 3rd - one week from today. We're headed to Disney World later that week, and I'm glad we were able to get in for the consult before then. I don't handle unknowns too well, so I think I'll be able to relax more on vacation if I feel like we have a plan in place. M is going to be able to come to the consult, which is awesome. With her crazy schedule, it's not often that she can make it to my appointments.

I'm not really processing the move to IVF just yet. I know the odds are higher, but so are the costs, and I think my fear of it not working is kind of preventing me from thinking about it at all right now. I think I would feel really differently about it if our insurance covered it. It would just feel like the next step. Without that financial safety net, it just feels like a really enormous gamble, and I'm a penny slot kind of girl.

Everything worked out fine with the KD hiccup. My blood test came back as it needed to in order to move forward with no issues, so that's something to be grateful for.

Our count of people in our real lives who have conceived, carried, and delivered babies all in the time we've been ttc went up by one last week. That brings our baby count up to 2 with 4 more moms set to deliver within the next three weeks. That is kind of mind-blowing to me. It's like, look at how much they've accomplished and we're still sitting here twiddling our thumbs. There are more to come. With one friend newly pregnant and several others starting their own ttc journeys, I know there will be more pregnancies to celebrate from the sidelines. I hope that we're at least pregnant by the time some of them deliver, but experience has taught me that even that is asking a lot. So, I'm just trying to prepare myself for those announcements, all the while reminding myself of my belief that our baby is worth waiting for.