Application and gone

T finished his autobiography. He stayed up too late and it was difficult, but he did it. The application is in an envelope and we will send it as we leave.

Here goes an adventure!

Leaving

Tomorrow is my last day of work before leaving. I have so much crap to do and I don't know when I'm going to do it. I'm going to try to leave work early tomorrow so I can do things. Tonight we each have plans with friends and will not get anything done. Oy!

T still hasn't finished his autobiography and I am requiring we mail it in on Friday. I have no idea how he's going to finish it. I am very upset about it right now, but he still says he'll get it done. We cannot talk about it without him getting frustrated, and we can talk about anything. We never argue or even get that annoyed with each other, so it feels so weird to have this albatross around our necks. I want him to finish it so we can just mail the damn thing in and get that part over with. We still have a bunch more big hurdles before the waiting just starts.

I have decided to give up giving up stuff. I'm drinking caffeine. I'm drinking alcohol. I've stopped my prenatal. Yes, we have two more vials of donor sperm, but I'm just sick of doing things that indicate I have some sort of hope. I have no hope. I will never get pregnant and have a child. It's just not in the cards for us. If a miracle happened, I'll start taking precautions then. Worse things have happened. Fuck it.

I'm trying to not stress. Our vacation should hopefully be relaxing. But I'm not quite there yet.

I probably won't blog from the road, so I'll not be back until after July 1. I'm sure nobody cares, really, but I just wanted to put it out there.

Have a great couple of weeks.

Father's Day

Today's a tough day for T. He really wants nothing more than to be a father, and his own relationship with his father was a difficult one. He loved his father deeply, but T's childhood was difficult due to his father's drinking. T doesn't talk in depth about his father, but when he does speak of him I mostly hear the love. Having never been touched by alcoholism I find it difficult to understand how T and his mother process their rocky relationships with T's dad. My MIL never has a bad word to say about him even though I know there were times when he was anything but a good person.

With the passing of Tim Russert, a lot has been said this Father's Day weekend about being a proud father and a proud son as Tim was. This moves T deeply, and I know he has many ambivalent feelings about all of these things. I know he strives to be the type of father that his dad never was -- he has said so. He wants to embrace the positive qualities of his dad, and because he doesn't have problems with alcohol he can take those good qualities that his dad had, some of which he sees in himself, and be a wonderful father. T is an adoring husband and an adoring cat owner. I know he will be an adoring father, too.

His father died reasonably young (from a brain tumor not unlike the one Ted Kennedy has, though his father's was inoperable) and T's biggest fear is that he will never see his children as adults. Because we are getting older and will be close to 40 when becoming parents for the first time, this fear gets stronger and stronger as every anniversary passes. We have T's birthday, the anniversary of his father's death, his father's birthday and Father's Day all as reminders of time passing. I a expecting another round of these anniversaries to pass before we become parents.

Today, Father's Day, we are very close to finishing up our initial adoption application. It has been difficult to get him to write about his own childhood due to the difficult issues he has faced. Aside from a few snapshots, T's autobiography is the only part of our application that we need to complete. I know he thinks about it every day and he promises that it will be done before we leave on our trip Friday morning, but he keeps pushing it further and further away. He does not like to talk about his childhood or to face his feelings when it comes to his father. It is especially difficult for him to do this on Father's Day of all days.

As we were watching the tribute to Tim Russert, we saw Tim wish his viewers a happy father's day. He wished a happy father's day to his dad and told his son, Luke, that he was proud to be Luke's dad. This triggered something in T. I'm not sure if T's dad ever told him he was proud of him, even though T knows that he was. It was only as T took care of him while he was dying that he got to see the softer side of his father. Moments like these move T to tears.

I wish there were some way I could ease the pain of fatherhood in general for T. I know that when we finally have children of our own some of that pain will be reduced. I'm not sure if he will ever fully come to terms with his relationship with his dad, but I think by being a dad himself, and the kind of dad his dad never could be due to his alcoholism, I think he will be able to let some of that pain go. A day like today is so difficult for me because I know there is absolutely nothing I can do to help T. He is a sensitive man, which is one of the reasons I love him so much, but it really hurts to see him hurt.

I hope that one day he will be a father soon because I know that few men will appreciate fatherhood the way that T will one day when he gets to be a father, no matter how that happens.

A good way to end the week

Yesterday I retook the test that I had failed at work and I passed with flying colors. I also found out that I was the #1 tech support person out of the entire floor for the month of May. They do a lot of quality control stuff and map your productivity and rank the approximately 50ish tech support people. Then they give you a bonus depending on your overall ranking. I had the best combined score of anyone. Considering I've only been doing support for 3 months and have only been eligible for the bonus for 2 months, I think that's pretty good. And even though I'm completely over qualified for my job, I still feel pretty good about myself for doing this. I don't think what I do is difficult and I know I do it pretty well. But it still feels nice to have physical proof that I am doing a good job. And hopefully that means that I can get another new job in the company pretty quickly.

We went out to dinner last night and I had a blood orange martini. Yum!

One week

One week today will be the night before we leave to drive to Oregon. I'm very excited and somehow a little nervous. I'm afraid of ending up sleeping in the car or something. We really have no plans what-so-ever. I'm not a very spontaneous person so this is difficult for me, but I can't really plan for this so spontaneous I will be.

I did end up peeing on a stick because I had a dentist appointment today and I knew they would want x-rays and even though I knew I wasn't pregnant I wanted the test to really make it certain so that I could get the x-rays without worrying. So, I wasn't pregnant and I got the x-rays. Sometimes I think I'm so stupid to think this way, but I can't help it. So with the definitive one-line I got some goat cheese and am thinking about drinking and having real coffee in the morning. :)

Nothing much is going on. Work has been going well lately. I get to retake the test I failed last month. Cross your fingers for me. I think I'm more ready now. I really hope I pass as I don't think I have ever failed anything more than once. I barely remember ever failing anything. Except maybe a swim test. I'm a really poor swimmer.

Today is an incredibly beautiful day and I think I'm going to go change and work in the yard for a bit.

Update:
I just changed my clothes and I've gained so much weight from last summer that the shorts I bought last year because I had no shorts that fit me are now barely fitting me. I feel so incredibly fat. I have not been this heavy in a long, long time. I want to lose weight, but I just can't restrict my eating these days. I really don't know what to do about it. I don't know how to regulate my eating. I eat to comfort myself so much. I do exercise regularly, but it doesn't seem to be helping. I feel like crap about this.

pregnancy jokes

So at work there were some more jokes about me being pregnant. I spilled a cup of water all over the floor and was frustrated and said so, and my neighbor says, "Your water broke?" And then another (a woman with a 1-year-old) said, "Maybe Rachel *is* pregnant!" and I got really annoyed and said quite loudly, "That really isn't funny." I got a little upset and I let them know. The co-worker got a little pouty afterward and I said to him, "Sometimes there are upsetting things in this world and you just have to learn to deal with it."

So, I'm hoping that *this* time is really the end of it. I mean jeez. I'm not even giving subtle clues anymore. These are flat-out 'I don't want to talk about this please' comments. What more can I do? I'm just so annoyed.

As far as waiting goes, I'm waiting for AF. I'm not even going to pee on a stick, which as you know is something I pretty much do no matter what. Even I can't convince myself I might be pregnant. T and I will be on the road during the next ovulation time. Maybe driving across the country will give us some help. It's the whole, "Take a vacation and you'll get pregnant!" thing. I'm sure after two and a half years and four miscarriages that driving across country will do the trick!

T hasn't made much more progress on his bio yet, so I keep nudging. I have to finish the financial part of the application, too. Ugh.

It's hot. Really, really hot. The thermometer on my car read 126 degrees this evening. No, it's not really 126, but it is really hot. I'm going into the air conditioning now.

The waiting

My b00bs have been hurting for about a week now. I keep waiting for it to go away. I think that has started finally today. I believe they are hurting a little bit less. This feels somewhat backwards as my b00bs usually begin to hurt right about now -- somewhere between 7 and 10 dpo. I'm not exactly sure when I ovulated so I don't exactly know where I am now. If I ovulated later, as I suspect, my chances of actually being pregnant are pretty low. I am on the progesterone which may be making my b00bs sore, but I continue to take it so why would it stop now?

Again, I spend so much of my time analyzing and wishing I could just forget about it. But I can't.

Yesterday at work on of my cube neighbors asked me when there were going to be some T juniors walking around. I shrugged. He pushed a bit more. I said some more non-committal things. A third co-worker was nearby and said something to the effect of, 'It looks like she doesn't want to talk about it.' I was pleasantly surprised by this comment. I wonder if his life has been touched in some way by infertility. He is getting married this weekend, so maybe he has just endured similar questions in a way he didn't enjoy. I finally said, 'Can we talk about something else?' Part of me wanted to blurt something, but I really, really want people at work to know as little as possible about my infertility. I just feel really private about it there. I don't want work to know anything.

Then on the way home it was raining and I mentioned an open window in a guest bedroom. Carpoolie managed to say, "Oh, I remember having a guest bedroom. Not anymore!' All this woman talks about is her children as she reads Parents magazine in my front seat every day. I try to be understanding, but I wanted to smack her after she said that.

Sigh. Maybe today will be a better day.

Never a dull moment

Last night the woman I carpool with walked down the street to show her kids my house. They were just standing there, looking at the house. I got nervous that they were going to knock on the door, but they didn't. A man with a dog walked down the sidewalk as they were standing there and the dog next door that is never leashed ran out and the two dogs got in a small tussle. The man who was walking his dog started to freak out a little. Carpool woman was there shielding her two kids from an impending dog fight. The 7th grader next door pulled the unleashed dog off the leashed dog.

Later, a fire engine with sirens parked outside our house. The fire SUV came and another fire engine came. I had no idea what was going on. They go to the house next door with the unleashed dog. They look in the back yard. Our neighbors have a chiminea in which they feed huge logs that are too large for it. They burn stuff in there constantly and in fact leave the house with things still burning in it. I guess that fire got out of control because they unrolled the hose and sprayed the neighbors back yard.

Those people are insane. They always have been. One of her kids has been in and out of jail and was dealing drugs out of the house. I can't believe they burned their back yard. That house is for sale and I'm sure the owner is not going to be happy. These people just floor me. It's unbelievable. I just don't understand people.

I'm guess I'm just glad the fire didn't get out of control?

And these people are able to reproduce while T and I cannot. How can it be a better idea to propagate those genes?

Dream

Last night I dreamed of a positive pregnancy test that had about 4 lines. One pink line and three blue ones, I think. I knew the pink one was for HCG, but I didn't know what the other ones were for. I knew it was weird that they were there, though. I didn't know what to do. I kept panicking and taking more tests, but the extra lines were still there. I went to the doctor and they did a bunch of tests, and the extra lines were because of all the chromosomal defects the baby had. I was going to miscarry again. I was so mad at myself for letting myself get pregnant and to hope that maybe it would be okay even though those extra lines were there. I'm not sure if I dreamed of miscarrying or that was implied. But it was a crappy dream and it's left me unsettled this morning.

The Surprise

The surprise was my parents old dining room chairs. Years ago they gave me their dining room table. They've been promising the chairs ever since. It's been about 5 years, but they've finally dropped off the chairs. T never thought they'd give them to us. But here they are.

Not super exciting, but the chairs we had in the dining room previously did not go at all, so it's nice to have normal chairs for a change.

Started the progesterone last night. B00bs have been hurting since around ovulation. That seems weird. Not sure what to make of it. Anybody have sore b00bs for their entire luteal phase?

Here comes Monday. Another week. Another day. Another dollar.

I've finished the first draft of my part of the biography and the part of the biography for the two of us. Now T needs to finish his part. We need a few pictures, to fill in a few blanks in the application, and then we will be ready to hand it in.

Not sure if we'll send it before we leave for or trip or not. Just not sure.