Oh Baby, Baby

It's been sooooo long. I started my new job for a company that's conveniently a very large manufacturer of computers, and our new laptop just arrived. I'm back in blogging business, baby.

Jeff and I found out I was pregnant on November 1, 2011. The good Catholic girl in me especially likes this date because it's All Saints' Day, and I like to believe that my dear friend St. Agnes and other angels up there in heaven were rooting for me and helping us along.

I had peed on so many sticks for so many days and months that I really didn't expect this morning to be any different. But somewhere in the back of my head I really thought it was going to be positive. Holy moly it was. Pregger test was seriously positiv-o. I was shocked, but also strangely calm. The first words out of Jeff's mouth were, "Dang la-wang." If you know Jeff at all, you can probably hear him saying this and it's hilarious. We were super thrilled and didn't really know what to say or what to do next.

Odd todd fun fact: This is the same day we were officially labeled "infertile" by the medical community.

I just kept thinking, "so this is what it feels like to actually be pregnant?!?!" Hmm. Pretty normal day after that, and it didn't really sink in at work. I think my subconscious was having a crazy time with the news, though. The very next morning, Jeff asked me if I remembered talking in my sleep. I didn't. He told me that I bolted upright in bed in the middle of the night and shouted out, "Holy shitballs!" Yep, that sounds about right.

Me at about 5 weeks. Feeling good, working out, drinking OJ. This sure didn't last long.

The same day we found out, I had my regularly scheduled acupuncture appointment with the lovely Dr. Liu.

She gave me a big hug when I told her the news and said, "You take long time but I knew you get pregnant." She said she would adjust my tea supplement and "Now I prevent miscarriage." I asked her if it was ok for me to continue acu, and she said I should for the first 12 weeks. As she bustled around me putting in needles, setting up 2 heat lamps, turning on my Asian music and covering me with a paper sheet to keep me warm, she kept muttering, "I knew you get pregnant" and "You take very long time." I'm pretty sure she did all the same needles, but only my ears were hooked up to the electrodes, which was a nice change.

I'm so sold on TCM. I know some of you might think to yourselves, or even out loud to me, that I've gone off the deep-end. You might also think that after a full year of trying, my chances were pretty high that I would actually get pregnant. Sure, after a full year I think my chances would seem to be pretty high. But a "full year" according to my dry barren desert body really only added up to 6 semi-cycles, one of them being medically induced. On top of that, I've only had 2 cycles since the last time I saw my west doctor in Chicago in June 2011 for the bad news that the past 4 times I thought I could get pregnant were complete and total impossibilities due to total lack of eggos. And only one cycle (this one) where I had tru-blood confirmation that I actually ovulated (I begged my western doc for a blood test in mid-October to see if my progesterone levels spiked, according to my body temperature and east doc telling me so. They had! My western nurse told me they were very confident I had indeed ovulated. The first thought that came into my head that morning: I have an egg! (intended to be said in the voice of the late MLKJ)).

 

In my wacked out hippie mind, we got pregnant on our first try and we did it completely naturally - no drugs, no hormones, no in vitro, no surrogate, and we're not having a 2-year-old Asian baby (unless Murf has Jeff's eyes; can't help that).

Baby. 18-ish week ultrasound. Looking G-double-O-D good.

Murf Momma