been a long time...

wow. i have not posted in a while. i got caught up with the adoption process and with phoebe's therapy appointments. she is doing really well. we are getting her fitted for AFO (ankle foot orthotics, basically leg braces) in the hopes that it will help her to take a few steps. i am really hoping this will give her more support and she will want to begin walking without it hurting her so much.  we are chugging along on the adoption process, still have the educational component of it to finish and some interviews, but honestly i am in no hurry. phoebe has been teething with molars coming in so it has not been an easy few days here. she is quite cranky, and that is just not phoebe. she is rarely a whiner. i am leaving on a trip for San Francisco tomorrow with my girlfriends! yay! can't wait for this much needed getaway. dh will be staying home with her while i am away. he will also be taking her to two therapy appointments and one music class, so he'll get to walk in my shoes for couple of days.

well, i must wake phoebe up now for play group. talk to you all when i return from vacation.

xoxoxo

i was walking phoebe in the stroller this morning when it dawned on me that two years ago, i feared the only only stroller i would be pushing would be an empty one. at the moment, i felt so grateful to be a mom. for that moment i was able to forget about all of the heartache and pain associated with infertility, and i was just able to be thankful that my stroller was full. i continued to be in that moment with a smile on my face, walking onward to the Seven Stars to get my morning coffee.

the moment passed when she threw her cup full of milk onto the sidewalk and it splashed up in my face and all over my clothes...Ah, the joys of motherhood...

this song reminds me of before i found you and not that i have you phoebe.
had all but given up
On finding the one that I could fall into
On the day before you
I was ready to settle for
Less than love and not much more
There was no such thing as a dream come true
Oh, but that was on the day before you

Now you're here and everything's changing
Suddenly life means so much
I can't wait to wake up tomorrow
And find out this promise is true
I will never have to go back to
The day before you

In your eyes I see forever
It makes me wish that my life never knew
The day before you
Oh, but Heaven knows those years without you
Were shapin' my heart for the day that I found you
You're the reason for all that I've been through
Then I'm thankful for the day before you-
yeah, yeah

Now you're here and everything's changing
Suddenly life means so much
I can't wait to wake up tomorrow
And find out this promise is true
I will never have to go back to
The day before you

Was the last day that I ever lived alone
And I'm never goin' back
No, I'm never goin' back

Now you're here and everything's changing
Suddenly life means so much
I can't wait to wake up tomorrow
And find out this promise is true
I will never have to go back to
Yeah, I will never have to go back to
The day before you, the day before you

It's been one hell of a week...

I'm sorry that I disappeared from the ICLW. I could not get on my computer at all the last few days. Out internet was down and it was very difficult to reply to posts and read blogs from my iphone. I have been so happy to receive comments from everyone and wish that I could have been better at returning posts. I guess I am out of the running now and I have a lot of catching up to do. For those of you who commented on my blog, I apologize for not getting back to you due to the internet. My daughter has also kept me on my toes with all of her appointments this week.

On a more positive note, Phoebe pulled herself up to standing. A huge accomplishment for both of us after all of the work we do with her physical therapy. We are now working on unlocking those knees and also learning how to hold a cup and finger foods. It's always something!

Happy to be back. Will catch up later.

For those who live in CO- I am trying to find flights to Telluride from Providence. What is the best way to get there? Apparently Telluride is closed due to work on the landing strip...

Thanks. xo

Spent 24 hours without Phoebe...

So DH and I went to Boston yesterday and walked around, ate, drank and sat in the park. We had dinner and met some crazy people. It was a very nice break from our crazy daily schedule. Now back to reality. We picked Phoebe up at my mom's house and planned to go to a Paw Sox game but she ended up needing a nap. So now our plan is to take her to the beach at 4 or 5 pm for an hour. Should be fun, although I am not looking forward to sand in her butt crack and putting myself into a bathing suit or anything of the likes. 

P.S Does anyone have any kids that eat better away from home than in their own house? Apparently mine does this.

To my friends in the IF blogger world. I must say...

... that this is my first experience with ICLW and I am loving it!  I feel like I am at a party meeting a bunch of great new friends! You are all very strong women and men and I truly enjoy reading all of your comments and blogs. Keep it coming! You all keep me going on a daily basis! DH and I have a sitter today and will be taking the day to spend time together and go out to dinner in Boston this evening. I promise I will read more blogs and post comments when I get home!

xoxo

ICLW TIME!!!!

Hi there in the infertility, loss, adoption blog world.

A bit about me just to give you an idea.

Dh and I were TTC for a year knowing that I had endometriosis, age against me and minor MF. after a year of no success we attempted 5 IUIs (all medicated) and 5 IVF cycles over 3 years or so?

 Can't remember timelines, i guess i have suppressed a lot of it.

A few chemical pregnancies, failed cycles, arrested embryos, almost a divorce and miscarriages later, we got pregnant with twins. We lost one twin early on and after a very difficult pregnancy and traumatic childbirth (my epidural did not work and i had a c-section and felt everything), Phoebe entered the world weighing a mere 5 pounds at 39 weeks gestation. The neurologists think that she had a stroke while I was pregnant with her, something that is common in twin pregnancies when one twin is lost. As a result, Phoebe has some minor developmental delays and has Early Intervention services at home several times a week. She is now one year and crawling, something i honestly wondered if she would ever be able to do. So now I worry, "will she walk?", "will she speak?"... 

We are also in the process of adopting domestically. I do not sleep more than 3 hours per night b/c of all the worry. This is where we are right now and how I came to be here... 

Welcome to ICLW!

officially overwhelmed...

just received about 200 pages of documents from the adoption agency that we need to complete and/or obtain records for before the social worker comes by for the home study. some days i feel guilty for working so hard for another baby when Phoebe has just turned a year, but I guess this is what I would be doing if i could get pregnant again, right?

 

so we need to obtain divorce records, birth certificates, marriage certificates etc... finger printing, background checks and health records.

meanwhile I am trying to organize phoebe's early intervention care, where she now requires speech therapy, occupational therapy, physical therapy and feeding teams. my dog is sick and i am watching two of my neighbor's houses while they are away, all while my husband is on call and operating all weekend!!!!! AHHHHHHHH! Calgon?

so anyway, instead of doing all of the things i just mentioned above, i am blogging and occasionally checking facebook.  can you say, procrastination?

phoebe is getting much better with the crawling and eating, now we just have to work on transitioning to the sippy cup for milk time. i know developmentally she is not there yet and when she is ready she will let me know, but for now i don;t mind feeding my peanut a bottle, she is content and still for the few moments it takes her to drink it and i can cuddle with her :)

not sure what is wrong with riley today (fur baby). i know it's super hot outside but i walked her at 7:30 this morning and she was dragging herself and limping. she has been lethargic all day. i'll watch her for the rest of the day and hope that she perks up.

my mind is racing thinking about the list that is getting longer and longer. the house is a mess, in no shape for a home study, probably not baby proofed all that well and a little bit small to be cramming 2 children here with two adults and a large dog, but hopefully it will all work out.

i am going to sign off now and do some laundry. fun stuff.

sorry i have not posted in a bit. we were on vacation in vermont. it was truly relaxing. felt great to be together all week with no worries. 

i am hoping to start up the monthly meetings for IF in the next few weeks, so please if you know of anyone in RI or nearby MA that would be interested in attending pass the word along.

you can send them my email address satsac14@gmail.com. I would love to hear from anyone!

I do have two lovely ladies interested so far but was really hoping for a larger group! Pass the word!

One year ago today, a miracle entered my life...

Exactly one year ago today, I met the love of my life. Phoebe came into this world at 5:20 pm on August 7, 2008 weighing a mere 4 pounds 11 0z. She was born by emergency C-Section and her heart rate was low so they had to get her out quickly. Unfortunately, i did not get to see her or hear her first cry because I was knocked out as soon as they pulled her out of me. You see, my epidural never worked and I was able to feel my entire surgery, one of my worst nightmares come true. Deus said that when they handed Phoebe to him for the first time, his whole world changed in one second. I think it's amazing how much he loves Phoebe. They are inseparable. He spends every spare moment he has with her. I love it. It makes me smile. We just returned from a lovely vacation in Vermont and we had a great time, just the three of us. Phoebe crawled for the first time while we were there! We were/are so excited. i had started writing this post in august and realized i had never finished and posted it!

i am going to disappear for a bit, turning my blog off. i will explain why when i return to the blog world.

will miss you all dearly!

taken from an article in the national geographic...

just thought this was cool...

The Power Nine: Secrets of long life from the world's healthiest humans

1. Move: Find ways to stay active

2. Plan de Vida: Discover your purpose in life

3. Downshift: Take a break

4. 80% Rule: Don't overeat

5. Plant Power: Choose greens

6. Red Wine: A glass a day

7. Belong: Stay social

8. Beliefs: Get ritualistic

9. Your Tribe: Family matters

we're back in business...

finally spoke with the case worker yesterday about going the domestic route and it looks like we are back in the running. we have to re-do a couple of things, home study, paper work and then we wait. apparently we have some advantages and could be matched sooner because we are a mixed race family. i have been running around trying to get ready for Phoebe's first birthday party for the last few days and have been so tired and feeling under the weather. just overwhelmed i guess.I can't believe Phoebe is going to be one year. it seems like we were just pregnant and decorating her room and now we are decorating for a party! i feel so blessed to have her in our lives. she is my everything.

 hoping to relax this coming week as we are on vacation. i'm getting excited about the prospect of having a new baby in the house again. it could take anywhere from right away to two years, but hopefully we won't have to wait very long!

sorry if this is a boring post. just needed an outlet today.

let's go back for a moment...

I would just like to preface these posts, the whole blog actually, by telling you a bit about myself, well more like telling you what i am not :)

I am not a writer. In fact I am terrible at it. I have a difficult time recalling timelines and although I have a creative mind, I often have a hard time organizing my thoughts and getting them written in an eloquent and articulate way. 

When I tell my stories to people, I think that they sound interesting at the time, but many times after reading what I have written, my life seems pretty average and boring.

I don't like to say this out loud or think this about myself, but i have bad luck. Really crappy luck at times. I was just telling a friend the other day, after I found out we had to start from square one again with the adoption, that I don't think there has ever been  a time in my life that I have said, "Wow,  that was easy!"  I have had many obstacles to overcome in this lifetime. From my childhood into my twenties and now life as a parent. It's never ending. Yes, I know there will always be bumps in the road along the way, and someone said all of these things will make you a stronger person (who was that person anyway????), but do there need to be so many pot holes (ok, we live in RI so maybe I should move)???

Anyway, I really just wanted to say that I was not even normal before infertility!!!! i am the drama mama. Drama follows me wherever I go, or maybe i create it (this is what i have been told, apparently it may be a sort of defense mechanism :)). There are some dramas I can definitely live without. 

Happy blogging :)

this goes down as one of the worst days in my life...

my posts are going to be all over the place... i am just sitting here remembering that very dark day when i got the worst phone call of my life. we had just gone through our fourth IVF cycle and with ICSI and assisted hatching we managed to fertilize two of the four eggs that were retrieved. it was not a perfect cycle by any means but it was the best one we had had so far. so i was taking a bath the morning of the transfer, trying to relax and meditate in preparation for receiving my future babies, when the phone rang. it was 6 a.m. no one calls here that early unless there is an emergency. i was frozen with fear. i made my husband get it. it was the doctor at boston ivf calling to tell us not to make the drive to boston because our embryos has arrested. arrested. i will never forget how the use of that word made me feel and still does to this day. they were dead. my babies stopped growing. i was devastated. i let out a blood curdling scream in the tub, my husband by my side. and i stayed just that way for hours, sobbing. i still get very emotional thinking about it right now. it was such a painful time for me. that was the fourth cycle in a row where i had somehow in someway, lost my babies. either though miscarriage, chemical pregnancies or arrested embryos, i have lost so many babies...

I promise I will post my pregnancy and birth story soon, but first I must vent about the "now" issues.  We were in the process of adopting a sibling for Phoebe. My husband is Filipino and has family living there so naturally that was our country of interest. Things were going smoothly until we received an email update from our case worker that the Filipino government issued a moratorium stating the hold of all children from age 0-4 years. This means that we cannot adopt a baby under the age of 4 and the moratorium is indefinite. none of the other programs work for us or they are closed or there is too much travel involved, etc... I am pretty heartbroken right now. I am starting to feel exactly the way I did while riding the IF roller coaster during my IVF cycles. I have been hibernating, wanting to sleep more and eat more and just be alone with my daughter. I want for her to stay a baby forever. So now we are waiting to get in touch with the director of the domestic program at WHFC, which is the agency we are using. I don;t think that i have the energy to continue this post, so I may come back and edit it later... sorry folks.

GETTING TO PHOEBE...

The journey of how my dream of being a mother finally came true...

It was the most difficult thing I have endured in life. The ups and downs were sometimes completely unbearable. At times I thought I would go insane, literally. I am sure my husband would tell you there are times when I DID in fact go insane :)  We fought, we played the blame game, we sobbed, we were hopeful together and we felt hopeless together as well. 

It started with some simple tests then worked it's way up to very invasive and painful procedures and daily injections, 5 of them a day. This went on for about three years? My sharps container (the industrial sized ones that my husband stole from the hospital) was almost completely filled over three years.  I became numb to the needles and actually felt a sense of satisfaction.  Yes, it felt good to give them to myself. 

Five years ago neither my husband nor I thought we would have to endure this kind of pain to start a family. We thought maybe because of our age we might need a bit of assistance but never in a million years did we think we would be labeled as "unexplained infertility".  After five failed IUI cycles we started to get nervous but thought, "hey all we need is one IVF", "they can get anyone pregnant with IVF"... Clearly we were uneducated and had a lot to learn, the hard way.  After three years of IVF (that's another four failed cycles, some miscarriages, some chemical pregnancies, some "arrested emrbyos") I was told by the RE that I needed to give up and think about donor eggs. My eggs were poor quality, maybe the age of a 45-50 year old women's eggs. We also had slight male factor but that was corrected with ICSI.

We entertained the idea of an egg donor and actually started the process with my sister. But in the midst of all of this treatment, her husband got deployed to Iraq where he would spend the next 18 months and it just was not the time for her to be doing something like this.

So we took a small break, I could never seem to take more than 2-3 months off from ART, call me an IVF junkie I guess. I was definitely addicted to it. Addicted to the hope that I would get pregnant that next cycle. It just had to work.

We decided to go back to the first clinic that we started with and do one more cycle. this would be, we decided, our fifth and final cycle. We had vowed that if this one did not work then we would explore other options. Well I am not sure if I would have been able to keep that promise...

On our last cycle we put four embryos back and got pregnant with twins, one of which we lost early in the pregnancy. At first I was a bit nervous to put four embryos back but I had never even had that many embryos with any of my cycles and I knew that this was our last shot, now what was i supposed to do with my embryos if I did not put them back? Something just told me to go for it. So we did. Now we have Phoebe.

I will tell you there were many things that I did on my last cycle that i had not done with my other cycles. I took royal jelly and bee pollen everyday for three months leading up to my cycle. I did acupuncture for months leading up to my cycle as well as a "pre" and "post" acupuncture session. I did yoga once a week. And I took a probiotic daily. I was also in a better frame of mind. Who knows if one or all of these things worked. I don't care what did it. All I know is I have the love of my love now. Phoebe.

Now we just need to get her a sibling. Somehow. 

My next story: My difficult pregnancy and traumatic delivery.

Increase your chances...

http://infertilitysupportri.blogspot.com/

Trying to get the word out on the street...

Ok, so I am not that technologically gifted or else I would know how to make my blog easier to find in a Google search. I am really trying hard to get this thing off the ground. I have even enlisted the help of RESOLVE of the Bay State, although they are not coming through for me. I met a gentleman who is willing to fund me for starting a non-profit provided I can get some volunteers to make phone calls and do other random tasks for me. I cannot put together the meeting until I have at least four people committed to attending a session. I am still in research mode, so lease bear with me while i try to start this from scratch. Hope to talk to you all very soon. Coming soon: My IF story... I promise it's a good read.  I just need time to sit down and think about it!

a dark poem i wrote while struggling in my IF journey

it's ok to feel dark sometimes. especially if it helps to get those feelings out onto paper...

Summer Nights

by: Susan Teeden

Silence ringing in my ears
Sweet smells of evening consume me
The unknown lurking in the shadows
I take them all in now,
hold them until the light appears again
The light that reminds me of reality
The reality that I cannot face
I crave the nightfall to stay with me

Copyright ©2009 Susan Teeden

A definite "must read"...

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/66949/how_infertility_affects_a_marriage.html?cat=41

STARTING A SUPPORT GROUP IN RHODY (RHODE ISLAND, FOR THOSE OF YOU NOT FROM HERE)

Greetings to everyone in the infertile world! :)

I just wanted to announce that I am planning on starting a twice monthly group meeting in Providence for anyone interested in learning how to cope with infertility, manage emotions, keep on top of your marriage and learn new ways of increasing your success rates during IF treatment. 

Let me tell you a bit about myself...

I am a 37 y/o woman that has been dealing with primary infertility for about 6 years. I was diagnosed with endometriosis at age 20 but none of my medical professionals along the way bothered to tell me that endometriosis may affect my ability to conceive later in life. Well it did. I suffered years of emotional and physical pain trying to conceive. I have endured needles, pills, miscarriages, failed IF cycles, you name it, I did it.  My marriage suffered and my relationships with my friends and family were negatively impacted by this.

Soooo... what I hope to accomplish with starting this support group is making sure we can all get together and talk about our fears and pain and frustrations before they end up consuming us. These sessions will not be conducted in a stuffy, depressing atmosphere. I plan on incorporating fun and humor into all of our meetings. Snacks and beverages will be provided Single women and couples are all welcome. Start date to be announced pending the amount of recruits! Please respond to my blog if you are interested, or email me at satsac14@gmail.com

Pass the word!

Best of luck on your journeys to becoming parents.

Susan