If you’re here for the Creme de la Creme, it’s the post below this one. I also have a hotlinked icon in the top left corner of the blog with the date and time of the last update. Entries are still coming in and the list will continue to be updated as new ones are added. Check back frequently…

Night Before:

I’ve been thinking a lot lately that I’d like to live in a sitcom opening credits–you know, that pre-show theme song where you see the characters going through their zany lives, rolling their eyes as the cat climbs into the coffee pot and they’re drinking hairball decaf yet again or crossing their arms over their chest to indicate that they are having yet another argument with their bonehead husband.

Since I can’t exist in a continuous loop of crazy antics set to music (yet), I’d like to at least have a theme song that follows me wherever I go, making everyone who interacts with me feel as if they are in a movie.

I’ve chosen something that is happy and light–I actually heard it for the first time when we went to see Juno yesterday during the independent movie theater’s version of the 20. I am still trying to wrap my mind around where I stand with Juno, but when this little Christmas song by Mindy Smith came on, I turned to Josh and said, “this song would be perfect for the opening credits of my sonohystogram.”

In order to fully enjoy this post, you should open another copy of my blog in a new tab or window, click on this link, make sure the song is set to “It Really is a Wonderful Life” (second one down on the playlist), click play, and then come back here to hear about the actual saline sonogram.

See, it’s nice, right? I know she’s singing about being in love on Christmas, but I like to believe that my examination room is filled with love. Love for my husband (who probably will be in the waiting room tomorrow because…I mean, does he really need to see pictures of the inside of my uterus?). Love for my RE. Love for the technology that is going to put a baby in my belly despite my somewhat higher FSH and 9-day luteal phase.

It’s the night before the actual procedure and I imagine tomorrow will be like this: blue birds will flit around the sonogram machine, snow will be lightly falling outside the window, we’ll all be drinking hot chocolate during the procedure (and I’ll get a little teary as I see my fibroid-free uterus. Um…please be fibroid free, uterus), and sparkles will be issuing from the extra large sanitary pad that will be waiting patiently for me in my panties to catch all of that saline solution as it drips out in a three-hour-long pee.

Oh…and this song will be playing in the background as we gaily think as the catheter is inserted that it really is a wonderful life…

The Day Of:

I’ve been made dumb by iodine.

I had some really brilliant thoughts prior to the procedure–even some saucy commentary on the episode of Martha they were televising in the waiting room about babies and pregnant women (right next to the poster asking parents to refrain from bringing their existing children to the clinic out of consideration for other patients). But I didn’t write them down and now it’s almost as if the iodine didn’t just make my vagina spanking sweet and sanitized, but it also washed away anything I was trying to remember from this morning.

I am a firm believer that procedures would hurt less if my RE strolled into the examination room in his snappy little white coat and said, “Melly, this is going to hurt like a mofo.” If he said that, I would brace myself for the pain and say afterwards, “that really wasn’t so bad” rather than having it the other way around. He tells me it won’t hurt a bit and I say okay and he starts the procedure and I have the cramping. Which either makes him condescending or a liar. Whereas telling me it will hurt MORE than it will actually hurt would make him compassionate or a liar.

I think a good rule of thumb is catheter=discomfort. I have yet to have a catheter threaded through my cervix and walked away saying, “that felt good” or even “I barely felt it.” I feel catheters and that could be due to my own uterus and not a fact of catheters. But I’m willing to bet that most people feel some discomfort when something is going through their cervix so I think we can equate catheter to the first rung on the discomfort ladder. In other words, once a catheter comes into the picture, you step up onto the first rung.

Because they’re going to also use a speculum and swab around and inject a foreign fluid into your uterus, you can take it up a notch to the second rung. So I would rate the saline sonogram a two out of ten.

It’s HSG lite in all respects. It gives you less information from an HSG and it’s less painful than an HSG and it’s less helpful than an HSG.

And it’s now over and I’m home and dripping and trying to concentrate on the work I need to get done. My uterus was fibroid and polyp free. A gorgeous oval. And while sparkles did not issue from the large sanitary napkin already strategically-placed on the panties, I did get to see a tiny black-lake-of-a-uterus fill with twinkling white bubbles as he injected in the saline. My theme song cued up in my head and even though my RE was concentrating on the screen and the sonographer assistant was pursing her lips and doing her best to ignore my cheerful exclamations of “yay!” and “polyp free in 2008!,” it really is a wonderful life when you can say hello to your reproductive organs on the small screen.

Of course, my reproductive organs are still reaching for the stars. Today, it’s a sonogram screen, but tomorrow, it could be the Silver Screen.

Fade to black…

The Creme de la Creme of 2007
good enough to drink

Other prizes honour only a small handful of blogs. Forget that! We’ve expanded the idea of presenting “the best” to include a post from every blog in the infertility/pregnancy loss/adoption world. This includes those who are the beginning of their journey to those who are in the middle of a hard-won pregnancy to those who are parenting after adoption. Listed below are the best posts of 2007. If you have a blog that chronicles your experience with infertility, pregnancy loss, adoption, or life afterwards and you’re not on this list, send a link of your best post from 2007 to and I’ll add your blog*. In the meantime, happy reading! And leaving a comment on these older posts is not a “may I?” but a “please do.” Comments are how an author knows their words are appreciated.

Tomorrow I will put out the Creme de la Creme list of 2007. I’ve been working on it all day and I just wrote the blurb for the final post that came in by the due date. I still need to lay out the list and create all the links–a feat that will probably take a few hours this afternoon or tomorrow morning. But I hope to also get to the posts that came in after that December 23rd deadline. And I hope that more posts come in starting tomorrow when people read the list and decide that they also want their blog represented.

I know I chose to create this list and I certainly wasn’t hired for it, but it still is an honour to be in the position of putting this list together. I have spent the last few weeks laughing and crying and sitting silently in awe and interrupting Josh’s work to read him various lines and sometimes full posts.

For some of you, these posts are one of the only reminders you have of a child lost and I handle those posts with the dignity and gravity of an actual child. I am honoured to get to hold those words; even just for a few minutes. For others, these posts are the containment of the ultimate celebration–the double lines or the long-awaited adoption or the child you never thought would arrive. And those too are just as important and cherished. I’m thankful that you passed them my way.

I feel silly being so emotional about a blog post, but I think you all understand what I mean. The Creme de la Creme is a yearbook of sorts–even if you’ve been in school all year, you still look forward to getting that book in May and reflecting on the year as a whole. In between all the words and pictures are the other stories–the bloggers who appear in the comments and the people who have slipped away from their stories and the friends that were made along the way.

And this list, for me, is an explanation. A counterbalance to the way infertility, pregnancy loss, and adoption are portrayed in the media. It is a greater version of reality. It is 133+ points-of-view. It is what I would hand another person if they wanted to understand the enormity of what is felt along the way–mostly because sometimes we need others to put into words what we couldn’t and they need our thoughts as well.

Thank you for trusting me with your posts. Thank you for helping create this list. I can’t wait for it to be finished and up for your reading pleasure.

Happy New Year.

There are children mentioned in this post.

Why do I always do a “children mentioned” disclaimer at the top of the post or in the title line? Someone asked me that recently. She wanted to know if I felt like I had to apologize for having children. She is not (as far as I know) a regular reader. Regular readers know that I don’t apologize for having children–having children is the single goal we all share (there are other goals too, but you know what I mean). Even if I hadn’t worked hard and conceived the twins through fertility treatments, I still would never feel as if I had to apologize for them.

Children are not apologies–even in the IF world.

This is what it’s like: children exist. I know that children exist and I will see them daily. I know people will get pregnant and have to tell me their happy news. That’s life. People are going to get pregnant and people are going to have children even when I can’t.

When someone has a pregnancy announcement to give me, I expect them to tell me. That is the way life works–sometimes people give you news when you’re not in a space to hear it and you have to listen and respond. The reality is that I haven’t been in a space to hear it for the last six years. I know, I know, logically, I thought I’d be in a different space with it once I had the twins. But that didn’t happen for me. I still dread pregnancy announcements. Call me small and petty–it’s fine. I own that.

It is never the fact that they have to tell me the news–I get that I live in a world where people will have to either let me know they are pregnant or treat me like a pariah. Since I prefer not to be treated like a pariah, I will hear pregnancy announcements. It’s how they tell me. I am desperately in love with people who send me an email that gives me their news and maybe even give a nod to the fact that hearing that news may be hard for me for a moment or two. After I get those emails, I take a moment to think and then I pick up the phone and call that person with genuine excitement. It’s really simple to get me quickly over my hump and into the land of congratulations.

Not so much loving the people who wait until we’re face-to-face and then drop the news on me while handing me sonogram pictures and then spending the rest of the time telling me about the pregnancy while pointing out how freaked out they were about trying because of my story but how it wasn’t hard for them at all. I wish I were joking, but I actually heard this speech a few times this year with my favourite being the friend who told me that she was so lucky that she didn’t have to do treatments because if she ended up with twins she would “shoot herself in the head” and I had to politely tell her that we didn’t consider our twins to be a horrific burden and if she could excuse me for a moment, I had a bathroom I needed to cry in.

I used to teach business writing and part of what I tried to convey to students is this concept of a “you” attitude which is that you go into every piece of writing trying to make the receiver feel as if their feelings are more important than your own (even if internally you know that your freakin’ feelings are more important). There are ways to word things–even unpleasant things where you need to tell someone that you can’t give them what they want–where the focus and thoughtfulness is on the “you.”

It all goes back to power. We all have power–regardless of whether or not we believe it. Every business has the power to make the customer feel as if they aren’t being dismissed and every person has the power to make the person they are interacting with feel as if they aren’t being dismissed.

The problem with a blog is that you don’t know who is reading. You could be happily pregnant or you could have just received a negative. I don’t know. So you could make the argument that it is impossible to have a You-Attitude with a blog. And beyond that, this blog is my own thoughts and my own reactions so why should I take anyone else’s feelings into account?

Because we’re human and we can.

So I put “children mentioned” at the top of the post or in the title line so you know that I am mindful that not everyone is in a space to read about children. It is no reflection on my children; it is merely a fact of where you are in your life. And I put that label out there so you can skip over what you need to skip. Hopefully, if you do skip it, you come back to read it at another point, but perhaps you can’t, and that is okay too. You need to do what you need to do to get through this and I need to write what I need to write so I don’t explode. And these two ideas can co-exist peacefully with one another if we keep that level of mindfulness in our interactions.

A long explanation to get to the point except the explanation is part of the point.

The ChickieNob learned a little while ago how much power she has through her words and when she is not getting what she wants, she will lash out by saying what she knows will hurt the other person the most. She had just finished shouting out the thing she always shouts at me and we were having a talk about how we express our anger.

I said to her: “I want to raise a daughter who uses words that help because she can; and not a daughter who uses words that hurt because she can.”

The operative words, of course, are “because she can.” Because we can. We all do have that power to make another person feel wonderful with our words or make another person feel terrible with our words regardless of the news we have to impart. Pregnancy announcements are like injections. There are some that are given with care and thought and while they may sting for a moment as they go in, they are over with quickly and life moves on. And because life moves on, you think about that injection in a certain way–you’re proud of yourself that you made it through it. You’re relieved that it wasn’t as bad as you feared. You can even laugh at it and turn the Follistim vial into a work of art.

There are other injections–either because the giver doesn’t know some piece of information (like allowing the alcohol to dry before you inject) or because they’re given carelessly, that not only burn while going in, but burn emotionally afterwards.

So all injections sting–but some remain on your mind long after the needle is in the sharps box and others are forgotten because they caused no lasting damage.

No one has it in their power to be so skilled with the needle or words that they never cause pain. It just isn’t feasible. But we do have it in our power to try to be skillful. Because we can. I recognize that every time I open my mouth to speak or set down my fingers to type, I have this unbelievable power to make my words help or hurt. Or remain neutral. But usually, help or hurt. As does everyone else who interacts with me, including the ChickieNob. They have the power to produce words that help or hurt.

So…my New Years Resolution this year: to go through the year, regardless of my personal mood, with a “you” attitude in my interactions and the mindfulness to use my words to help because I can. A tall order, but resolutions are supposed to be tall orders. If not, what would we have to bitch about come February?

And on a larger note, since I have come to be extremely frustrated during the month of December by people who were obviously raised by people who didn’t teach them this lesson, to impart this way of interacting with people to the ChickieNob and Wolvog. It is more than teaching please and thank you. It is teaching a child how much they can affect
another person’s life and to guide them towards bettering the world–not just in the recycling cans or helping a little old lady cross the street sort of way. But a simple mindfulness before acting or speaking with a consideration of how your actions or words may affect the other person. If I do that, if few people will say later in life that the ChickieNob or Wolvog hurt them, I’ll feel like I did a good job.

I am terrible with goodbyes–even if I’m saying goodbye to some inanimate and a human construct such as time (or in this case, a year). But goodbye 2007. You were this really strange mix of the sublime and the suckage. And I’m just grateful for the time; grateful for all of you; grateful for what I have and for what will come.

Do you hear that? Shhhhhh… It’s the sound of thousands of keyboards at rest.

Do you remember the MTV show The State? It was a sketch variety show and on one episode, they had a scene of two teenagers making out with their hormones dancing around in the background. The guy finishes, his hormones finish, and the girl’s hormones are left dancing around by themselves like, “hey, I thought we were partying.”

That’s sort of what this time is like for non-Christians. And I wish there was a way to add an emoticon smiley face to that last sentence so you know that I meant it tongue-in-cheek without having a blog post look like an email.

I’m up; I’m partying; this week is simply the final week in December for me (just as whichever day Rosh HaShanah falls on the calendar is simply another day of the week for you). But it is a huge one for you. So I understand that your hormones…um…typing fingers…have eggnog glasses to grip and you don’t have time to write blog entries while Uncle Richard is peering over your shoulder at the computer saying, “what does BFN mean? Brisket for noshing? Birds find nettles? Best forgotten, no? Burnt fingers notwithstanding?”

Um…feel free to add your own favourite reworking for BFN as spoken by generic Uncle Richard…

To ensure that this post is as long and rambling as all other roundup posts, I’d like to write for a moment about why I love the roundup. I started doing this almost a year and a half ago and I think I’ve only missed a week or two since its conception. Have you ever been to the movies alone and when you walk out, you want to talk about it with everyone, but you can’t because they haven’t seen it yet and they’ll never get how cool the plotline was or how surprising you found the ending. And it’s a huge buzz kill.

I feel that way sometimes when I’m reading a blog entry. I read it and I immediately want to talk about it with everyone, but then you see that only one other person has commented. It’s not a reflection on the quality of the post–it’s just the reality of the system. A finite amount of readers are divided into an infinite amount of blogs. New blogs pop up daily and it’s hard to keep up with the sheer amount of writing going on in the blogosphere. So there are thousands of these writers, putting out brilliant thoughts online and you stumble onto them, read them, and then you want to talk about it. With everyone.

Hence the roundup.

So thank you, everyone, for writing incredibly cool posts that make me think or remind me of something I went through myself or put into words what I have been unable to put into words.

And now, a small sample of the brilliance I read this week:

I was laughing so hard that I literally couldn’t breathe when I read this post at Flotsam. I had to keep walking away from the computer and then walking back and finally, I had to call Josh over to read it aloud to me. We spent the whole week repeating to each other that Shmutzli is covered in lard and soot. Easily identifiable if he comes here with his sack…

Io at Who Shot My Stork has a post about her sister coming into town for the week and why she hasn’t told her yet about her struggles with infertility. She writes: “I don’t think I’m ready to share my heartbreak with her. I’ve always looked up to my sister and wanted to by just like her when I was a kid. I stole her clothes and her books and drove her crazy. I don’t want her pity or her advice on not having kids though. After all these years of trying to be like her, I know her all too well and she would say all the wrong things.” I don’t know why, but I loved this thought–perhaps because I too am someone who worships my sister. And the twist of knowing the person you worship so well through careful observation that you also know their foibles–and still love them.

Beyond the fact that she has a really pretty picture of her tree (and I’m a sucker for Christmas trees), Meghan at A Little Sweetness has a post that made me laugh where in obsessive googling, she ends up back on her own site. This has never happened to me, though others have sometimes ended up at Operation Heads Up during googling and told me so (which is the point, I guess, of OHU). Go over and read the post and then leave your own googling story of whether you’ve ever reached the end of the Internet.

Lastly, I loved this post at Murphy is a Bastard chronicling all the things she will teach her child when she is a mother. Not only the useful: “Always check your knickers are not tucked into your skirt before leaving the bathroom” but also the profound: “Have your own sense of style.” I hope she gets to pass along these lessons soon.

I mentioned it in the Lost and Found, but it bears repeating again. Jenna at Epiblog is urging all of us to take out our activism fingers and do something that will only take a few minutes from your day but will make a big difference in a lot of lives. (1) Watch this video. Each time you watch it, a donation is made to Autism Speaks. (2) Tell others about the video either by posting it on message boards or writing about it on your own blog. (3) Leave the filmmakers a comment on their film post (it’s easy, just scroll down the page under the film and you’ll see a box where you can leave a comment). Three things–10 minutes from your day tops–and you’ll do a world of good for another family. See, don’t you feel better already?

Have a wonderful weekend. I will be Creming–a new verb I designed for reading through all of the Creme de la Creme posts. Or blurbing. I’m writing blurbs. I’m blurbing. Mad, crazy blurbing skills. You will be thinking up thousands of new permutations for BFN…