Patience at the Impatient Patient has set up a virtual world tour of the infertility/pg loss community. You can go to the world tour page and click on the links to see a photo tour of the world. I wanted to do two places–Maryland (where I live) and a series of beaches in Virginia that make me happy. Since they’re in quick driving distance by American standards, I thought I could include them in the tour.

A restaurant I enjoy at Virginia Beach–Mizuno. It didn’t feel like a tour of the space without at least a passing reference to food…

Now go fly back up to the top of this post and catch another leg of the journey around the world.

While we were driving home, my daughter announced that she knew how babies were made.

“Really?” I asked, turning onto another road and thinking about the time I let her read one of my infertility books while I snapped pictures as a joke. I assumed since she’s still in diapers that she was also illiterate. Perhaps she had absorbed more than I realized about FSH and LH. Then there was the time that I made her the uterus hat…but that’s a long tale… “Tell me about it.”

“Well, first the mommy says, ‘I want a baby.’ So she goes to a garden and she plants a seed. She pours water on it with a watering can. I have a watering can. I have a green watering can. Mommy, can we play with my watering can?”

“And what happens next?”

“Sometimes the baby doesn’t grow. Then the mommy cries. Waaah.”

“That’s true,” I agreed.

“You had to wait a long time for me. You cried.”

“I did,” I agreed again. “What happens next?”

“The flower grows because you pour water on it. Then a fairy waves her wand and puts the baby in the mommy’s belly. And the mommy gets a big bump. The baby is inside. Then the baby comes out and she’s a baby. Lisa has a bump and there’s a baby inside.”

“That’s right.”

“Did you know that? That Lisa has a baby inside her bump? Did you, Mommy?”

“I did, actually,” I tell her.

“What’s the name of the fairy who waved her wand and put the flower me into your belly?”

“Her name is Flora,” I answered.

“I love her.”

“I love her too because she waved her wand and put you in my belly. Can I ask you a question? Are you a mommy before you have the baby? When you’re planting the seeds?”

Laughing at me as if I’m an imbecile, “yes!” she shouted.

That sounds about right. Ah, young Jedi, you have learned well.

This is the last…sniff…roundup of the year. Next week will mark the one year anniversary and we’ll have the huge celebration roundup list. So take some time this weekend to review your assigned blog and pick out your favourite post. Oh…right…and send it to me when you’re done so I don’t hound you mid-week… It’s due July 17th so I have enough time to layout the list.

I loved making that Choose-Your-Own-Blog-Adventure post this week. It took a shitload of time, but it was totally worth it. I went to bed giddy. And now I’m going to send Sharon off on many adventures including a baby shower that goes in twenty different directions. Which means that if you are subscribed with bloglines for the Annex, you may want to cancel that account. Just so I can upload the posts backwards and make the linkage and not have the stories ruined for you.

And getting to the point of this post quickly for the first time in forever…the blogs:

Geohde at Mission: Impossible finished her last viva (oral medical exams) last week and had a great post about the final exam. As luck would have it, she got the ideal situation to diagnose for any infertile doctor-to-be: “Yesterday, one of my stations was meant to be a 20 year old woman with a ruptured ectopic pregnancy. Her opening line was that she had some tummy ache. Her facial expression was closer to severe constipation. Additionally, she was at least 50.” The post is more entertaining and informative than Grey’s Anatomy. Head over and read the whole post.

Mary Ellen at Our IVF Journey has a very moving post about this last cycle. She is the little engine that could–so many of us are little engines that could. And you need to read this post because while it mourns this last loss, it also celebrates the road ahead. The determination of a couple who will become parents because they are charting their own path and knocking out the obstacles in their way. Mary Ellen has a beautiful thought in the middle of the post: “We know that we have a much better chance with donor, especially since I have gotten pregnant twice in 4 cycles, and that once we hold our baby for the first time, DNA just isn’t going to matter. Besides, BT and the insanely high risk of IF and recurrent pregnancy loss is something that we wouldn’t wish on our worst enemy, let alone our child. We believe that it was not meant to be passed on, and while our child may have issues with the fact that they are donor concieved despite our best efforts to give them a happy and stable home life, they will likely never know the pain and torture of infertility and recurrent miscarriage and never have to worry about passing this horrendous genetic disorder onto their children. I know that I could have never forgiven myself if I had to watch our child go through what we have been through.” And that’s why she is already a mother in my book: she cares for her not-yet baby so much that she is willing to do anything to bring him or her safely into this world. And that is a pretty amazing thing to read.

There is still time to hop on-board for the Impatient Patient’s World Tour which debuts this upcoming Monday. Even if you don’t put your hometown on the map, click around to see everywhere from California to Tasmania. How do you join the world tour? Simple! Read this post and follow the handy directions: write a post/add photos, email Patience a link to the post, and she will upload the link on the World Tour page. So go run around town and take photos. And travel from the comfort of your computer on Monday (you may want to email Patience or leave her a comment if you plan on joining along so she can guesstimate how many links will be coming in).

And a new feature: Line-of-the-Week. The line that made me spit out my coffee when I started laughing: “They said you were crazy. You were, kid. Just crazy enough” (from Infertile Fantasies).

Goodbye first year of the Roundup. 52 posts, several hundred blogs, and a lot of great writing. Meet back here next week to kick off a new year of Roundup with a linky list of love.

Was this the best use of my time last night? Perhaps not. But it made me really happy. Hopefully, all the story paths will work (I was a little tired and started forgetting whether or not Sharon knew certain information in each path). All I know is that there will be many more Choose-Your-Own-Blog-Adventure stories in the future because making this kicked ass. There are many possibilities, so keep returning to the beginning and going on a new adventure.

You know the drill–you get to choose Sharon Barren’s destiny (because while it was always fun that the series was in second person, most of us have enough problems in our life without taking on those of Sharon Barren) in this choose-your-own-adventure post. At the end of each section, there is red text that contains two choices. Click on one and continue on your way until you hit the next set of choices. This post won’t make sense unless you choose because the rest of the story is contained on different posts. You need to choose. Choose, damnit! You can always start over at the beginning and choose a new adventure.

Sharon Barren, five foot two and a ninja at heart, was driving home from her neighbourhood fertility clinic, IUI dreams dancing in her little head. Her E2 was 869 pg/ml and she was triggering that night. There had only been 3 follicles, which was less than what she wanted considering what she had gone through to make them, but it was better than the one mega follicle she had produced in past stim cycles.

She had enough time to treat herself at the local Starbucks and stop at home before she had to get to work. She wasn’t sure she really needed the calories from a dulce de leche latte, but a treat sure sounded tempting…

• If you want Sharon to stop at the Starbucks, click here.
• If you want Sharon to continue back to her house, click here.

I could make an appointment with my local therapist to deal with all my frustrations of this latest chapter in the trying-to-get-a-baby-to-form/stay-in-my-uterus chronicles, or I could just make a film for the upcoming IIFF and deal with those emotions that way. The IIFF is not only free (whereas my therapist charges me a $20 copay and makes me drive a half hour), but you have the chance to win fabulous prizes this time. It may be possible to work through my fears about loss and missed chances AND win a bottle of Love Juice.*

I spent yesterday afternoon working on the music to the sequel of Mother Earth’s Flower Shop. It is called “The Gardener Knows” and it explains loss in simple to understand terms that are appropriate for both a child and your idiot Aunt Jane who tells you to just try again because it wasn’t a real baby.

It is really hard to sing it. I’m not just talking about the fact that it is completely out of my range and you’re going to hear a bit of the old warble when you listen. It’s because I made it general enough to refer to both a failed cycle and pregnancy loss. To all the hope you plant in the ground that never springs up to life.

Frank at PostSecret has a message up this week about why he took a brief break from the Secrets Project. A person asked him if his absence was the beginning of the end and he responded, “It’s not the beginning of the end of PostSecret. But maybe it is the end of the beginning.”

I am not taking a break from blogging (you can’t get rid of me that easily!), but there is a sense emotionally that I’ve come to the end of the beginning with this round of trying to conceive. Josh said that I’ve sounded down in many of my recent posts and I haven’t even posted the ones that I felt were too morose, though I am considering working backwards and posting one of them later this week to (1) take it out of my drafts folder and (2) cut myself loose of it. I have been down. I’ve been really frustrated. I’ve felt very much strangled by time and money and people not moving fast enough. I yelled at a poor nurse at my doctor’s office today because she was still focusing on the timing of this progesterone test and I exploded with, “isn’t it indicative of a larger problem than just progesterone if I’m not ovulating regularly? I. Don’t. Have. Time. For. This.”

It literally comes down to the fact that I can’t sense what will happen next. When I was finishing college, I knew that grad school came next. And if it wasn’t grad school, I was going to take the year to live on a kibbutz in Israel. I knew what the future looked like and while my first choice was definitely my first choice, my second choice made me happy too.

Since my first choice to conceive at home hasn’t been coming true, it is time to move onto my second choice. And this is where it gets murkier–is it better to spend the money on IVF or adoption? How will we pay for this? How will it affect the family?

I wish that my life was like a little advent calendar working my way towards holding that child. And I could just peek behind all the doors and see a little glimpse of the future. And know whether I’m on the right path (this hypothetical advent calendar would be more like a choose-your-own-adventure path to the goal with the ability to flip a few pages ahead and know if the choice you’re making is going to bring you to the prize or towards some horrible end forcing you to start over at the beginning yet again).

I wish I knew if I was making the right choices. Where is my Disney-issued fairy godmother when I need her?

*It’s not too late to enter and make a film. We just started this new cartoon last night. You could make a film that is a montage of pictures set to music in one evening. Come on…join. Don’t you want a little Love?