Happy almost blogoversary day to meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Thank you for agreeing to participate in (1) more of my harebrained ideas and (2) my totally undeserved celebration (or…more accurately, we all deserve an international, online celebration so we should all beg for one every once in a while).

So here is a rundown of the week (since some activities require forethought and preparation).

The festivities kick off on June 18th with invisible booze at the Virtual Lushary. Come, drink imaginary drinks, and read what everyone has been up to since the last open bar. This is a great way to pick up lots of points for the Commentathon (see below): just follow bar comments back to the author’s blog and read a new story. Or two. Or eighty. And leave a comment. And count that as a point.

The Commentathon will take place over the course of the entire week. Our aim is to spread the love over the blogosphere by collectively leaving 1000 comments. This is how it will work: (1) beginning June 13th, people can “register” and tell me a comment goal for the week. Be realistic, but pledge how many comments you will give out during the week. For every comment you leave on someone’s blog, you get one point. For every comment you return that was left on your blog (in other words, someone leaves a comment on your blog and you go to their blog and return the favour by leaving a comment. We’ll call these “double back” comments), you get two points. So, let’s say that you pledge 10 points per day, you may leave 6 comments as well as return 2 comments for a total of 10 points. (2) starting June 18th, keep track of how many comments you leave over the course of the day. Each morning, send me a note to thetowncriers@gmail.com and let me know how many comments you wrote on infertility and pregnancy loss blogs* the day before. Again, every comment counts as one point and every double-back comment counts as two points. So keep track of how many points you have daily. This is, of course, done on an honour system. (3) keep track and send in numbers until June 25th (there will be three “catch-up” days that you can use from the 26th–28th if you’re away between the 18th–25th). (4) we’ll see if we can write 1000 comments as a community over the course of the week. (5) the highest commentors will be announced and awarded on the 29th during the blog roundup.

Secret Public Ode Day will fall on the 21st. This one takes a bit of preplanning too. Choose another blogger and write a paragraph about how much their blog means to you. How you’ve found inspiration in their words or how their point-of-view has made your journey or coping strategies a little better. You can reference (and link to) specific posts or simply speak about their blog in general. Email me the paragraph with a link to the blog some time between today and June 20th. I will post all of them on the 21st. You will never know who wrote the paragraph about you so don’t even ask. Just bask in the love and know how much you’ve changed someone else’s world. This is sort of in that vein that people never take the time to say nice things about a person for when they’re alive and can enjoy the compliments. Moreso, this is a reminder that even though you may think your blog is expendable, people would be very sad if you ever took it down or stopped writing. If you have the energy, write more than one paragraph and send them to me! Make sure you also try to write about the smaller blogs you read that people may not know about yet.

On my actual blogoversary, the 25th, we will hold the Great Cake Day. Bake or buy a decadent dessert, but take a photo for your blog pre-consumption (or during consumption. But it’s just a tease if you post a picture of an empty plate with a few crumbs and a grubby fork). Post your picture and sent me the url for the post. I’ll make a massive list of everyone eating cake on the same day across the world. If you live in the same city as many other bloggers, set up a date to get together and consume cake together. Or if you live in the middle of Kansas and you’re the only stirrup queen for miles, proudly chow down on your chocolate cake alone (though, you’re not really alone because everyone else is chowing down on their cake and talking about it online so it feels like we’re all together at an enormous international party). If you bake your cake, post the recipe too. Or if you buy your dessert from a fantastic bakery that everyone should know about, provide a link in case someone else lives in your city too.

I had a few other ideas, but I fear that the week will be too packed so I may hold off and do a few more things later in the summer. So…that’s the schedule. I’ll post registration for the Commentathon in mid-June. But right now, you can get started on your ode to another blogger for Secret Public Ode day. Or two bloggers. Or, 50 bloggers if you have the energy. Send them along once you write them and I’ll start compiling them into a post.

* Infertility and pregnancy loss is a simplistic name that encompasses any blog related to infertility, treatments, living child-free, adoption, GBLT assisted reproduction, donor gametes, secondary infertility, pregnancy loss, pregnancy-after-infertility, and parenting-after-infertility
(as well as any other categories I inadvertently left off the list).

At the same time, we’ve already composed the music and are writing the lyrics for our entry in the next International Infertility Film Festival. It has a seasonal theme and all I can say right now is that our four verses each cover a different season.

Josh: Melissa–get off the computer and stop talking to yourself.

Watch the film here

Yuck

When my new OB handed me my new prescription for Prometrium, he mentioned that he prefers patients to take it orally.

“Oh…,” I said, trying to decipher his handwriting on the script. I was wracking my brain to remember what Kris wrote about the different progesterones. “So they make an oral progesterone now?”

“It’s the same one,” he told me. “You can either use it as a suppository or ingest it. I prefer patients to ingest it. I think it works better that way.”

No offense, but there are things that belong in your hoohaa and there are things that belong in your mouth. And with a single exception, there is nothing that belongs in both places. You don’t put milk-soaked cheerios in your vagina so why should you slip progesterone down your throat?

Am I the only person in the world completely nauseated of the idea of putting something I once thought of as a suppository in my mouth?

Side Effects

I know this is silly because it’s only 81 mg, but I thought that one of the side effects of taking a daily baby aspirin would be that I would never get headaches. It would be a preventative painkiller. It would blot out the pre-cramps that signal an upcoming period.

It doesn’t really work like that.

At all.

Bell Ringing

This is the worst part about knowledge: you don’t know until you have it that you really didn’t want it. And at that point, it’s too late to unring the bell. After many weeks of thinking about temping and forgetting to temp, my new OB’s request to run a new day-21 progesterone test was the perfect reason to pop the thermometer back in my mouth. That number dictated my whole mood for the day.

And this is what I learned after all of those months of having 30-day cycles and thinking that things had somehow normalized with my cycles: I didn’t ovulate when I had the right cervical mucous. I ovulated many days later on day-21. My temperatures hovered right above the coverline. My LP ended after 9 days. So much for a perfect 30-day cycle.

I want my new OB to run day-3 blood work for me.

Do I really want to know the results knowing that I can’t unring the bell once I see my FSH level?

What does the hope buy me if I end up learning down the line that it was paste instead of diamonds?

In another month, it will be my first blogoversary (June 25th). I know, I know, these blogs grow up so fast. Just the other day it was a little toddler, asking questions about the worst thing anyone has ever said to you in regards to infertility and now it’s a surly teenager, stealing cigarettes from the local 7-11 and drinking beer under the bleachers.
Um…

And I know that everyone’s blog turns a year old at some point. I know that many people have blogs that are two, three, or even four. But almost 500 posts in a first year feels like it’s cause for celebration.

Why do I deserve a week of festivities when my blog is no more special than anyone else’s blog? Because I’m asking for it. It’s not that I’m more deserving–it’s just that I have the chutzpah to ask. And the other reason is that while my blog is my own thoughts and feelings, I have always seen it more as a public space–a public living room sans crap bucket or a bar that serves virtual drinks. So it’s really a celebration of all of us–an entire community of men and women who are bonded together by a simple pomegranate-coloured thread.

What do you think? Will you eat cake and comment and join in whatever hairbrained activities I think up for this week-long celebration? Consider this a pre-party RSVP to find out if anyone would even be willing to eat cake. Online. At the same time. Before I spend more time coming up with ideas of how we can virtually come together for a week-long love fest.

So…now back to your regularly scheduled round-up:

Julie at A Little Pregnant had a wonderful post this week called “Worth It” where she muses about the idea of stopping the process of adding to her family. When she talks about how enticing it is to simply stop, people assume she means that she is seeing the benefits to being done with babyhood–a sweet time, but definitely a hard time. But it isn’t that. It’s the idea of being finished with trying to conceive–the roller coaster of emotions and the difficult decisions. For those who haven’t had trouble conceiving, they overlook the stress of conception and only consider the diapers and bottles and cracked nipples and sleeplessness. But for those who need to clear the hurdle of conception or carrying first? It’s a minefield that few have the tenacity to walk across again and again. And yet, when you know what you’ll miss by not walking through that minefield to the other side? It is enough to break your heart as you stand in place. Sending good thoughts to you as you suss this out.

Asheggy at The Spirit of Magnolia had a post this week about letting go of a dream. Even when you are 1000 kinds of excited to adopt, there still is a mourning process that takes place as you shut the book on pregnancy. As a step in that mourning process, Asheggy placed her fertility monitor for sale on Ebay. And felt liberated by having this reminder out of her house. Until…she went to the hospital to visit a friend who just gave birth and the wave of nevers toppled over her: “As I looked at “R” I just couldn’t stand the fact that ‘THAT WOULD NEVER BE ME!‘ I would never carry a baby to term. I would never be in a maternity ward delivering a baby. I would never be blessed with a labor/delivery experience.” It is a very moving post.

Peep at Conflicted is moving onto her first egg donor cycle. In a post this week, she has a paragraph that moved me beyond belief: “Anyway, we are moving on to a donor egg. I am excited about it. Maybe I am in denial but I think I have had long enough to roll it over in my mind and now I am ok with it. I told my husband the other day that one day this precious little girl (?) is going to walk up to us and say mommy, daddy …something cute… and we are going to be glad my eggs sucked because we wouldn’t have THIS one! I know it’s corny and way too positive but that is where I am at now and I have to do what it takes to be at peace with not having a genetic child.” I love that idea that if all the other cycles had worked, you wouldn’t have that child (either now or in the future). Okay, so I wish these cycles would work, but it’s also a gorgeous thought.

Jay at Making Cakes the Hard Way has this melancholy little post this week that I loved. It starts with a description of what so many of us feel at some point or anot
her on this journey: “At the risk of sounding like I’m having a mid-life crisis (I’m not, but that would probably be easier to define), at the moment I feel like I’m stuck in a strange sort of existential limbo. Neither here nor there; not finished with doing something, but not started with the next thing either; not really anywhere solid, safe nor secure.” The entry then continues into a brilliant analogy between trying to conceive and moving to a new house. And you need to read the whole thing to get it, but I promise that you’re going to be nodding along and saying, “so true.”

Lastly, in a blogosphere that is known for desiring a positive, Adrienne at Max’s Mommy explains why a negative can sometimes be a good thing. It’s a thought that has gone through the pregnancy loss journals from time to time (Tina recently had a similar thought on the Waiting Blilt). But it’s a beautiful post about answered prayers that keep a woman from going through another loss. It always moves me when I read something that expands my understanding of life and death and the whispered prayers that fall in between.

So there were three big winners of last week’s guessing game. Somewhat Ordinary, Bea and Karen each got four out of five correct. So you have won this nifty sidebar icon for your blog as well as bragging rights until the next Guess-That-Blogger Roundup. And everyone else in the roundup should grab the roundup icon to add to your post as well. If you want it. No pressure.

So…
In closing…
Your tasks in this order:
1. Send a pre-RSVP whether you would participate in a week of blogoversary festivities if I came up with a week of activities.
2. Read these incredible blog posts above and leave the author a comment.
3. If you live in the U.S., have a wonderful holiday weekend.