Taking a break from making applesauce for Chanukkah (how does applesauce fit into the meal, the non-Jewish reader asks? On top of the latkes!) to clean up the side bar a bit and make it more readable. All the write-up titles flowed into one another so I divided them with numbers.

I added two links that aren’t on the blog. One is a hormone level chart (from Fertilityplus) under “diagnosis” and the other is a beta chart (from betabase) under miscellaneous. Both seem like helpful links to have handy.

There are a bunch of new write-ups including unexplained infertility (thank you, Jackie) and questions for a high-risk OB (thank you, Tina). Tina wanted more eyes on her list to make sure she wasn’t forgetting anything important. If you’ve been to a high-risk OB (MFM specialist), head over to her post and see if you have anything to add.

Keep those write-ups coming…

My side bar keeps growing and growing in length. It is now longer than the posts. I find that very amusing. I think it was adding so many write-ups to Operation Heads Up (by the way, if you have any topics to add to Operation Heads Up, let me know. I would love to have a bunch of international adoption ones geared towards specific countries since the process varies from place to place–anyone want to jump in and start one?).

I also added a new poll, but it’s so far down the side bar that I’m not sure how many people have seen it.

Lastly, I added a link under the big book icon for the Barren Bitches Book Tour–essentially a book club that you can do from the comfort of your own living room in the hour you choose. Go to the post to read more and send me an email or leave a comment if you want to participate. The more the merrier.

And now, the blogs…

Serenity had a great post this week about conversations at parties. Obviously, if you’re doing treatments or in the middle of the adoption process, it’s on your mind. Yet no one talks about it. You see people at parties and they ask how you’re doing and what do you say? You feel like you’re lying if you don’t mention that last IVF attempt. But you also know that most people don’t want to see pictures of your embryos while they’re drinking that appletini at the company Christmas party. Serenity says it much better that I do, so head over and read the whole post…

Teamwinks at Are We There Yet asked an interesting question on Wednesday: why does foster-to-adopt lag behind domestic and international adoptions in terms of popularity? She has already posted a list of books about foster parenting. But it is a good question–why does it not only lag behind as “third choice” in the adoption world statistically, but it also lags behind in terms of printed material and web sites? Why isn’t there more information out there to be gathered by prospective foster parents?

I know I posted about this earlier in the week, but it’s such a good idea that it’s worth repeating. Bea at Infertile Fantasies has started an idea called 50 Good Deeds. Every week, she posts a report card chronicling the things she’s doing to give back to the world. Rather than repeat the same crappy year, she’s decided to take control of her life by giving to others. And this idea rocks. It rocks for everyone she helps along the way, it rocks for Bea who is turning around her life, and it rocks for every person who is motivated by her great idea to go out and get involved.

Vee at The Sweet Life has been having a hard week–she went to her friend’s mother’s funeral this week and her own mother is ill. She also had a very moving comment in the center of one of her posts this week. She writes about holding a friend’s new baby: “Everyone was oohing and aahhing and they kept throwing in the ‘oh he looks exactly like his father.’ Which he did but one thing I have learnt was never say who the baby looks like because you just never know. I know for a fact that they didn’t use a donor it was an accident, yeah one of those. But I know if I can avoid any pain that any future donor mum or dad have to go through then I will. Even if it is as simple as not mentioning who the baby looks like, not unless the mother or father mention it anyway.” I’ve been thinking about this for a while and the whole biology game and the importance people seem to put on a child looking like their parents. I know I’m guilty of doing this too and it’s something I’ve tried to be conscious about not doing once I realized how those comments would sting if we go ahead with adoption (see, even stirrup queens need to be taught). When I first met my husband’s grandfather, I commented that they both had the same hands. And when my son was born, the tradition continued. He was named after Josh’s grandfather and he has the hands of his father and great-grandfather. It’s something I think about a lot now as we look at adoption. And weighing whether seeing those hands again matters (as if it’s entirely up to me!). Or why we can’t celebrate and comment on the beauty of having everyone biologically unique. Again, what is the purpose of the biology game except that it makes us feel connected to someone who has passed away. But what about the emotional pain it causes the living parents when people comment about how their child doesn’t look like them? Do the drawbacks outweigh the benefits of the game, especially once you consider that this is the reality of the donor and adoption world. And, like Vee points out, the simple way to remedy this situation is to not try to look for these similarities and point them out to the parents.

Baby Blues has fantastic advice–comparing parasailing to infertility–and how the same techniques that can get you though your fear of heights can also be used to navigate the non-infertile world as a stirrup queen (or sperm palace jester–boys sometimes need advice too). You need to go to her blog and read the whole thing–especially before you have to go to all of those holiday parties that Serenity mentioned in her post.

Prior to being diagnosed as infertile–which was my first major experience with failure–I was of the mindset that you should push on to see all attempts to their ends. If you start college, you should finish it. If you begin a project, you should see the final product. I had the mindset that if one tried hard enough, they could do anything.

And then I found out that my reproductive organs weren’t in agreement.

As a teacher, I was constantly faced with students who wanted to quit. They would receive low grades on papers and they told me they wished they could drop out of English class. They sat on the bench all season and they told me they wanted to quit the team. They struggled with math and tried to convince me that learning algebra wasn’t necessary for what they wanted to do in life.

And I didn’t listen because I had this philosophy–this philosophy that you had to try. You had to keep going at it until you succeeded.

To keep busy while we tried to get a baby to stay and grow in my uterus, I started taking classes. Cake decorating, as you know, rocked. Leyning didn’t. Leyning is the singing of the Torah. There are little marks that tell you whether your voice should go up or down or hold onto a note or keep it short. Our synagogue is community led, meaning that there is no rabbi who performs the service. Anyone who wants to participate can get up and participate. A friend talked me into taking this class so I could read the Torah portion on a Saturday for the congregation.

Except that I sucked. I sucked hard. I just couldn’t get it. I had learned to play piano by ear, and trying to read marks from a sheet and translate them into a sound was very difficult for me. I was excited the first class. I was nervous the second class. I dreaded going by the third class. That’s all it took–three classes for me to feel like a total failure while the rest of the class read and sang. And I muttered and fumbled over the words. Even my husband–my tone-deaf husband–was able to catch on to the method. But I was completely stuck.

At any other point in my life, I would have made an excuse and said I was too busy and dropped the class. Or I would have forced myself to practice and attend until I had mastered the skill. But failing at making a baby had made me overly sensitive to the fact that I couldn’t succeed at this too. Instead, I went to my classroom and said, “now I know how you feel.” And I explained to my students that I was quitting because I had assessed the situation.

It wasn’t a base experience that I needed to have in order to go onto another experience. It was an entity unto itself. And it was making me miserable. And it was making me feel badly about myself. And it was taking up a huge spot in my worrying cache and I needed that space to worry about other things.

I told them that I would help them quit things in order to make room for other experiences as long as it wasn’t a base experience that was necessary for a journey. Learning how to form a thesis statement? Sorry, you have to push on and learn it or you won’t be able to construct a paper. And that will affect you through college and possibly beyond. Learning how to make a lay-up? What? You don’t want to be a basketball player forever and you’d be happier playing soccer? Well, let’s go down to the coach and I’ll help you quit gracefully.

And in all my years of helping children quit, I never once had a child come back and say they had regrets. And I never once had a parent tell me that they were upset with the idea of quitting once they saw the transformation of their child. Replacing anxiety producing activities with enjoyable ones tended to make a happier, healthier child. It’s not a popular stance in this country, but it’s one that I now feel strongly about. It’s okay to quit. It’s okay to remove things that are stressful from your life. You don’t need to feel badly about it. You can walk away and not look back except with a dull twinge of sadness from time to time. Which is much better than a daily dose of anxiety.

Do I wish I knew how to leyn? Sure, I do. And if I ever change my mind, leyning is still there to try again. But I also know that leyning is an important base experience if you want to become a rabbi or a cantor. But it’s an entity unto itself in my life. Even though I didn’t feel this way when I was considering quitting, in the end, I closed up shop and walked away without it affecting my quality of life.

I think too many times in the fertility process, that mantra of “winners never quit and quitters never win” comes into play and we feel like we can’t walk away from a path until we have exhausted it. Until someone kicks us off the path. And while it’s okay to let yourself take a path to its ends if that’s what you need to do, it’s also okay to step off the path before the end and say, “you know what? I’d be happier on a different path.”

It all comes down to understanding what are your necessary base experiences. For some people, they want to become a parent no matter what. Therefore, trying all the paths to parenthood becomes the base experience necessary in order to achieve the end goal. For other people, parenthood isn’t necessarily the only job they could see themselves doing in this lifetime. Therefore, all those paths aren’t a base experience. They’re entities unto themselves. Therefore, if they stop treatments/the adoption process/surrogacy, they could be just as happy in life living child-free. They replace one goal with another.

For people who do have the goal of parenthood, unfortunately, you don’t have the ability to walk away because these experiences are necessary for achieving your goal. But I think we sometimes get focused on our current path and forget that we can quit and step over to another path. And it’s not quitting in a negative sense. It’s self-preservation. It’s taking control. It’s seeing that the paths are all parallel to one another and each leads to the same place–mommyhood or daddyhood.

It’s so hard to quit for the first time. It goes against everything you’re taught. The pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps-mentality of a red-blooded American (are there other colours of blood?). But it can be so freeing and the flip side is that you create a space for a new experience.

I just wanted to say as people are making their New Year’s resolutions that it’s okay to have one of your goals be that you’re going to quit your current path and try something new–either third party reproduction or adoption or IVF or living child-free. Because quitting takes a lot of courage and strength. And it can lead to the most wonderful achievements.

In honour of 2007 quickly approaching–and since I suck at actually doing memes once I’m tagged, I’ve started my own. I’m not sure if this is kosher–if a regular person can start a meme or if there is a group of men and women tucked into a dark room somewhere creating these lists. So…um…I tread carefully, attempting to not offend the Memers with my offering.

I have created this meme which can be done in two different ways. Either you can do all seven categories and list two answers for every category (get it? It’s 2007, so I’m playing on the two numbers: 2 and 7) OR you can choose two of the categories and list seven answers.

The categories:
Things you learned this year
People you met
Things you don’t want to take with you into 2007
Things you want to hold close as you pass into 2007
Things you’re looking forward to in 2007
Things that were life changing in 2006
Things you hope to accomplish by the end of 2007

(see–those are the seven categories. Now you can either give two answers for each category OR you can choose two from that list and give seven answers)

Things I learned this year
1. Even Cooks Illustrated recipes sometimes need tweaking
2. That I’m homozygous for the MTHFR mutation (C677T)

People I met
1. I came together again with Lisa R (who I knew in high school and haven’t seen since) which has been fantastic–I love how our lives criss-cross.
2. All you lovely ladies (and men) of the Blogosphere–way too many to name. And a huge thank you for keeping me sane.

Things I don’t want to take with me into 2007
1. My on-going anxiety
2. Negativity and pessimism (what? Me? Negative?)

Things I want to hold close as I pass into 2007
1. Josh and the twins
2. My current calm with conceiving (it may be short-lived so I’ll hold it close as long as possible)

Things I’m looking forward to in 2007
1. Our trip to Smith Island in June (right, Josh?)
2. A healthy pregnancy–perhaps?

Things that were life changing in 2006
1. Signing with a new agent
2. Starting this blog–it has been a huge outlet emotionally

Things you hope to accomplish by the end of 2007
1. Learn how to knit
2. Make croissants for the first time

Let the tagging begin–if you’re reading this, consider yourself tagged. And let me know you did it by placing a comment on this post.

I was tagged by Michelle about 80 years ago to do that five things meme, and I’ve really been struggling to come up with five interesting things about myself (beyond my conflicted feelings about Christmas…). Sorry if the pickings are slim…

1. I bake all of my own bread. We haven’t brought store-brought bread into our house for almost a year. I usually bake four times a week: bagel day, whole wheat day, challah day, and then a wild card: it could be rye bread, a baguette, or a loaf of crusty Italian. It was one step on our multi-tiered ladder to taking part in a sustainable living philosophy.

2. I once had a guinea pig named Vladimir. When we brought him home, the pet store owner told us that we should make sure that different people held him while he was getting accustomed to his new environment because guinea pigs have a tendency to bond to the first person who holds them. My parents went out the first night he was at our house. I grabbed the guinea pig. I didn’t put him down all night. The guinea pig became solely attached to me–all according to plan (apologies to my brother). I loved Vladimir will all my heart and soul. In his old age, he developed stomach cancer (but lived for an additional two years). He was finally in too much pain and had stopped eating so we needed to put him to sleep. The vet said he had never seen a person cry so hard over a rodent. I made Vladimir a promise that I would never get another guinea pig. I deeply regret making this promise because I would like to get another guinea pig one day. But I’ll always feel like I’m breaking a promise if I take in another guinea pig.

3. I began printmaking when I was in high school. I went to the Smithsonian program. I first studied intaglio (mostly etching). Then, when I went to college, I got time in a studio and continued with intaglio and also silk screening. When I went to graduate school, you needed to complete six credits outside of your program in a related fine arts program. My college advisor wrote the head of the department at my graduate school and got me an independent study (again in etching). I deeply regret going the independent study route. I wish I had taken a course and learned more rather than just continuing to hone what I already knew. But my happiest moments in grad school were mixing acid in my lab over at the visual arts building. That and eating dinner Friday night with my cousin on the Smith campus.

4. I am a neat freak and I love organizing things (as you can probably tell from my side bar…). Whenever I’m stressed out, I have to clean. It is my number one favourite way to relax.

5. My dental file has me listed as a “heavy gagger.” Which just about sums me up. I could not wear a retainer or a mouth guard. I can’t even chew gum. I have such a thing about having having stuff in my mouth. Except…well…some things… Like…um…food. Yes, I can have food in my mouth.

I’m not going to tag anyone because it feels like I’m the last person in the world to do this meme and everyone else has moved on meme-wise. But, just in case I’m not the last person, if you haven’t done this one, run straight to your blog and post five things. And let me know so I can go read yours too.