I’m addicted to the timehop app. In case you live under a rock, it’s an app that shows you what you posted on social media on the same day in previous years. This showed up on Saturday.
The photo on the left is of the meds for my first day of injections from the cycle that resulted in the twins. I didn’t really blog it at the time, but now that I’m scrapping pictures from these months, it’s kind of forcing me to process it. Which is good and bad. Good because dealing with baggage is healthy and bad because dealing with baggage is hard.
RaptorDad and I had agreed that this was going to be our last cycle regardless of the outcome. I had a really hard time accepting the likelihood that Kate would be an only child, but to be frank we had gotten to the point where we were done flushing all of our disposable income down the toilet of infertility treatments. We decided that if Kate was going to be an only child that we might as well take advantage of that and start traveling. Plus, she was starting kindergarten and I was going back to work at an awesome school after 5 years as a Stay At Home Mom. We were just done with having our lives on hold. And done with the emotional roller coaster that is infertility treatments. I was so sick of having my life divided into 2 week cycles of hope and despair.
The cycle seemed doomed from the beginning. We were supposed to cycle in early summer so that all of this would be behind us before I went back to work, but our meds got held up by a European holiday and then held up in customs. (We always order our meds from Europe because it’s a fraction of the cost. Still ridiculously expensive, but much cheaper.) Then we decided to ask for a lap to check for endometriosis just to be sure that we gave this cycle every possible chance to succeed. Good thing too, because they found a cyst the size of a tennis ball when we did the preop ultrasound. And when they went in, they found not only endometriosis, but that both of my tubes were partially blocked despite a clear HSG and hysteroscpoy the year before. Well, no wonder the treatments weren’t working.
We started the cycle right before I went back to work; in fact, I had to ask to leave one day of inservice about 30 minutes early. Talk about awkward. Obviously I didn’t say what kind of appointment I had, but it’s still awfully flakey to ask to leave early on your first week of work at a new job. RaptorDad and I had no actual hope that this cycle would work. We were just going through the motions as we had both accepted that Kate would be an only child. I don’t even think we would have gone through with the cycle if we hadn’t already spent many hundreds of dollars on the meds earlier in the summer. But we had and so we did.
When I started my period a few weeks later, we were sad, but in some ways relieved. After all, I had gotten hired at a school that I loved. I was so excited about working there, especially since it seemed like I would be able to transition into a full time teaching job the following year. And while I missed being at home with Kate, she was loving kindergarten and I was loving being on the same campus as her.
I decided to test early just to rule out anything crazy before I stopped my progesterone. Imagine my shock when I got a positive test! I then spent the whole weekend convinced I was having a miscarriage, but I was actually pregnant! We were in for a long road ahead, but I’ll tackle that more in another blog post as this one is already super long. 🙂
And if you made it through all of that, here’s your crafty reward. 🙂 Like I said, I’m scrapping pics from last August/ September and I came across these pics that RaptorDad took as a joke. I always take pictures with Kate on the first day of school with a little chalkboard so he decided to take some of me on my first day of inservice. 🙂
I thought it might be neat to take pictures of the layout in progress, so here’s the bottom layer. I mixed up some paint and some texture medium and put it through a stencil.
Then I matted my pictures several times and added a bit of rick rack. So far so good.
Then the embellishment, journaling, and title. I had a super hard time with the embellishments! I love the October Afternoon puffy stickers, but they drove me crazy trying to figure out where to put them. lol.