Just a quick note to acknowledge the baby gifts that have arrived – bottles from Sarah S. and a baby bath tub, wash cloths, towel and sleepers from Jennifer. Thank you – you guys are just so awesome! I feel like I’m going to spend a great deal of time telling Charlie about his Internet Aunts one day. You didn’t have to bathe in the roasting pan because of a very nice lady who lives far, far away who didn’t even know you. It will be like his own personal fairy tale.

We were standing in the bathroom the other night, flossing or what have you, when the Dork Lord took a long look at my belly.

“There’s an actual baby in there. It’s going to be born and then we have to take care of it.”

“That’s sorta how this works,  yes.”

“I can barely take care of myself!”

I snickered. “Well, that’s why I’m here, yeah?”

It wasn’t the first minor freak out either of us has had. It’s sure not to be the last. We’re half-way through this pregnancy and it still doesn’t register all that often that it’s real. Our little guppy is a manchild. We’ve known this for weeks and weeks thanks to a relatively new blood test that identifies the baby’s genetic information floating around in my genetic information and BAM! reveals possible chromosomal abnormalities and the baby’s sex. Our 18-week check up was a while back (the Penis Unveiling, the Dork Lord calls it) and everything seems to be just as it should. Ten fingers, ten toes, four heart chambers and discernible stubbornness.

His name is Charlie. You can pretty much call him anything you want as long as that anything you want is not ‘Chuck.’

We’re at the point where I can sense the motion of him wiggling around in there quite a bit, though individual kicks and karate chops are just starting to catch my attention. It’s all very science fiction-y and very distracting. Then sometimes I don’t feel him and that’s even more distracting. So this weekend, I ordered one of those hand-held Doppler jobbies so I could listen to Charlie’s heartbeat at will. It arrived yesterday and is now my favorite battery operated device. It took a while, digging around on my belly, to find that heartbeat, but once I did, it was like getting a report card. A plus, plus, plus!

A few weeks ago, I had my very first full blown, I’m pregnant so I can’t take my meds migraine. It was 26 hours of unmitigated torture. I figure Charlie owes me. He’ll be pretty new to the job for the first Mother’s Day, so I’m gonna give him a year to figure out how best to say Thank You for Not Poisoning Me. I do love sapphires.

Thank you for all the well-wishing! We are so thrilled and terrified. But mostly thrilled.

… and then I got pregnant.

To say I was surprised would not be entirely accurate. In fact (when I tell people this, they immediately get this look on their faces that says, “Does not compute.”), for the first two days that I knew, I couldn’t get out of bed I was so depressed. My head was so full of information about my broken ovaries and inadequate eggs that I was absolutely sure I was going to lose it. It’s the ultimate inferiority complex. The infertility inferiority complex.

Fourth of July weekend, I slept on and off and bargained with the Universe as I peed on stick after stick. “Please let me keep it. Please let me keep it.”

That I’m married to an optimist eventually provided a very necessary counterpart to my world-class worry. Though, it wasn’t really until this week’s ultrasound that I started feeling like this was the real thing. I’d even started showing the week before. Still not real. But something about watching the little guppy bounce around in there convinced me that whatever odds were stacked against us, we really did beat ‘em.

I am forever grateful for all the messages of encouragement and all the hearts and thoughts and prayers that went out for us. I don’t know why we go so lucky – but I am so grateful we did.

My feelings on abortion are complicated. My feelings on choice and access to care are not. Sent this morning via United States Mail:

Dear Senator Davis,

I often have a feeling of despair in regard to the political process, the lack of a real voice many of us have in it, and the increasing fervor to remove rational discourse from it. I do not feel that way today. Thank you for what you did last night. Thank you for standing up for us – both literally and philosophically – and for giving us a reason to hope.

Most sincerely,

Heather L. Hunter

If one day we are actually successful at spawning (I remain at the There’s Still Hope stage of this endeavor for now), I will likely begin every telling of that child’s birth story with, “I peed in a cup eighteen thousand times to get you.”

A brief note: If you were happy to see words on this page again, you’ll be less happy to discover that, for the foreseeable future, they’re likely be about bodily fluids and disappointment. But hey, if you stuck with me through douche-bags and disappointment phase, this won’t be nearly so head/desk. So there’s that!

And, back to peeing in a cup. Over the last handful of months, I have learned a number of things. Among them:

1. Fertility treatments are very expensive.
2. None of them are covered by insurance.

These things being true, my doctor and I talked about not talking about fertility treatments for a while. The Dork Lord and I are actually pretty lucky that we didn’t try and try the old fashioned way only to realize a year or two down the road that my parts were defective. Lucky, because the up and down of the monthly Did it Take? is really emotionally taxing. I paid that tax a handful of times before pain became a factor, the doctors got crackin’, and we had our answer even before we’d even asked the question.

Where do babies come from?

Not from you. Your ovaries don’t work.

That we can’t afford to pursue something more aggressive until next year, well, right now it’s really only taxing on my patience. It’s almost a relief compared to the pain of wondering. Almost. In the meantime, we’re keeping at the old fashioned approach – after all, what have we got to lose?  The Dork Lord’s getting laid a whole lot, so he can’t complain. But he’s not the one peeing in a cup twice a day hoping that a little strip of paper will reveal that, contrary to all indications and doctorly predictions, your ovary came back from the dead and RELEASE THE HOUNDS! HERE COMES AN EGG!

Like I said, I’m still hoping, in a detached sort of way. And peeing. Always peeing.