One-liners

Over the last year or so, I've come to decide that Nico is my Period Twin. We both had HA, got pregnant within a month of each other, gave birth within a week of each other, and have recently been in the weaning process, wondering if and when our cycles might resume.

Warning: if you don't want to know anything more about my girly bits, stop reading now.

Lately, Nico has had some symptoms that indicated she might have an answer to that most interesting question, and in that last week, I've had cause to do the same. I don't temp, because I've found it to be unreliable as well as annoying, but I do keep half an eye out for some of the other fertility signs. To an extent, this feels like keeping an eye out for the sudden appearance of unicorns; even on the estrogen overdose cycle, and on the cycle in which I got pregnant, I never really had much in the way of CM, and nothing else except for random homicidal impulses.

Lately, though, there has been something that looks very much to my uneducated eye like EWCM. Of course, the very first thing I did was to drag out my ovulation microscope, and for the first time in my life, I actually saw some minor evidence of ferning. So I trotted myself down to Walgreens and bought a 20-pack of OPKs, excited by the possibility that my body might be working like a real live girl.

I think I shouldn't pee on any more sticks, of any kind, because it is bad for the soul. Five out of five days, I have managed to produce a line that's only visible with the assistance of an electron microscope. The CM dried up and went away, the crampy feelings I've been having disappeared completely, and there is nary a saliva fern to be seen.

Frankly, I'm not really sure what to think about all this. I can't help but conclude that there was some kind of ovarian activity taking place -- there was certainly some estrogen coming from somewhere, and that's encouraging. On the other hand, it seems to have fizzled right out, which argues that the hypothalamic-pituitary axis is not entirely with the program. I have progressed much farther toward weaning lately (we are nursing 2-3 times per day), so maybe completely weaning will make a difference. Alternately, maybe they are already weaned enough that this is as good as it's going to get.

This week's project is to drop the post-nap nurse, and get down to morning-night nursing only. After that, we'll probably take a couple more weeks to drop those two, at which point we'll see if I cycle naturally in the next three months. One of three things will happen: I'll start ovulating, in which case there will be puppies and rainbows and baby dust; I'll completely fail to do anything, in which case there will be wine and eventually a visit to the RE; or I'll cycle irregularly, in which case who knows.

Every time I don't ovulate, or have a negative pregnancy test, feels like a failure. I don't know how it feels to legitimately try for cycle after cycle, because I never got far enough on my own, but I can't imagine it's fun. Combining the two by waiting out a year of irregular cycles, well, that sounds rotten. I would like very much to get pregnant again, have another baby, go on hormone therapy, and forget about this entire chapter of my life. If we threw ourselves right back into treatment, that's just that much sooner we'd either be pregnant or be done, and either way there would be some relief.

G wants to be patient, and see if it happens naturally. That is easy for him to say, because he isn't the one who is broken. If I do cycle again on a quasi-regular basis, I think I'll be OK with trying to wait it out, because I do think that I have a reasonable chance at a pregnancy if I can just get the ovulation thing happening.

I wish I knew what was going to happen, and I wish I could just stop thinking about it until it does.