Taking Charge of My Fertility

I have decided that this book is my Bible. Every time I have a question about my cycle, signs or charting, this book has the answer at the touch of a fingertip. It's awesome. I'll spare you the details, but let's just say I got confirmation today that my cycle is operating just as it should be on schedule. *wink* Now, it's time for the two week wait. My husband's birthday is March 20, and I am SO hoping that I have a birthday present to share with him that will make him (and me) SO happy.

I am feeling better about the PCOS scare. I thank you all for your comments and good wishes. I called my doctor's office today, and they said that my doctor hasn't looked at my u/s chart yet, but that she will soon and that if the tech (who has been a u/s tech for years) saw anything that was indicative of PCOS, she would have flagged it. Apparently they get a lot of PCOS cases in their office. At any rate, they reassured me and told me to try not to worry and that they will have my doctor call me, but that I shouldn't believe everything I read on the net! Ha! At any rate, it's not doing me any good to worry myself to death about something that I probably don't have considering that my periods have been as regular as clockwork all my life, but if it turns out that it is an issue down the road, I'll deal with it at that point.

Right now, I'm just going to stay positive and concentrate on willing a positive pregnancy result to show up!!! Implant, little eggie, implant!

Not much else to report. I gave myself a pedicure and a manicure tonight, and it was heavenly. I have new hand and foot creams from Mary Kay that are just awesome, and now I smell all pretty with pretty nails to boot. An added bonus of my prenatal vittles is that they make my nails grow long and strong! It's great.

I have a lunch scheduled tomorrow with one of my buds for lunch, and that's about it. True excitement for the first day of March, let me tell ya!

Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome

Thanks to the people who posted in my blog and a few that read my fertility journal, I am now scared to death that I have PCOS and am going to call my doctor tomorrow as well as a reproductive endocrinologist to see about testing. I know you all mean well, and I appreciate your kindness and consideration in bringing it to my attention since obviously it never occurred to me. I'll keep you posted on what happens. Yes, it's true that I do have some of the symptoms consistent with PCOS, such as weight problems, hair on my upper lip, and then of course, the ovarian cysts shown to me in my u/s that the tech thought were super fertile. But I've never had problems with my cycle EVER and obviously I didn't have trouble conceiving the first time we tried to get pregnant, so I don't know. My doctor never even mentioned that PCOS was a possibility, and I have to believe that she knows what she is doing, but then again, everyone seems to be of the opinion that ob/gyns don't have a lot of skill in diagnosing PCOS. I don't know.

Not much to report at the moment. Just charting, charting, charting, and trying to get pregnant naturally. PCOS could throw a wrench into that...we'll just have to see.

Work is going pretty good and the hourly thing I posted about earlier this month seems to have stabilized. I now have time to work out, read, stitch more, take care of myself, and watch movies. It's fantastic. I haven't really been blogging much or spending much time online because I've been busier with the domestic side of my life, and it's been nice.

One of my friends has recently become a Mary Kay consultant and I've been slowly switching my makeup over to MK as a result. Every time I see her, I am buying more nail polishes, eyeshadows, etcetera. Yesterday I had lunch with her and another friend and bought three eyeshadows, a mascara, two nail colors, and a tube of foot lotion. Plus, she gave me a ton of samples to try, so I'm sure I'll be buying more of it. It's great stuff! I love it so far!

I guess that's about it for now. We have some movies to watch today, and we're going to go out to lunch in a few minutes (a late lunch) and then I have tons of laundry to get started while I am stitching. That's about it for today.

More later.

Fertile Myrtle

I had my ultrasound on Tuesday, and it was a huge success. My uterus is the perfect size, my ovaries are alive and well, my endometrium (aka the uterine lining) is nice and thin, and the tech EVEN saw about ten follicles just sitting there with eggs in them.

So of course now P has it in his mind that he wants twins. Yikes!

Anyway, it was a great relief to me to hear that everything is a-okay. The tech said it was like I was never pregnant, never had a miscarriage. Just like it never happened.

Of course, except in my mind.

But I'm not dwelling on that, or the weight gain, or anything. Right now I'm staying positive, keeping a good attitude and thinking lots of great baby thoughts.

The Notebook

I am not a person who cries at romantic movies. I just don't. I tear up every time I watch Armageddon, Beaches, Deep Impact, any movie that has anything to do with a dog or cat dying, Apollo 13, The Horse Whisperer, and probably a few others that I can't remember.

This one had me crying. And it touched me so much that I went out and bought the DVD the next day for full price AND the book, and read the book in one afternoon.

Here's the website for more information...it's amazing. This is definitely a book and a movie I would recommend. It is one of the best stories I have ever heard of. I won't say anything more so I don't give it away, but if you are looking for a tearjerker, go get this movie. Now!

I don't have much to share today. I was utterly unproductive all weekend. I ate out with P quite a bit, went and got waxed yesterday (brows, upper lip and Brazilian), shopped yesterday, stitched, and inventoried our movie collection today. We decided a few days ago that we are going to start slowly replacing our VHS collection over the next year or so. Our VHS tapes sound SO horrible on our television with our new sound system, and DVDs are getting cheaper and cheaper every day, so I inventoried our VHS collection today and made a list of all of the tapes we want to get on DVD. We already have a good head start, and tonight when we were at Target, we picked up a bunch of them for $7.50 each. It's amazing how cheap DVDs are getting!

Tonight, I have no loftier plans than to do some laundry, stitch, watch movies, and just be a couch potato. I incline-walked on our treadmill this afternoon for thirty minutes, which I was proud of, and I plan on repeating that every day this week! I have no excuses now that I can't work long days!

Ta-ta for now...

29 days later...

...and Aunt Flo has arrived yet again. Yay!

I wish that I could post my chart in my blog so I can share the perfection of just how great my chart looks, but I can't figure it out. But it's amazing. It's like something out of a textbook! My temps all stayed low until my egg came, and then stayed up for the entire rest of my cycle. My ovulation day was on Day 16, and my luteal phase was thirteen days (average for most women is 12-16 days). I even experienced a preovulatory dip in my temperature RIGHT before I ovulated, which is super cool...kind of like a warning light that your egg is on the way! Many women don't have that.

Anyway, I woke up this morning with such a sense of hope. I finally get to backtrack to the timeframe right before I got pregnant and start trying again. I'm so excited. I even feel motivated to paint this weekend, so maybe we'll work on our cabinetry.

On a work-related note, things are looking up there. I had yet another discussion with my boss yesterday about things, and I feel better about it...much better. It IS going to work out for the best. My performance is not suffering at all...except in my head. And now I have more time to read, stitch, relax with P, and work out, and I won't be such a crazy workaholic all the time. It's going to be fine. In fact, today I have 8.5 hours left of the week to work, nowhere whatsoever to go today, and I plan on just sitting at home relaxing and working quietly.

It's going to be a great day!

Hourly vs. Salary

Well. I never dreamed it in a million years, but my company has found a new and interesting way to torture me.

Some of you may have heard about an interesting little lawsuit in California (several, in fact) that have sought to change the overtime laws in favor of the employees. Meaning that, instead of being an exempt professional employee with the full entitlement to do my job at my discretion and set my own hours, I now am a non-exempt nonprofessional employee, I have to keep a set schedule, work no more than 38.75 hours per week, and report my daily doings to my supervisor. And every hour that I work over 38.75 is paid to me rather than being absorbed as part of my salary.

Granted, this is a great idea, but what has happened as I predicted is that my company now will not permit me to work overtime, and I have LONG maintained that my job can not be done properly in that short of a time period per week. And, of course, the job itself is not changing, so what is now happening is that I have the same job duties and a hell of a lot less time to do it in.

It's torture.

A perfect example of this torture is today. I left my house at 9:30 am. I got to my first appointment at 10:15 am. I worked solid all day at my fire house. Because of the fact that my customer kept me there answering question after question after question, not only did I get home late, but I didn't finish what I had to finish and have to go back tomorrow to finish up. Hence, I didn't get to sign on to my company's claim system and work at all, and won't be on tomorrow until late in the day. Maddening!

I know that as the typical employee, I should not care a bit about this and should just work my allotted hours and not worry about it, but I feel like this is going to cost me my performance and I just can't accept that. At all. It really bothers me!

Talking to Queenie accomplishes nothing. She refuses to approve any overtime and basically has made it known to me that she doesn't want to debate the issue. Period.

I am at a loss as to what to do. Does anyone have any suggestions?

I'm back from Charlotte!

And what a fun trip it was. I did lots of girly stuff...got a French manicure AND a pedicure, shopped, watched movies and drank lots of girly frou-frou drinks with my friends, cooked, played with my friends' dogs, went to the mall, went to the bookstore, and visited my friend's parents. It was SO great to visit my best bud S.

I even read some books. My friend S loaned me a copy of Dan Brown's Deception Point, and I was totally hooked. I finished it in two days and immediately bought Digital Fortress and borrowed Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code from S to read. I also bought a copy of The Horse Whisperer. I may never stitch again!

The only bad thing that happened was that I just about had a full-blown panic attack when I was driving in my old hometown. I was so freaked out that I might pass my mom in the car and she would realize that I came all the way to North Carolina and didn't stop by to visit her. So childish and ridiculous.

Oh, and I'm retaining water like it's the middle of the desert in August. I ate a lot of sodium-laden foods this weekend, such as spaghetti, Japanese hibachi, pizza, cheesecake, Indian buffet, a cheeseburger...and you can see it in the puffiness in my face and around my midsection. I have a gallon of iced tea brewing as we speak to take care of that. I think the bad foods combined with all the alcohol I drank Saturday night and the traveling plus the fact that I was on DayQuil or Nyquil almost the whole weekend has just wreaked havoc on my poor body. At least I remembered to take my prenatals most of the time and take my temperature every morning!And today, I'm in that weight room if it kills me. P made a comment today that just about destroyed me when I got in the car at the airport. He suggested that maybe it would be good if we didn't get pregnant right away so it would give me a chance to lose some weight. Yes, a comment that he regretted immediately. I started to cry immediately. What a welcoming present! He felt like a heel immediately. Granted, I know that I have gained weight since the miscarriage, but for him to point it out to me like that really stung. Truth hurts, unfortunately. But I don't want to put off trying to conceive, unless the doctor feels like we should.

The rest of the day today I plan on spending cleaning the house and unpacking, and then I'm going to work out in a bit (I really will) and go get P at work, although after the thoughtless comment this morning he deserves to stay there. He really hurt my feelings.

Anyway, I'm back home safe and sound!