Take a Giant Step

That's the name of a song by a group I like to listen to, and it's been running through my head lately. We just took a giant step. Our giant step has nothing to do with the one in the song, though. Our giant step was hopping back on the ttc train.

There are a several of reasons why this is such a big deal to us. The first ones are probably pretty common: can we handle another baby? Well, we'll never know unless we try. Can we afford another baby? If we waited until we were sure we could afford children, we never would have had the one we've already got.

The rest of our reasons are more specific to our situation. Since we have one child with a neural tube defect, we are at an increased risk of having another child with a neural tube defect. To try and lower this risk, I've been taking 4 times the recommended daily amount of folic acid for the last 3 1/2 months. What if it happens again? Also in the back of our minds is the knowledge that at least one fetal surgery patient had complications with her next pregnancy. Her incision "unzipped" and the baby was outside the uterus and deprived of oxygen for a time. She ended up being fine, because they caught it quickly, but what if that happened to me? What other complications could arise because of the fetal surgery? We have decided we'll just take what comes.

Despite all this we're much more relaxed about the whole thing this time around. It's almost impossible for me to chart temperatures, since I don't always have at least 3 hours of uniterrupted sleep before I get up in the mornings. So I'm not obsessing about temperatures. My cycles are pretty regular and I have a general idea of when I ovulate, so we're just winging it this time.

We always said we wanted to have two kids. I wanted them to be about 3 or 3 1/2 years apart (I also wanted to be done having kids by the time I was 30, but that didn't happen). One might ask why we are trying now, when Alison just about 19 months old. Well, it took us 4 years, two intrauterine inseminations, 3 full in vitro cycles and a frozen embryo transfer to get pregnant with Alison. We have such explained infertility that it's not even funny. At my last OB appointment before Alison was born, the med student doing her High Risk rotation asked me about birth control. I almost laughed in her face and told her the best birth control we ever used was actively trying to get pregnant. The chances of me getting pregnant the old fashioned way is slim to none. But, since there is always that freak chance that things will work the way nature intended them (I did get pregnant that way once and unfortunately miscarried), we've decided to give ourselves 6 months before we head back to the specialist. That will bring us just past Alison's 2nd birthday. From then it will take time to get an appointment and get on cycle for the procedure. A successful first try would put us in the range of Alison's 3rd birthday. We can afford one full IVF procedure and one frozen embryo transfer (if the IVF doesn't work and we have embryos left). So that means that by this time next year I will either be pregnant or done ttc. And while I hope that I am pregnant, I can accept the other outcome.