Fit For Future Families - August 2011

Ahhh Wednesday!! It's my favorite day of the week and marks off another week closer to seeing my hubs and being in Hawaii!!

Jalara - I'm so sorry you are dealing w all this! Like everyone else I'm hoping this "learning experience" gets some helpful answers for you for next time!

Karen - 2ww sucks! I'm NOT looking forward to that AT ALL! I'm hoping w all the hussle and bussle I'll be dealing w having family in town and getting used to the hubs being home will distract me thru it....

Ashely - fingers crossed for you to get a BFP and not have AF show up!

Stephanie - Boo for AF showing up...ESP during such an emotional time...at least she came after ur vacation! What sort of active things did u do in Hawaii? What island did u go to?

AFM - another successful day yesterday! I got my workout in the morning, 72oz of water and under calories (even though mfp says I was over by like 20calories) I can tell I'm getting used to eating like this BC it's taking me longer and longer to start getting hungry between meals. I **plan** to walk tonight but we'll see how hot it is when I'm ready to walk. If not def planks, pushups and squats. Meeting my trainer in the morning! I have been redoing our budget all morning to make sure we're good when hubs gets home and all out pay goes back to normal (while he's gone we get extra stuff..danger pay, separation pay etc, guess they figure it will make u sleep better at night knowing your loved one is doing something SUPER dangerous if they pay u a little more...) looks like we'll be good and even be able to start saving even w me going PT at work once school starts AND not getting paid at all if I go on maternity leave sometime next year! That is a HUGE thing for me...I constantly worry about money so I have worked it out where we pay bills out of each check, put $$ into savings and then we each get an "allowance" and that is for gas in our respective cars and fun things (going out to eat etc....) it will be mice not to have to get freaked out when he comes home and tells me he filled up his gas tank and we have bills getting ready to clear! Whew!

i got the results from my blood work yesterday. i guess they did do hcg with the progesterone.

hcg = 1
progesterone = 7.4

the doctor wasn't in to interpret the results though, so i still have no idea what that means. i have to call back in tomorrow. *sigh*

Last month we started trying......no luck However this month is a new month. We aren't really trying ovulation kits and that kind of stuff.....we figure we will try just to have fun with it for now. Its been fun! LOL

welcome! trying can be fun.

some advice i've gotten:
to give you the best results, you need to be 'friendly' every other day during your fertile time.
if your period is day 1, then conception days are 12-15 in a normal 28 day cycle.
you can check a pregnancy test on day 27.
most cycles are not 28 days.
to increase the chances of have a girl, the sperm needs to already be there before the egg is released.
'boy' sperm swim faster than girl sperm.
if you can, enjoy the process!

Godblessourhome-....if you don't mind me asking did you conceive your boys naturally or with meds?? I have PCOS also so i was just wondering!

Well, to be honest, I'd brace yourself for some unhappy news (sorry Hun). But you aren't 100% out until the re-test the beta.

thanks. i am prepared for bad news but i do want to know why the opt said i ovulated 2 weeks before i actually did. i find that really strange and it has me worried that i have inadequate luteal phase, premature luteinization, or luteinized unruptured follicle syndrome (oh the joys of self-diagnosis via the interwebs). it will be just one more thing that stand in the way of me becoming pregnant again.

So, to cheer me up, DH got me a ring today - we wanted stand-in rings for our trip to LV this month (our wedding sets need to be serviced and we don't want to risk them). I love citrine (topaz is my birthstone and this is a less ugly version).

beautiful ring jalara!

Bump

okay ladies. Serious life changing/interfering question for you. My hubs is military. We've been stationed at our current location for four years now, which pretty much means we are hot for new assignment at any time. No problem there since I feel little love for the town we live in and we're no where near family. The big problem is that we stupidly/naively bought a home when we moved here. We were told at the 'bottom' of the market. Well, the current 'bottom' is about 50,000 less that what we paid. So, we have a few options.
1. My husband can do a year in Korea. His follow on would be here again so we would have another four years at least to have the market rebound. I would be here by myself with our son.
2. We could wait for word to come down on a new assignment and try to rent out or house.

He's been offered a position in Korea for one year, starting in December. The idea is for me to be preggo by then with the baby due in June. Which would mean that, yes, I would be alone for the birth. He does get two weeks off while overseas so he could fly back but it would have to be timed precisely. But, he would make more money while there and we wouldn't have to go through the fears of not being able to rent out the house.
Any advice would be helpful.

I agree with Jalara that while we can all give you advice based on our own personal experiences, your relationship, your life and your home ultimately can only be decided by you.

But here's my take on it: I get the financial hardship that it would potentially throw on you, but there is a quality of life issue too. Being a military means that you are asked to sacrifice a lot and this might be one of those things. How does your husband feel about losing a year being with you? Losing a year being with your son? Missing out on the birth of another child? How would you decide differently if he weren't military?

Creepy stalker…….sorry, can you tell I have a hard time letting go?

Bump. Sending love to those of you I know.

Newbies, you have a great group of women here!

Julia--a year is a long time to be apart. I fall with most others on the side of "keep the marriage close-it's the most important, and let the house issues work themselves out." Now if that isn't an over-simplification, I don't know what is! We are in the same boat--we had a townhouse, bought it near the peak, and now it is so totally not worth anywhere near what we need to sell it. So, we rented it out--this is our second year renting it. We took some time to try to find good renters, and we have been lucky with our choices so far. No big catastrophes, although my husband does most of the "property management" so it's a pain when something breaks and he has to go fix it. Depending on what your finances look like, you might consider handing it over to a professional property management team. Put them in charge of finding the tenants and doing the repairs if you are overseas. At least look into what it would look like to do that. Again, you have to decide what is best for you all. Only you can make the right decision, no matter how much advice we all give! Good luck!

Jalara-I'm glad you cried. I hope you allow yourself some more space to do that. I have a book on secondary infertility--it's fascinating to me because a) I'm struggling with it, and b) my master's degree is in counseling, so from a therapeutic standpoint, I find it really interesting too. Anyways, the author who has worked as a therapist with RESOLVE (National Infertility Association down here in the US), was talking about taking time to grieve infertility, miscarrage, the choice to stop treatment, or whatever the issue may be, and the importance of it. The jist of it is that it may seem like it will never get better, and if you start to grieve, you won't be able to stop and will just get sucked down into the crappy emotional vortex for the rest of your life. But, she went on to talk about how our bodies seem to have a way of "coping" with the grieving--often they don't give us more than we can/should deal with at a time--our bodies/brains seem to have a "shut down" mechanism that often shields us from too much of that stuff at a time. That's part of the numbness/acceptance at first, and then it's part of the reason why dealing with grief issues often seem to come and go, popping up when we thought we were through it, I guess. It's being broken up into smaller pieces over a larger time. I had never heard of that before, and thought that was really interesting way of looking at grief. An old Zen saying "The best way to deal with a bull is to give it a large pasture." (That was from the www.resolve.org website, BTW--I've found their resources helpful.)

I myself have used a timer-limit on myself (different grieving issue, but still). I set a time--like on the calendar, for however long I want to give myself, and then for that appointed time, I just let it all out. When the timer dings, I pull myself back together and go do something else. The nice thing that it has done for me is that during the times that I need to have my act together (work or whatever), somehow just knowing that I have that time set aside for it, even if it is later, allows me to focus better on other things when I need to. Compartmentalization at it's best, I guess. Good luck hon. If you aren't pregnant when you go to LV, I hope you find some killer gluten-free adult beverages and live it up!

AFM: I"m just coasting. The bloating seems to be getting better, but my mind is playing tricks on me, of course. One second I feel hopeful, and the next I'm just certain it didn't work. And the crazy thing is, not one ounce of all the worrying, thinking and ruminating can do anything to affect whether it actually worked or not! Yet on and on I go. I must need some more projects to work on. Tomorrow is my weigh-in---not looking forward to that. I've been experimenting with mantenance and not logging my food, and I'm not sure that it has been a successful endeavor. BUT, what a time to try that--during treatment and the 2WW. I totally set myself up. I think I was just sub-consciously looking for a way to simplify my life during this process. It worked--everything is just a simple choice to put what I want in my mouth and eat it! Haha! So, we'll keep coasting for the next week or two. I think I"m just going to go with it till this 2ww is up. If I"m not pregnant, I'll need to exercise control over something to balance my feeling out of control-ness with this infertility crud, and I think I"ll chose my diet at that point. We'll see. Good luck ladies! (Sorry this was so long--I just kept going. I tend to do that. Oh well.....)

Does anyone know guidelines for exercising while miscarrying?

I don't know "guidelines" but I know what did / did not work for me
The morning after the m/c started, I tried to do the JM 30 Day Shred Level 2 full-out. That was crazy, I don't recommend that. Just be careful with anything that has you upside down (yoga/pushups) or any kind of ab exercises. I walked every evening for about an hour and that seemed to help (plus it was quality bonding time with DH, we were able to talk a lot and sort of grieve out loud for our little blueberry we lost.

However, I had to go in for 2 weeks to have my bloodwork HCG levels taken - I thought I had stopped the heavy bleeding (just spotting) after 7 days, but my bloodwork said that my hormone levels were still high. So I did a bunch of situp/abwork and bleeding started again. Way TMI but I did this 2 more times throughout the next 7 days and it helped the rest of the tissue come out, and bleeding to stop completely the way it was supposed to. I have read about people needing D&C after a natural miscarriage b/c not all the tissue came out. Just wanted to tell you my experience, and what helped me.

Sorry again that you have to go through this.