IT'S BEEN A WHILE...

So much has been going on, it's hard to know where to start...

The biggest news is that tomorrow we meet with our doctor to have an ultrasound to inspect where we are with ovulation. Then, we'll do one HCG (is that right?) injection to force a timed ovualtion. Even though we know Rachel ovulates regularly with no problem, this supposedly will help us time things better and will guarantee a quality egg, or at least that's what we've been told. After all of that, we'll return to our doctor sometime on Thursday for our second insemination. We're very nervous and very excited.

In the midst of it all, we've been through sperm hell. We'd selected two or three donors we really liked, all of whom were still in the database as of Friday. Well, we went out of town for the weekend and when we returned Sunday evening, we logged back into the database to discover that all three of the donors we liked were sold out! Talk about a panic. No worries, as all is well now. This morning, I checked the database again, just to see if by some miracle one of our guys was back in the list. They weren't, but someone new was added and he's just perfect, or at least I think so. Anyway, I feel really relieved, even though the whole act of picking a donor from a catalog is pure torture.

Tomorrow morning I'll be driving to the sperm bank an hour and a half away to retrieve our specimen in its tank and then coming back in time for our appointment. In the meantime, Rachel will be trying her best to relax.

This afternoon, she'll go for her second accupuncture appointment, which will be followed up by a massage. We're not sure how we feel about accupuncture, but it's done at the wellness center at our local hospital by a physician, so that helps a bit. You know, anything to help Rachel calm down is best and we figured that at the very least, the accupuncture couldn't hurt.

Just a tidbit of information -- Rachel had shingles last month, which is one of the reasons we had to wait a month inbetween tries. Her shingles were mild, however, and have healed up on their own without medicine. Her doctor said that the cure was worse than the illness itself, so we decided to hold out and see if she could get better on her own. Thank heavens, she did. We've also been on a regimen of prenatal vitamins, once-a-day baby aspirin, and 1500mg of Metformin daily. Hopefully, everything combined will make for a successful conception.

For now, we're just wishing we could make this special. Not that it isn't special in and of itself, but we'd like to do something nice. But it's all so scheduled and medical, it's hard to have it be sweet and special. Plus, all of this falls in the middle of the week, with the insemination on Rachel's last day of school!

So, in a nutshell, that's what we've been doing. If you wanna know more about the rest of our boring lives, check out Julianna 2006 for more.