the beginning...

There are a lot of emotions that go into deciding to become a parent. At least there were for Jen and I. Excitement, anticipation, nervousness. We never thought disappointment, frustration, and sadness would be included in that list. For those of you that know us well, know that we met and settled into life together fairly quickly. Legally domestic partnerized two months after we met, married in front of friends and family on our one year anniversary. We give a lot of thought to our major life decisions even if those decisions happen quickly. :) So when the conversations started about trying to have kids, true to our past, we decided right away that we wanted to start a family. We did our research, found a donor and made an appointment with our doctor. We were eager to get started with the process and were hopeful that like everything else in our life together, things would happen quickly and just the way we wanted them to. Our doctor recommended I start taking my temperature in order to track ovulation and determine when the best time to try would be. We started our journey in April and right away it was obvious my body wasn't in our plan to start a family right away. We knew that it would be expensive and our concern had been that we would run out of money for the required samples. Neither one of us thought it would be my body and lack of ovulation that would be the obstacle between us and parenthood.

A few months later, in late August, I took my temperature as normal and didn't see any kind of spike, which would be an indicator that I would soon be ovulating. Hoping that if the spike didn't occur but that maybe I would still be ovulating, Jen and I bought a month supply of ovulation predictor kits and decided to test every day. The morning of August 21st I was going about my routine as normal...shower, brush teeth, pee on a stick. :) The difference was this time, there were two lines. Finally! An indicator that I would be ovulating! An indicator that we could try! I ran into our room, scared the crap out of Jen by waking her up and made her look. I wanted to make sure I was actually seeing two lines! She confirmed it and we both squealed and hugged each other...so excited we were going to get a chance! I made an appointment for the next day and we walked around with perma-grins for the rest of the afternoon.

The next day we woke up more excited than we have ever been! It was the day! We were making a step towards being parents and we couldn't wait. It was a Saturday and even though the medical offices were closed, the nurse midwife on call was going to be meeting us. It felt so right. The office was quiet and it was just us. The midwife gave us time together before hand, answered all of our questions and let Jen help in the process. She was great and we left feeling so excited! I took the remainder of the day to rest and we started the wait to see if things worked, sure that they had...so positive! Jen read to my belly every night, we started picking out the things we wanted for the babies room, and narrowing down names. We just knew it was going to work and we were going to be one of those couples that got pregnant the first time. And then my period came. And we were devastated. We cried and felt sad for ourselves. Stung each time we heard of another friend who was pregnant. Not really sure what to do when things didn't go just as we planned.

It's now January and we haven't had the chance to try again. My body just won't cooperate. We have a sample all lined up, just waiting. And we're not good at waiting. Patience is not a virtue that really exists in this house.