Don’t get me wrong.  The whole trying part of the trying to conceive thing is still fun, it’s just the failure that’s no fun.  I’d much rather get excited about a donut than whether or not there’s a tadpole in my uterus just waiting to sprout limb buds and a face because I know the donut will never disappoint me.  The donut’s always gonna be there for me.  That tadpole may or may not.

Honestly?  Just between you, me, and the Internet?  I don’t think I’m pregnant.  I feel the exact same as I have the past four months, which is to say not pregnant.  I’m like a Magic 8 Ball, except when you shake me I won’t tell you your future, I’ll just tell you I’m not pregnant and to stop shaking me before I bite you.

After four months, I’ve got this whole not pregnant feeling down to a science, and I’ve even established a timeline for the symptoms of emphatic non-pregnancy.  I guess that’s why I’m so apathetic this month.  All signs point to fail, and there’s no use mustering up optimism at this point.  I may be Eeyore, but I’m Eeyore with a hefty book of common sense ready to smack the optimistic smile right off your face if you try to sunny-side me.

The really lame part of the whole thing is that because of last month’s freak show of a 40-day long cycle, my ovulation window is about two weeks long.  That could be adding to my ambivalence this month, because who in their right mind gets excited to pee on 14 ovulation tests just to figure out when the timing’s right?

That said, I’m just going to let the lunacy of all my work projects carry me away in a flood of deadlines and coffee cups and let my uterus worry about itself.  Sure, I theoretically have time to spare worrying about whether or not I’m ovulating and if/when Aunt Flo is going to show up, but the question is: Do I want to?  The answer, dear friends, is no.  Not at all.  Not even a little bit.

Am I sad that we aren’t pregnant yet?  A little.  Will I be bummed out if we didn’t conceive this month?  Absolutely.  Am I going to deal with it like an emotionally mature adult?  Nope, I’m just going to cover my ears and complain.  Since when isn’t that an effective way to deal with problems…?

Make a choice.  I can either choose to wallow in my melancholy (and infinite sadness) and be really and truly miserable or I can dust myself off, stick out my stubborn little jaw, and kick sand in the face of whatever’s bothering me.

I chose sand kicking this time.

I figure that if this is how my uterus is gonna be about this whole thing then fine, but I’m not going down easy.  I’m just gonna wait her out.  She will eventually become a home for my progeny and she’s just gonna have to be happy about it because 1) I’m more stubborn than she is and 2) I’m in charge of the chocolate consumption around here and if she doesn’t start being a little more accommodating she may find her chocolate privileges dwindling.

Likewise for my writing situation.  I submitted my latest chapter to my writing group for review on Saturday and it didn’t go very well.  They gave me the kiss of death, they said they didn’t understand my character very well.  Shoot me right in the face, why don’t you?

I gotta figure that 60-odd pages into this novel, if my readers don’t understand my main character something is really wrong.  Now I have to comb through everything I’ve written so far and try to figure out why no one understands my poor protagonist.  It’s enough to make me want to hang up my noveling hat right now.

As if that weren’t enough, I read a novella by Jim Butcher (the author of the much beloved Dresden Files) and it made me crazy.  He’s so good!  I love his writing so much!  Why do I suck so much?!

Enter Wes.  He shook me firmly and said every artist throughout time has always admired and respected someone else’s work.  I asked him if even Matthew Bellamy of Muse, patron saint of rock guitarists everywhere, admired other people’s stuff.  Wes told me that Bellamy has great affection for Led Zeppelin, and that encouraged me.

If even Matthew Bellamy, who makes my eyes go crossed with his undeniable talent, looks up to someone then maybe it’s not a total waste of my time to keep trying to write even though people like Stephen King and Jim Butcher make me feel quivery and I’m-not-worthy on a nearly daily basis.

So, the moral of this story is: Even though (so far) I suck at getting pregnant and writing novels, I’m stubborn and will keep at it.  Kicking sand in the face of adversity, because I’m just too stubborn to lie down and quit.

Scene 1:

Erika wakes up at 6:30 am on Saturday.  She has to go to the bathroom, and knows she won’t be able to go back to sleep until she does.  She nudges Wes.

Erika: Honey, I have to pee so I might as well take the pregnancy test now.

Wes: Mrmph.

Erika pads into the bathroom, takes pregnancy test, and brings it back into bed with her without looking at the results.  She hands it to Wes.

Erika: What does it say?

Wes: Not pregnant.

Erika: [redacted].  Well that [redacted] sucks.

Scene 2:

Erika is at the grocery store when Aunt Flo finally shows up.  Erika hangs her head in frustration that she wasted yet another pregnancy test and wonders why Aunt Flo has to be such a gigantic pain in the [redacted].

A circus midget then slips on spilled beer in the aisle, promptly knocking Erika into the beer display and showering both of them with beer, which prompts Erika to make a life-changing discovery about how beer can make your hair grow thick and soft.  Erika and the circus midget patent the beer mixture, make millions, and Erika and Wes retire to a life of luxury in Costa Rica.  Hilarity ensues.

The End.

I’m going to drown my sorrows in a cosmo and some luscious cookie dough.  And try not to think about how I just wasted another very expensive pregnancy test.  And how unfair it is that I waited and waited and have nothing to show for it but a prankish uterus.  And how if my cycles are going to be close to two months long that I [redacted] quit right now.

Answer me this, though: Why is it that you can spend ten minutes trying to get a Labrador’s coat wet and still have great gaping dry patches all over?  I know Labs have a special double-coat and oil that makes them such good swimmers and whatnot but it also makes them nigh impossible to get really and truly soaking wet.  It blows my mind every time.

Also?  Doc licking the water drops that fall off the edge of his nose makes me melt from the cuteness.

I hope you all had a great Mother’s Day.  Mine was lovely, I had a nice chat with my mother and spent the afternoon eating yummy food with Wes’ family.  It was a strange day for me, though.  Even though I took a (negative) pregnancy test last Wednesday there’s still been no conclusive proof that I’m not pregnant.

And I’m late.  Like, pretty freaking late.  As in festivities were supposed to start last Tuesday and as of right now I’m later than I’ve ever been, wonky cycle lengths all accounted for and everything.

This made Mother’s Day a bit interesting for me.  I was determined not to test on Sunday because, in case you haven’t heard, I don’t do so well with dashed expectations and I didn’t feel like having an emotional breakdown on what is supposed to be a lovely celebration.  But I’m still wondering.  Fixating a little, but mostly curious.  Having never gotten a positive pregnancy test result, I have no idea what it will feel like.  It’s much easier for me to imagine not being pregnant, so that’s where my mind keeps going.

Regardless, Wes and I have decided that I will take another test on Saturday if things haven’t started by then.  That will put me at six days later than my latest-ever date, so I should have a reliably positive or negative result then.  So fingers crossed, ok?

1. My doctor says it’ll probably take 3-4 months for my body to be completely free from the effects of being on the pill for so long.
2. A posse of mothers I talked to said not to start really trying until at least the fifth month.
3. This way I won’t be in the throes of morning sickness nausea when I go to visit my Dad next month.  That, in and of itself, is a very good thing because my Dad makes the most delicious food this side of Heaven and if I were too sick to eat it I’d be a very sad panda indeed.

If that weren’t enough to take my mind off the emptiness that is my uterus, I came head to head with KFC today and did not emerge unscathed.  You may have heard about the free meals KFC is giving away, but if you haven’t here’s the deal: KFC is trying to re-brand themselves as a healthier option, so they decided to give away free two-piece grilled chicken meals to anyone who printed the coupon off their site.

At first I was excited, because who doesn’t like free food?  My friend and I printed off coupons using our printer at work and toddle off to KFC looking forward to warm biscuits and our choice of two sides.  We walk into the restaurant and it’s nowhere near as packed as I thought it would be, so we smile and settle in to wait.

Ten minutes later the lines still hasn’t moved.  We start to get edgy and people start to leave.  The line finally starts to move and we get to the front of the line and place our order.  The woman behind the cash register takes one look at our coupons and tells us she can’t accept them because they don’t have a watermark.

Nowhere on the coupon site did it mention watermarks.  We look at an example she shows us and notice the yellow and orange watermark because it’s in color.  I attempt to explain to the woman (who, poor thing, is obviously not a native English speaker) that our printer is not calibrated to display light yellow and orange in black and white.  She looks terrified until her manager struts over and tells us we can’t use photocopied coupons.

We try again to explain that we didn’t use photocopies, we just didn’t print the coupons on a color printer but she tells us she won’t serve us no way no how.  So we left, dejected, rejected, without our meals and completely frustrated that our well-reasoned and articulate justification of our eligibility for a free two-piece meal fell on deaf ears.

What is the deal with that?  They were giving out free meals left and right, why couldn’t they just have served us some yummy food?  Did the manager think corporate headquarters were going to inspect each and every coupon and refuse to comp their supplies for those two meals because the watermarks were too faint?

I think she was unreasonable and rude, so that got me thinking about KFC and let me tell you, it’s no good when I start thinking about something when I’m peeved.  Bad things happen.  Their new ad campaign is “Unthink KFC”.  First of all, unthink is a really dumb-sounding word, and what their motto is really saying is that if you’re considering eating at KFC you should stop.

Seriously, think about it: What does “Unthink KFC” mean to you?

Also, their website is unthinkfc.com.  Now, I can see what they’re going for but what that looks like to me is UnThin KFC, which is to say that not only should you stop if you’re thinking about going to KFC, it’ll make you fat too.  Stupid ad execs who came up with this idea, stupid KFC watermarks that don’t print on black/white printers, stupid store manager who doesn’t understand greyscale calibration.

Oh, I WILL “unthink” you, KFC.  Even if you were the last fast-food chain in the post-apocalyptic dystopia of the future, I would rather cobble together a meal of wrappers and contempt than walk through your doors again.  I hope you’re happy, you chicken merchants of despair.

My mood vacillates wildly between tummy-fluttering excitement and cool insouciance.  I don’t even allow myself to wonder about how cool it would be/what it would mean/how awesome it would be to know I was pregnant on Mother’s Day, instead choosing to divert my mental energy into convincing myself that it didn’t happen this month.  I love being right, and being right is about a thrillion times better than crushing disappointment.  Unless being wrong means I’m pregnant, in which case bring on the wrong.

Just between us, though, I’m pretty sure I’m not pregnant.  I don’t feel pregnant, I’m not exhibiting any pregnancy symptoms (except moodiness, but really.  It’s me.  Come on.) and I figure it does me no good to look for things that aren’t there.  Better to write off this month and set my sights on next month.  It’s infinitely better to focus on hope than dwell on what you don’t have.

It’s not like I don’t have enough stuff to distract me.  Wes started school tonight and I have the house all to myself.  How did I celebrate my heady freedom?  Manual labor, of course!  A rowdy gust of wind knocked a tree from our neighbor’s house onto a cedar in our yard, where it remains tangled hopelessly in our gigantic cedar’s arms.  Several branches were resting on the roof of Doc’s kennel so I busted out my hand saw and went to work.

I cut through a three inch bough and, I kid you not, I felt so triumphant I shouted out “I’m a mountain woman!”  This is what happens when a white-collar goofball who makes her living applying one pound per square inch to a whole bunch of twee little buttons gets herself an outdoor project involving tools.  Doc’s kennel is now free from perilously poky and heavy tree branches and I feel pretty freaking victorious.

It feels pretty weird to know that Wes is sitting in a classroom learning about hardware troubleshooting (Heh.  Wes was born knowing how to do hardware troubleshooting, he’s probably bored out of his mind right now) because it seems like we were just throwing around the idea of him going back to school a few weeks ago.  This huge change crept up on me, I guess.  I definitely underestimated the sneakiness.

What does this mean for the blog?  Probably lots of a long, meandering blog posts thanks to my inexperience with free time.  Topic for tomorrow?  Probably a review of the new X-Men movie we saw over the weekend.  There are about a million conflicting reviews out there so I’ll let you know what I thought and give you even more information you probably don’t need.  You can thank or ridicule me later.

The interest of the people who know I’m trying to get pregnant has flagged considerably, for which I’m kind of glad.  It was nice to have people care so much and be so excited for me, but it’s a bit unnerving to have to constantly admit to another unsuccessful month.  Almost like my uterus and I are a disappointment, like maybe we need to go to couples counseling to work some stuff out.

It was immensely reassuring to hear so many women, all of whom have many kids, tell me not to even think about maybe getting pregnant until at least the fifth month of trying.  They really didn’t say anything my doctor hasn’t already said, but for some reason when they said it I actually listened.  I guess being on the pill for seven years necessitates an adjustment period, so that’s that.  It’s silly to fight it, or think I can worm my way around it, so I’ll wait it out.

Just me and my uterus, chilling together and totally not freaking out while the clock of our adjustment period winds down to zero.

Wes is all thumbs with this whole trying-to-get-pregnant thing.  He has no idea what to do with my calmness one day, or the ensuing paranoia-insecurity meltdown wherein I assure him that I’ll never get pregnant and that, if we lived 300 years ago and he was royalty, he would have already decapitated me and married someone else by now.  I think he’s doing what most men do in response to an unpredictable woman: keeping his mouth shut and offering plenty of hugs.  And chocolate.

So that’s the latest.  This is officially the end of our third month of trying to have a baby, for those interested in keeping track of this sort of thing.  There’s a whole lot of nothing to report, which is better than having something bad to report.  I’d rather tell you all about how there’s nothing going on in my uterus than explain why there’s a third foot growing out of the small of my back or something.

When I decided to blog about trying to get pregnant, I was worried that my blog would lose interest for anyone who’s not interested in kids and the making and raising of them.  I fretted about alienating some of the people who turn to me for their daily nonsense.  I love (the way only a blogger can love) everyone who hangs out with me here, and the last thing I want to do is change the blog to the point where some people forget why they started reading.

But.  I am trying to have a kid.  The process is relatively simple, but it’s going a lot less smoothly than I was anticipating and it’s this very topic I feel like writing about today.  I imagine that if I ever do manage to get pregnant, pregnancy and babies will forthwith become a popular topic around here.  Essentially, this will become a mom blog, albeit a mom blog with my perspective and penchant for sass.

However, long before this can become a mom blog, it’s got to get past what I’ve decided to call Operation Firstborn.  The operation hit a few snags this week.  As of yesterday, I was officially three days late if you took last month’s timing into perspective (which, why wouldn’t you?).  I was starting to suspect that Something Was Up.  I bought pregnancy tests and made plans to test this morning.

The problem was, I couldn’t sleep because I was so excited and nervous.  Excited because I could be getting a positive test result, and nervous because I had no idea what was going on if the result was negative.  I laid awake from 2 AM until 3 AM before deciding to just take the stupid test already and stop trying to force myself back to sleep.  I rationalized that a negative result at 3 AM would at least have the cushioning of fatigue to mask the disappointment.

A negative test result sucks just as much at 3 AM as it does any other time of the day.

I went back to bed, thinking purely in terms of expletives.  Mostly I was just scared because, if nothing was happening and I wasn’t pregnant, it could possibly mean that something was wrong with me.  My least favorite thought in the world is that something might be wrong with me, and the dark hours between 3 AM and 6 AM played those insecurities like a fiddle.  My mind cruelly ran through every woman I know personally who’s gotten pregnant while on the pill, then compared me to them and wondered why I couldn’t get pregnant when I was making it as easy as possible to do so.

I ended up falling asleep praying that things would get moving again if I wasn’t pregnant (weird prayer, I know, but if things getting going on their own meant that I was healthy and nothing was wrong, then it seemed a perfect prayer at the time) and when I woke up I was pleased to find that I was healthy and everything was going again just like it was supposed to.

A lot of information, I know.  When you’re running off an emotional breakdown hangover and three hours of sleep, the line of propriety shifts ever so slightly.  When you’re a blogger, writing about something so personal as pregnancy or raising children or even just trying to make children, it’s very difficult to properly tell the story without sharing a lot of information.

Operation Firstborn is still in full swing, though Wes and I are getting decidedly more relaxed about the whole thing as we go along.  Maybe March will be the month, maybe April, maybe even May.  I have no idea.  The lesson that getting pregnant is not the kind of thing you can plan is getting hammered into my skull more every day.

My hope is that if I ever do get pregnant, my joy would be magnified that much greater by the sorrows I overcame in getting there.  At least I have my health.  And my incredible husband who hugs me when I’m crying at 6 AM and doesn’t even seem grumpy about it.  And my puppy, who licks my face more if I’m crying and will even knock over my water glass for me if he thinks it’ll help.  For now, that’s more than enough for me.

Sure, I knew about prenatal vitamins (those are important?) and no booze or caffeine (sob!) but I thought that was about it.  I was naive, though, and I paid for my naivete with a small portion of my sanity for a very short while.

The drama started with prenatal vitamins.  I was on these really fancy-shmancy ones my doctor prescribed for me and, because my insurance was excellent, I didn’t pay a dime for them so I had no idea how much they cost.  My insurance is still good, but different now, and when I refilled my prescription and found out the prenatal vitamins I had been taking were $1.50 a pop I nearly died from sticker shock.

I promptly requested the generic brand because I have no desire to swallow that much money every month, and the pharmacict promptly reacted by packing my bags and sending me on a guilt trip.  The generic brand doesn’t have DHA!  Your baby’s brain development will suffer!  It’s a brand new compound and you absolutely MUST have it!

My raction to this was guilt and shame.  Was I willing to let my baby’s BRAIN suffer just so I could save a few bucks every month?  How bad of a wannabe parent am I because I’m unwilling to spend $45 a month on prenatal vitamins?

Never mind that those vitamins make me nauseous and miserable, my baby needs DHA!

After looking into the matter a bit more, I discovered that you can take DHA supplements separately for much less money and that it’s fine to start taking DHA supplements after you’re pregnant.  So, what this means is that the pharmacist was a great big jerk for making me feel so bad and that she was freaking me out for no reason.  My baby (if and when he/she comes) will be just fine if I take the generic prenatal vitamins for now.

I just thought it was preposterous that I could already feel like a crappy parent before I was even pregnant.  That’s just the beginning, too.  Don’t even get me started on all the crazy information out there on the actual making of said baby.  There are line graphs, calendars, formulas, and potions for making children and it’s enough to convince you that it’s impossible to just make a baby the old-fashioned way.

I’ve decided that, since people have been having healthy babies for all time without benefit of the Internet’s brain-eating pie charts of doom, I can too.  I’m going to attempt to just take it easy, relax, and stop worrying about what such-and-such website says will make a better/healthier/cooler baby because really?  Losing my mind while pregnant is not going to help anyone.  Least of all Wes.

After talking this plan of action over with some mothers I know, they all agreed that this is an excellent attitude to carry over into parenting.  I guess it’s fortuitous that I got this out of the way now, lest I find myself at 4AM one day in the future in a puddle of tears because every website disagrees about the best way to swaddle a screaming infant.

Ha.

That resolve lasted all of two seconds before I cracked from excitement and wrote in this post about how I hope Wes and I will be able to expand our family this year (and I didn’t mean with a hamster).

Once that cat was out of the bag, it was all over and before I knew it I was Twittering about feeling nauseous (not because of baby, but because of nasty pre-natal vitamins) and lamenting that those “Test 5 days early!” pregnancy tests are a waste of money but so. very. tempting.

It would appear that I lack the strength of will, or self-restraint if you will, to be coy about this whole process. Not like this lady. I don’t know how she managed to wait so long to tell the Internets but she is way more self-controlled than I am.

So, in the spirit of all the not-coy going on around here, I thought I’d share some of the things I’ve learned so far during this whole phase of hopefully expanding our family (and my waistline):

• I am unbearably impatient. I am incapable of waiting (with grace, anyway) for anything I am even a little bit excited about. For past reference, please see my little episode with Ambien during the week before my wedding.
• I am ambitious. I want to be the chick who gets pregnant the very second she starts trying! With the smartest baby! And the lowest amount of weight gain! This is silly and will only lead to problems, which leads me to the next point.
• I am incapable of thinking rational thoughts when I’m excited. I can tell myself ’til I’m blue in the face that testing early is a huge waste of money, but as soon as The Crazy starts up I’m done for. I may as well possess no critical thinking skills whatsoever for how much good they do me during times like those.
• Wes in incredible, and quite possibly the most helpful and loving husband in the world.
• I no longer have the ability to keep my pie-hole closed about key matters in my personal life. The minute something happens I have the urge to either blog or tweet about it. Am done for. You can list “social media” as c.o.d.

That’s about all I’ve learned so far. Not too profound, but it’s been eye-opening in a way because I never knew these particular traits of mine would become so pronounced the minute we started trying to have a kid.

All I can do is shrug and tell you I’m not really surprised because really, if I get completely insane and impatient about birthday gifts, there’s really nothing at all surprising about me losing my mind over becoming a parent.

Babies are like the most intense gift ever, and they even come with a surprise element because 1) You don’t know what the gender is for a reeeally long time and 2) You never really know exactly when they’re going to show up.

Given that I can’t handle surprises, and it drives me crazy to be out of control and unable to plan for things, it just dawned on me: Babies are my kryptonite.