Not Just A Mom

When I was younger the only thing I could ever picture myself being was a mom.

Friends and family members would ask what I wanted to be when I grew up and I'm sure I gave the usual responses for girls like a nurse, a teacher, and at one point I even thought I wanted to be a physical therapist. Honestly though, the only thing I ever really saw myself "being" was a mom.

I had almost given up on this dream. In fact, for many years that's all it felt like: a dream. My marriage dissolved and I really thought that it just wasn't going to happen...ever. 

Then along came this wonderful, patient, sweet, loving guy who was not the least bit concerned that I had been married before - more than once - and, although I saw myself as such, did not see me as damaged goods. 

Before I knew it my resolve to "never get married again" had melted away and I found myself professing my love and devotion to him until death do we part surrounded by our families on a blustery January morning in 2010.

One friend still calls me a liar to this day, because I got married again.

It's ok...He's worth the teasing.

Since we knew that we both wanted to be parents, we began trying right away.

The odds were against us.

Forty might be the new thirty but my eggs had no idea about the rule change. Women are not supposed to be having babies in their forties.

Nearly a year of disappointment went by before we decided that it was time to look into medical intervention.

This is where it gets really interesting...

We opted to do IVF.  IVF stands for In Vitro Fertilization which is a process where an egg is fertilized outside the body. The clinic we went to had a "Shared Risk" program that gives you your money back if you don't have a baby after six tries. What an incredible opportunity!

There was a catch.

We had to use donor eggs to qualify for the program because I am old...reproductively speaking of course.

Cool!!!

Most women would be a little bummed about this but let me tell you that I was not in the least upset about stopping my genetic line.

At the time, I had just buried my father, the latest in a long line of male cancer victims in my family,  (someone with my genetic history would have been excluded from the donor program had I been younger) and if we used my eggs there was a five percent chance of success with an 80%+ chance of birth defect!

Bring on the donor eggs baby!

We signed up, signed our lives away financially and got busy reading bios of egg donors.

Not only did we get to see baby pictures of the donors but we even got to see teenager and adult pics as well. The donors fill out medical history forms and write an essay about why they are making the donation. It was a very cool experience...the first time.

I'll cut to the chase here. The twins were the result of our fourth round of IVF.

IVF is not just swirling the eggs and sperm around in a test tube it is a huge science that involves timing, injections, restrictions on what I could and couldn't eat and even whether or not I could wear deodorant the day of the transfer!

Cycles one and three resulted in nothing. Try number two started out as a pregnancy and ended in a miscarriage.

A devastating experience I would not even wish on my greatest enemy.

I'd waited my entire life to be a mom and there I was six weeks into my first pregnancy and it was over. To make it even worse I bled so badly that I required surgery and nearly needed a transfusion.

People don't talk about miscarriage.

To this day I will always wonder who that baby would have become. Despite the love for my two beautiful boys, I will always mourn the loss. It was devastating in ways that I could never describe. If you've been through it you know how horrifying it is. If not, you'll never fully comprehend the immeasurable sadness that accompanies the loss.

It literally took weeks for me to bounce back emotionally.

Once I was ready we began to look at bios again and prep for round number three. Despite all the stars aligning and everything being perfect, it didn't work.

To make matters worse, it seemed that everywhere I went there was an entire army of pregnant women. One of my friends, who hadn't wanted children, called to say that she was pregnant.

Well...now...how unfair could life possibly get!

Don't get me wrong here, I was and am insanely happy for her, but I was jealous as hell!

Heading into round four everything went wrong! There was one donor but three recipients for the eggs. One of the recipients didn't like the birth control pills that she was supposed to be taking so she didn't take them and postponed all of us for a month.

I swear to you that if that woman had been standing in front of me at the time, I would have punched her in the head. I was livid!

Then the donor got pregnant! Seriously?! WTF!! Could things get any worse?

Back to the bio database we go. Lo and behold there was a donor that already had two recipients signed up. We were the third and all systems were go. Things moved so fast from that point on that it is nearly a blur - or it could be that the children have destroyed that much of my memory - I can't be sure. Before I knew it we had eggs being fertilized and a transfer date was set.

I distinctly remember the doctor saying to me, "Since you've had such a difficult time, I think we should transfer two embryos and see if one sticks." Ha! We agreed, signed the necessary paperwork and I assumed the position on the table.

They tell you not to do home pregnancy tests but I don't know anyone that can resist that temptation...I still have all of mine. Needless to say, that when I went in for the blood pregnancy test I was not surprised that it came back positive but I was surprised at the number.

Whether you pee on a stick or you have a pregnancy test by blood draw the hormone that they look for is HCG (Human Chorionic Gandotropin - which is made up of cells that form the placenta). The HCG hormone is measured in milli-international units per milliliter or mlU/ml. In a blood test anything above 25mlU/ml is considered positive for pregnancy.

My nurse called me the afternoon of my blood test to say that it was positive and that my number was over 3000!!!! My response was, "Oh my God, they both took!"

Three days later I went back for my second and this time my number was over 10K. My nurse giggled as she suggested that maybe one of them split and I was carrying twins. Yeah, um...not funny!

Everything was confirmed with an ultrasound and we could see two little heartbeats at 14 days after conception.

Because of the previous miscarriage, we were cautiously optimistic and told no one what we were doing! Should this pregnancy fail too, I didn't want to have to tell everyone like I did the other time. The thought alone was painful.

Six weeks in I started to bleed.

The trip to the local emergency room is 8 minutes but it felt like an eternity!

I told the intake counselor what was going on, they triaged me immediately and put me in an exam room. The doctor came in so quickly I wasn't even finished changing into my gown!

After I was examined he declared that all was fine but was sending me down to ultrasound just to double check. The ultrasound showed no abnormalities and we were sent home.

I remember thinking that I wanted my mom. She had no idea that we had even begun another round of IVF. I wasn't about to call her from the ER and tell her but I knew that the conversation was going to happen very soon.

Six and a half weeks later I started bleeding again.

This time they didn't even triage me. They just brought me right to an exam room and the doctor was waiting for me. After a full exam and ultrasound I was once again declared fine and sent home to rest.

The good news was that that was the end of the ER visits.

The IVF process doesn't end with the transfer of the embyo(s). I endured shots of Progesterone for three months and shots of Estrogen for two. Prior to the transfer there were other shots. The easy ones were the belly shots which use insulin needles, are very, very tiny and barely pinch. The others hurt like hell. The progesterone comes suspended in an oil. The progesterone gets absorbed right away but it takes longer for the oil to get absorbed in the skin. In the meantime, I had oil lumps on my butt. Every night before the shot, I would have to find a location without a lump that my hubby could stick the needle.

Pretty much nothing made this any easier or less painful. It is what it is and if IVF was the only option for having a child then this was what I had to endure. Besides it will be a great guilt trip when the kids are older.

In all, pregnancy sucked.

The only thing good about pregnancy was the end result: our boys.

Would I do it again? Hell yes!

We have just celebrated the boys' first birthday. The house was packed with friends and family and the cake smash was epic. I look back the pictures from this past year and can't believe that these two beautiful baby boys are mine.

I have dreamt my entire life what it would like to be a mommy. My dream has come true. I've been a mommy for a year now and reality doesn't disappoint.

Yes it's tough sometimes, especially the teething. I mean seriously, teething has been a nightmare but I'm sure it's no picnic for the boys either.

That they are not my DNA doesn't matter. I carried them. I felt them wiggle in my belly. They are mine. I am not just a mom, I am their mommy.

You Call It Teething, I Call It Hell!

When I was pregnant women reveled in telling me their horror stories about pregnancy and birth. I was extremely sick when I was pregnant and while it was nice to hear that other women didn't enjoy the experience either I would have preferred to have talked about anything other than being pregnant like, I don't know...like...the migratory pattern of the swallow or anything else that would have taken my mind off of my misery. 

After the boys were born, I was given a reprieve from the "my pregnancy was worse than yours" stories but was then bombarded with annoying "just wait until" stories that primarily revolved around poop: color, texture and smell. And, while I appreciate a good laugh, the stories did little to offer any advice or assistance. 

We have received some really good advice such as using mini frozen pancakes as teethers. They numb their gums and give them a snack at the same time. 

Some of the bad advice has been to put the coffee table in the basement and basically bubble wrap the entire house, if not the children. My mother is strangely obsessed with tempered glass. Every time the boys press their faces to the windows, which they love to do, she says, "I hope that glass is tempered." I get the impression that even if it was bullet-proof glass she would say the same thing. 

We take necessary precautions and have removed thing that can kill them, inserted outlet covers,  bought a new (to us) entertainment center that closes so they won't be inclined to play with the cable box and installed gates at the top and bottom of the stairs. 

There will be no bubble wrapping of the house. 

It's amazing how many lessons we have learned in the first year of their lives. 

First and foremost on the list is that the biggest oxymoron in the history of mankind is term "childproof."

"Child-resistant" would be more accurate. And even then, it should be prefaced with the word hopefully. 

We try but seriously, we can't be with the kids 24/7 and don't want to be either. In fact, you can tell the kids whose parents hover around them. They are whiny, demanding and incapable of entertaining themselves. 

The boys are pretty good at entertaining themselves for a couple of hours each day. They do fight over toys and access to them but for the most part, once redirected, do a great job. 

There are days, and nights, that are endless hours of hell that can be attributed to one thing and one thing only...Teething! 

This began at four months when one of the boys teethed non-stop for an entire day. 

Since then we've had days and weeks of reprieve but lately both of the boys have been teething incessantly. Most of the time we can settle them down with a coating of Orajel (on their gums) and when needed baby Tylenol or baby Motrin. Most of the time...

The past week has been horrible! 

They have been teething worse than ever and all I can hope is that they will cut a whole mouthful and get this over with! 

The drool, runny noses and crying aside, the worst of it is the whining! 

I HATE WHINING!

I really do. I despised it before having children. I despise it in other children and I despise it in my own children. When they whine, I usually say something like, "Nobody wants to hear that." I thought I was making that statement up but according to my Aunts, my grandmother was known for saying this as well. Evidently, I'd heard it years ago and filed it away for future use. 

The boys' used to sleep through the night. Now they are awake multiple times. One has night terrors and is teething, the other is just teething. Either way, I'm pretty sure I got more sleep when they were two months old than I do now. 

If you've known me for any period of time, you know that I am a high-energy person who is capable of operating very well on very few hours of sleep. However, I don't really do well in the middle of the night when my REM sleep is interrupted by a screaming child...or two...in need of another coating of Orajel or some pain medication. 

Most of the time I am very patient with the kids but in the middle of the night, when woken from a dead sleep, I am neither patient nor thinking rationally. I try to get up and get to them as quickly as possible but there are times that I pretend to be sleeping hoping my hubby will get to them first. 

Why I do this, I don't know. It rarely ever works and even if he does get up, he can't get them to settle like I can and I end up getting up anyway. 

We have all of the over-the-counter teething meds, some of the newest and greatest teething toys but what works best? Frozen sweet potato fries and frozen pancakes if they are crying but if just in need of something to chew on they love their spoons. They have two types of spoons. One is all plastic and the other is metal with the rubber coated bowl. Those are actually their favorites which is cause for more lecturing from my well-intentioned family and friends. 

I understand their concern but when they are hurting and nothing else works, they get the metal spoons...end of discussion. 

I'm sure that something will come along soon enough that I will deem worse than this but the  teething experience is terrible and the doctor assures me that this can be a two year long process...Oh goody! 

In the big scheme of things two years is really a drop in a pond and crying, colic, poopie diapers, boo-boos, etc. are all things that can be fairly easily overcome. But, it is pretty evident to me that Dante was not a parent. Otherwise he would have created a level of hell filled with teething infants preventing individuals from sleeping by whining and screaming at all hours of the day and night as penance for evils committed during their lifetimes. 

Dark Grilled Cheese

If you ask any of my friends and my hubby, they will tell you that I am a pretty good cook and I make a mean cake. So why is it that three times this month I have managed to burn my soup and grilled cheese sandwiches?

The grilled cheese, I must confess, is my culinary Achilles heel. I'm just not patient enough to wait for it to brown up properly and tend to have the heat turned up too far. Thankfully, my hubby says he likes them "dark." Honestly, I think he's just taking pity on me. Either way, I don't care, he eats them and I don't have to throw them out and start over!

The soup...well, I just forget!

I put it on a back burner with the heat turned down and walk away to take care of the boys lunch. Between 1-2 HOURS later I will be at the sink making the boys their afternoon bottles and I will hear the distinct bubbling sound that only boiled down soup can make and then rush to take it off the burner. Like that last half-second is miraculously going to save it right? Sort of like leaving the lights on in your car at the mall and running the last 10 feet through the parking lot to shut them off and magically saving the battery. Anyway, I digress....

Burning things is not a norm for me. I like to be in the kitchen. My center island is a commercial prep table because I spend that much time in the kitchen (it was thousands cheaper than an actual island) and I am a good cook. I have traded recipes with professional chefs!

It's the kids!

I get so distracted with the boys that I completely forget what I am doing.

Imagine my horror!  I have been told by multiple professional chefs that I am an "excellent cook" and am now reduced to burning canned soup?!

I used to make gourmet meals like shitake mushroom risotto and chicken marsala. My friends used to call me for cooking advice...now I burn soup.

Now that it's cooling off, we're in comfort food season. On a good night, I'll get the chicken in the oven and rice in the cooker in time to put something on the table that resembles a balanced meal.

Bad nights we're eating "dark" grilled cheese sandwiches and burnt soup.