How did we get here?

It was odd walking through the same hallways and prep-rooms of the fertility section of the hospital yesterday that I’d walked through four other times before. This time was different -- I wasn’t hopped up on Valium and didn’t have ovaries full of follicles waiting to be retrieved. And, I wasn’t the one that had to wear a lovely pink and mauve hospital gown (honestly, why are they so hideously ugly? Perhaps it’s to keep us from wanting to take them home).

As we sat with our lovely and beautiful Nest, trying to calm her nerves and ease her mind, I thought about how we’d gotten to this point.

Way back in 2005, Jack Bauer and I started trying for a baby the old-fashioned way – no luck. A couple months with ovulation detector sticks – no bun in the oven. Because of my bicornuate uteri (yes, I have two uteruses. Have I failed to mention that?), my fertility doctor decides that we can move straight into the hard core stuff. So, in November of 2005, we try our first Ovulation Induction /Timed Intercourse cycle, which is basically the same as Artificial Insemination, except that the inseminating part isn’t artificial, it’s the real thing. You do fertility injections to boost your eggs and then the nurse calls you to tell you exactly when to have sex – it’s oh-so-romantic.

That one didn’t work, so we tried again in Feb. 2006. Once again, I wasn’t knocked up. After failing two times within four months, we decided to take a break for a few months. So, we tried one last OI in August of 2006.

After that one didn’t work, our doctor advised us to try IVF. We were excited – surely this was a sure thing. Our egg retrieval and first transfer was that November. In fact, JB wasn’t even in the country when the transfer took place. I thought that was the time it had to work – what a great story. “I got pregnant without my husband being there.” But, I didn’t.

At that point, we decided that there was a real possibility that it would never happen, so we started our paperwork to adopt a baby from Vietnam the last week of December 2006.

We jumped right back in the IVF pool pretty quickly. I had my second transfer of thawed totsicles in March of 2007. No kiddo.

Another break, while we were busy filling out paperwork, getting fingerprinted, sending checks to pull together our adoption dossier.

We decided to give the IVF one last try in November 2007. But, again, a negative test result. We took almost a year to re-group and think about what we should do next.

We found out about our nonbio baby in July 2008, so we thought we were getting close, but after things were put on hold indefinitely two months later, we started thinking of other options. And, we weren’t getting any younger.

Then the Nest came into our lives and the rest is history.