Oh where oh where have I been

Well, a lot has happened since I last posted. No big surprise I guess when you take a 6 month blogging break.

The biggest news is I'm pregnant (I know - again) but this time I am seriously pregnant. Well, for me it feels seriously pregnant to make it to 17 weeks. That is nearly half way!

I will back post some updates about my second full round of IVF. I did an antagonist cycle, which was quite different to the long form synarel round I did first time around, so in the interest of continuing my commitment to providing factual information about the IVF process I will write up what was involved in the antagonist cycle.

The main reason my blog writing stalled was everything going on at work. For some time I had been trying to sign up to a redundancy package. The pressure of working for the same organisation through our ongoing IVF and six pregnancy losses just weighed on me and the temptation of a tasty pay-out and break was very strong.

Knowing a lot of my colleagues knew about my blog, I felt I couldn't write about my struggle with my work and my desire to leave our much loved organisation. After months of internal organisation discussions, and waiting, on 31 January 2013 I finally walked out the door of my permanent government job. I left behind much strived for job security and a great package (and an awesome maternity leave policy) with the loose plan of a three month break, before getting back into the job hunt, or setting myself up as a consultant.

The other reason I slowed down on the blog was that I simply felt a lot better. After years of stress, sadness and busyness, I made peace with our fertility / infertility stuff. I think the blog has played a big role in my ability to process the stress of fertility treatment. I also did a few sessions with a psychologist that helped a lot after our last pregnancy loss. I suddenly found myself more at ease with my pain, my sadness, my struggles and the tension slowly slipped away. I have a draft blog on these sessions that I will finish and post.

On 6 February 2013, just days after I finished work, we did another embryo transfer and were not surprised to have yet another positive pregnancy blood test on 18 February 2013. My three month break turned into my first trimester. Three months where mostly things seemed to progress well, but mentally to some degree I was still expecting to lose the baby.

Now I'm well and truly into my second trimester, I haven't worked at all through the pregnancy and I feel totally awesome. I would like to do some work to bring in some cash before the baby is due, but neither my husband nor I think it is worth me going nuts about finding work or working full-time and potentially putting unnecessary pressure on me or the pregnancy. We are so lucky the payout I received was substantial enough for me not to need to work for a long time yet, but I am well aware that any extra cash I earn now will mean the longer I can not work once we actually have a baby, or a new kitchen...

Baby's due date is 25 October 2013, which happens to be our fifth wedding anniversary.

Our next major obstetrics milestone is the 19/20 week morphology scan scheduled for 5 June 2013.

I can't believe my baby making mission blog will actually now get to cover my experience of pregnancy and not just pregnancy loss. All of these weeks not working I've had to blog and it has taken some time for me to feel positive enough to decide to get cracking with it again.