US IN 2011, A FAMILY!!
JUST THE 2 OF US 12/31/05Wow! I am really starting to see a pattern here. One of the worst things (In my opinion, anyways) one can be is predictable, and yet that is exactly what I have become. The pattern to which I am referring, and the way that I have become predictable is that I am a horrible blogger! It has been forever since the last time I wrote. 10 months to be exact, if I remember correctly! I guess I just feel that with social media, e-mail, and texting, everyone already knows what I am doing all the time. With Facebook, Twitter(follow me @gehrigsmom), and then just plain old e-mail, texting, cell phones, and dare I say it, land lines, I don't feel the need to post boring, tedious, mundane details of my life. However, when I started blogging, I wanted to do it as a way to be able to look back and read my own posts, as a way of recording our family from day to day.
I feel like I have nothing really significant to write. We have just been busy living life. For once, it's been extremely ordinary. After the last 10 years, I think that is something I should just relish at this point. This May it will be 12 years that Eric and I have been together, with our 10 year wedding anniversary coming up on October 19th. When I think back to May of 1999, and think about how far we've come in those 12 years, I see that we have been NON STOP since then. So maybe it's a good thing to have NOTHING going on for once. I am sure that my husband would not agree with me on my perspective of our life right now. For him, it's not so quiet. He is currently working harder than he ever did, and after going through 4 yrs of undergraduate school, graduate school for a year, medical school for 4 years, and a residency for 3 years, that is saying a lot. He is currently holding down 6 different jobs/titles. 1)staff physician for FES (Fremont Emergency services, 2)co-director of FES, 3)Director of Southern Hills Hospital Emergency room, 4)Co-director/Co-owner ACES (Advanced Care Emergency Services, which is in AZ, he works down there a week every month), 5)Medical Director of MedicWest Ambulance Services, and 6)Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at Toreau University. All of this, and yet he still finds time to spend with Gehrig and me, and maybe even golf once in a while!!
I certainly miss having him around most of the time, because before he had all of these job responsibilities, we actually had a LOT of quality time together, so it's been an adjustment. At least it has been this way ever since Gehrig has been born, so it's all he knows, and it's all I know as a parent, if not as a wife. As a wife, we had lots of time together, because we were married 7 years and together 9 before G was born. But as a mom, I have always been pretty much on my own. I do have lots of help and support from my parents, so I really can't complain. They are in the process of selling their house in Albany, and they are moving to Las Vegas!! I am beyond thrilled, Gehrig is thrilled, and I know Eric is relieved because he knows how close I am to my parents, for starters, and he won't feel so guilty for not being here a lot of the time. I certainly do not have any resentment towards him in this department. I joke about being a "single mom", but it's all joking. Honestly, I am extremely grateful for how hard he works for our family, so that I don't have to, so that our son can have his mother home with him. That is the deal we made. He works outside the home and I work inside it. We're a team.
Gehrig is thriving. In May it will be a year that he has been in day care 3 days a week. I agonized over my decision to put him into day care, especially because I do not work, and there is no reason for him to go, (practical reason anyway). At first Eric was 100% against it also. Now, a year later, he has told me that it was the best decision I have ever made. The reason I did it was because G is an only child, and is going to be an only child. There is no chance of a sibling, and we are not going to adopt or have a surrogate carry for us, like we originally thought we would when G was just born. He has no cousins. All of our family is back east. He has no friends in our neighborhood. he is the only child on our street. I do have a wonderful group of girlfriends here, a group of about 12 of us, and we all have small children, the only problem is that they all live in Henderson, which is on the other side of town. We live in Summerlin. So while all my friends get together every day for playdates at the park and at each others' houses, I am a 15-20 minute car ride away. So we do get together with them about once a week, but the other 6 days of the week G was becoming very bored at home with just me all the time. When he was a baby, it was no big deal, because he had 2 naps a day, and the rest of the time was getting fed, changed, and in a bouncy seat or a jumparoo, or having tummy time, etc. But now that he requires more stimulation than that, I felt it was time to get him socialized. Time to get him used to being around other children, learn how to share, have a structured day, and have LOTS OF FUN in the process.
Saying that his day care, Kindercare, has exceeded my expectations is an understatement. He is not even 3 yet, and he can sing all of his ABCs, count to 15, can identify colors, shapes, numbers, and letters. He sings so many songs, cuts with (kids) scissors, colors, talks in complex sentences, has started being able to play video games, brushes his teeth, and is almost potty trained. He is a very caring and compassionate little boy. Very sweet, and adores his mommy!! (I'm melting). He shares well and at his parent/teacher conference his teacher told me that he participates in all activities eagerly, and that he's one of her favorites!! He gets music lessons on Mondays, and has started playing drums and piano. Our school district here in Las vegas is one of the worst in the country, so we are starting to look at Pre K and Kindergarten now. We will definitely be sending him to private school, although are not sure if it will be a parochial school or a private prep school/academy. BUT in order to go to one of these schools, in addition to it being very expensive, he also will have to interview, at 4 YEARS OLD!! THIS is precisely the reason I wanted to send him to "school" at less than 2 years old. Now that we have, he will be ready for those interviews next year.
So because he is in school 3 days a week for 8 hours a day, I have decided to finally get my license in NV to practice nursing. When we moved here, in 2005, I had just finished working as an RN in Pennsylvania, and in New York before that. I have NEVER not worked, since I was 15 years old. The reason I didn't get licensed in NV initially was because we planned on starting trying to conceive as soon as we moved out here. We were married in 2001, and shortly thereafter learned that our only hope of becoming parents was going to be through In Vitro Fertilization (IVF), which isn't covered by insurance and is very expensive, often over $10,000 per try. So financially we weren't able to try to conceive while Eric was a resident in PA in the early years of our marriage, and I was an RN. Once he got a job out here as an attending physician, we were finally be able to start trying to make our dream of becoming parents a reality. While still in PA, I had bought a book called "IVF, The A.R.T. of Making Babies", written by Dr. Geoffrey Sher, of the Sher Institutes For Reproductive Medicine (SIRM). This was the 1st book I read about infertility and Assisted Reproductive Technologies, namely IVF. I schooled myself on IVF, both through books and online.
It just so happened that SIRM had a location in Las Vegas (as well as many other cities in the US). Our luck couldn't have been better, the right place at the right time! So we moved here in June 2005 with plans to go to SIRM as soon as Eric started working and we saved enough money to start our fertility treatments. For anyone who has gone through fertility treatments, you know that in addition to being financially draining, emotionally draining, and physically draining, they also take up every bit of time you have. You literally have to go to the doctor's office EVERY morning during an IVF cycle to have bloodwork and ultrasounds, to monitor your hormone levels and follicle growth. You also have to give yourself anywhere from 1 to as many of 6 injections daily for weeks, sometimes the injections have to be given at EXACT times, not a minute sooner or later. So because of this, it was decided by Eric and me that I would not work, so that I could focus 100% physically and emotionally on getting pregnant.
Trying to get pregnant through fertility treatments is not a job I would wish on anyone, not even my worst enemy. It was the hardest thing I have ever gone through in my life, and after going through 22 open abdominal surgeries prior to getting pregnant, that is saying a LOT to say that trying to conceive was worse than being sick my whole life. I'd take a million more surgeries, or even 2 full time nursing jobs over going through IVF ANY DAY. And, in order to even START the IVF process, I had to have 3 surgeries on my tubes, ultimately I had both of my fallopian tubes removed, because even before we started our very 1st round of IVF they were wreaking havoc on my body, and my reproductive endocrinologist (IVF doctor), Dr. Fisch said that we would have better chances of success if they removed my tubes. So 2005 became 2007 before I ever even got pregnant. 3 surgeries on my tubes, 1 for a bowel obstruction, and 1 to remove my gallbladder, so 5 MAJOR abdominal surgeries in 2 years, not to mention countless admissions into the hospital for complications-without having to have surgery. Before we knew it it was September 2007, 2 years and 3 months after we had moved here, and we were going into our FOURTH round of IVF, and I had yet to get pregnant. This was also about $60,000 later.
In the end of September 2007, we started our 4th round of IVF. It was my worst round yet. Things were just not going well for us. The doctor couldn't figure out why I was not getting pregnant. With blocked tubes as my diagnosis, and those tubes now out of my body, it was fairly cut and dry what needed to take place. I needed to take shots daily of hormones that would stimulate more than one follicle to grow eggs. They would remove my eggs from my ovaries. They would mix those eggs with Eric's sperm. Those fertilized eggs would become embryos, and 3 or 5 days later be put back into my uterus. SIMPLE. Only it wasn't. The doc said that by all accounts, i should have been pregnant on the 1st or 2nd try. Why we were going into our 4th try was starting to puzzle even the doctor. I was getting more and more frustrated, anxious, desperate, and hopeless. One night I laid in bed with Eric and sobbed, apologizing over and over again to my husband for being such an inadequate woman, for having a disease that I had no control over, for costing us so much emotionally and financially over the past 2 years, with no end in sight. He just held on to me, telling me NOT to apologize, and telling me that he knew that I couldn't have children the day he married me, and that he'd do it all over again. I felt so guilty that this man, that I knew was going to be an amazing father, was going to end up living childless, all on account of me. I even told him that if this round didn't work, I was DONE. No more treatments, no adoption, no donor eggs, donor embryos, or surrogates. In fact, I even told him I was done being married. I wanted him to have the chance to marry someone that COULD give him what I could not. It would kill me, but because I loved him, I would make the sacrifice of letting him go so that he could be happy. It was a very dark time. I wasn't stimulating well, only had 5 follicles going into my egg retrieval, and the doctor didn't have high hopes that this round was going to be any different than it had been the last 3 times.
Imagine my surprise, about 3 weeks later, when I got a phone call telling me that I was indeed pregnant!! AND pregnant with TRIPLETS, Gehrig and a set of identical twins! What happened was we transferred 2 embryos into my uterus, and they both implanted, and one split, giving me Gehrig and identical twins. Sadly, I lost my twins, one never got a heartbeat, and the other one's heart stopped beating at 14 weeks. I found out I was pregnant on October 12, 2007, 2 years and 1 month after we had started on our quest to get pregnant. We had NO idea that it would take that long. I had a very long road ahead. A high risk pregnancy, many hospitalizations during it, a complete placenta previa, a horrible bleed at 31 weeks, preterm labor and complete bedrest from 31 weeks til 37 weeks 4 days when Gehrig entered the world on June 4th 2008, at 5 PM, weighing 6 pounds 11 ounces and 19 inches long! I ended up almost dying after giving birth and being in the hospital a whole month, while G came home with Eric, without me.
And next month it will be 3 years since the day my life changed forever and my miracle baby was born. 3 full years of feedings, diapers, baths, kisses, hugs, snuggles, LAUGHS, tears, and everything in between. The best 3 years of my life. I could never have imagined how much my life was going to change, for the better, back in 2007 when I found out I was going to have a baby. I could never have imagined back in 2005 when we moved here that it would be 2011 before some sort of normalcy would come back into my life, or that it would be 2011 before I would be going back to work as an RN, a job I loved so much and worked so hard to have to begin with.
So as I say all the time, "where does the time go?", It's time to sit and ponder just how fast it really does go by. Days become years and before you know it, many years have passed. I never truly understood the saying "the days are long, but the years pass by" until I became a mother. So now, I really appreciate that time seems to be slowing down somewhat. You never know when life can get so out of control crazy, so I am enjoying this time, this normal, ordinary time. Every mundane second of it. If I could make the time stand still altogether, i would, and I'd bottle up my baby's youth. But he will continue to grow whether I like it or not, so I can only remember to enjoy every MINUTE of it.
