First thing, thank you everyone for being so open in sharing your stories and thoughts on my last post.  It was extremely helpful for my friend.  I am so sorry that your wisdom and thoughts meant that you had been through such a loss or losses.

I’ve been terribly remiss in writing, and October was chock full of events and things.  Every time I try to write something, I feel like I have so much just hanging out there.  If I write about one thing, I should really write about them all.  So I’m just going to give a quick run down of the month.  Some of these items deserve their own full post, but I’m never going to write anything else if I don’t just get these down and out there.

• Chris and I celebrated our 9th anniversary on the 7th.  It’s been a great 9 years, made far better by the fact that I’ve spent them with him.
• Zoe turned 3 on the 12th.  Anything I could say about her being 3 will just sound cliched.  But I will say that I’m loving her more and more as she gets older.  She has her moments of strong-willed craziness, but she’s also funny, and fun, and all of a sudden able to do all sorts of things on her own.  We celebrated her birthday on the Saturday before.  And it snowed that day.  Which means the whole party – with a lot of kids – was indoors.  But it went surprisingly well.
  

  three!

  

  Snow on the morning of Zoe's birthday party (Oct. 9)

• On Zoe’s actual birthday, I was out of town on at a meeting for science librarians at small undergraduate libraries.  Yeah, it’s a small group of us, but it was great to be able to spend time talking with people who really have the same job I do.  And how cool is it to go to a professional meeting where the first evening’s events include looking at Jupiter through a 100 year old telescope, and spend the next day’s lunch wandering through a really cool set of greenhouses.
• I must have been sick for much of September and early October, though it was mostly just a cough and fatigue.  It was only mid-October that I realized I was feeling better and had energy to think about the world beyond what absolutely had to be done in the near future.
• Chris and I went to the fertility clinic for our first appointment.  The short (ha ha, not really all that short) of it is that the doctor recommended we not start treatment too soon since I seem to be having reasonably consistent cycles, but he ordered some tests.  I had a moment of panic that we shouldn’t have gone to the doctor at all, but he reassured us that they recommend seeing couples who’ve had trouble in the past if they’re trying for 6 months with no success.  We were told to try ovulation predictor kits (I’d forgotten those could work, I only used them last time when I was in the middle of the lengthy no ovulation period), and were given a paper where the nurse helpfully wrote down which days we were to have sex.  Nothing like a prescription for lovin’.  From an older nurse.  Chris and I responded the only way we could, by making bawdy jokes about needing to “get my prescription refilled.”  The ovulation predictor kits worked by the way – well, kind of – they showed that I ovulated, but I didn’t fall pregnant, so it’s on to more testing next month.

• 

  Epcot

  We went to Disney World.  I know!  Disney!  World!  Us!  We went with good friends who have a daughter Zoe’s age, and a 5 year old son.  I highly recommend going with friends, it gave us a lot of options for splitting up so different people could do different things, and since they’d been before with their kids, we absolutely took advantage of them and their knowledge.  We celebrated Halloween with Mickey and his friends, and had a wonderful time.  Oh, and it was hot.  Kind of awesome to get to enjoy hot humid weather for a bit in October.  It will be a long time until we have that weather again in MN.  I’m afraid that if I tried to write about it, it would just sound like a dry recitation of what we did, so instead I’ll just post some pictures and a link to even more.

  

  mmmm....frozen treats

  

  dressed up for Mickey's Not So Scary Halloween Party

Photo album of our Disney vacation

An acquaintance of mine is a doctor, she recently had to tell a woman that she’d had a miscarriage. She wrote: “I don’t think I did a great job of it and I want to do it better next time. If anyone’s been on the receiving end of this kind of news, what was helpful or not helpful for you to hear? Did you prefer medical language (e.g. is “embryo” or “fetus” too harsh for non-medical people?)”.

I’ve never been through a miscarriage, but I know that some readers have.  If you have thoughs, you can leave them here (you are welcome to post anonymously, if you’d like).

In honor of today’s announcement of the Nobel Prize for Physics, which went to Charles Kao for his work with fiber optics, and Willard Boyle and George Smith for their invention of the CCD technology (the technology that makes digital cameras work), I offer up a few random pictures that I like, taken on a digital camera and shared on the Internet, which runs on fiber optics networks.

tomatoes from my garden

Zoe in the dress my mom made for me when I was her age

cows at the State Fair

tomato sauce - some assembly required

Zoe and my best friend's cat

giraffe

butterfly on a flower

purple potato from our farm share

Zoe and I went to the opening of a nearby park.  Silverwood park is along the shores of Silver Lake, a little ways north of us.

The celebration included rocks that you could color with markers, buckthorn rounds to decorate, spinning demonstrations, the raptor center showing a kestrel and a red-tailed hawk, good food, music, performances…  Oh, and face painting.  The woman who did the face painting was good, and really fast.  All the mothers ahead of my got their faces painted, too, so I gave in to peer pressure.

At bedtime, I worried that Zoe would let me wash off the butterfly.  She didn’t want to at first, but she accepted my explanations that her pillow would get dirty, the butterfly would end up messy, and besides, we had a lot of pictures so we could look at it any time.  Her face was washed with no problem.  A couple of hours later, when it came time for me to get ready for bed, I balked.  I didn’t want my little penguin to go away.  I had to recount those same arguments to convince myself it would be ok.  I do have a lot of pictures to look at if I want to remember my penguin.

With the fall term having started, I’m back to working one evening a week – Wednesdays, this term – so I have Wednesday mornings off.    The current plan is to get back to doing yoga more regularly.  There’s a ton of yoga studios around here, but I really like the non-profit one that’s a few miles from my house, and I’ve already bought a pass there.  Yesterday I got their fall schedule.  Wednesday morning class is … wait for it … pre-natal yoga.  Nice.

(I’m being overly-dramatic here.  There is another yoga class earlier in the morning that sounds lovely that I’m planning to take)

Each year in mid September, friends of ours host a deep fry party.   They have 3 fryers running for the event, and everyone brings food that they think would be good (or just fun) to deep fry. There’s a couple of brilliant things about this deep fry event.  First, it’s not at my house.  It’s also an annual event, any more often would be way too much, but a year gives you just enough time to detox from the grease and plan your entries for the next year.  There’s also a spirit of experimentation and one-upmanship.  You start finding yourself looking around your kitchen in early summer wondering, would this be good deep fried (the answer is almost always yes).

This year, we brought three items

• I made a curried use-up-the-farmshare-veggies (zucchini, carrot, onion, bell pepper, one little hot pepper) fritter.  The veggies made it healthy.  Like a deep-fried multivitamin with curry.    I added a lot of curry powder to the batter, but the fritters ended up pretty mild.
  

  curried veggie fritters (pre-fried)

  

  fritters all fried up

• I also tried to make donut holes this year with the Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day brioche dough.  After frying them, I tossed them with sugar, cinnamon, cardamom, nutmeg, and a little salt and pepper.  I think I made the circles too small, but they were light and the sugar coating was yummy.
  

  my spiced donut holes

• Chris tried fresh mozarella balls, that were battered and breaded with ancho powder and dried epazote, and then made a yummy fresh tomatillo salsa.  The fresh mozarella was too liquidy, but it was very tasty.
  

  Chris's Mexican-spiced mozarella balls and tomatilla salsa. They didn't hold together well, but they still got eaten

• Zoe got into the spirit of things, too, by helping a friend dredge zucchini slices in flour before they were battered and breaded.  It kept her occupied and entertained for nearly an hour.  Though ended with a very floured child.
  

  Zoe helps with zucchini fries

  

  happy, and quite covered in flour

Other pieces of deep fry wisdom that we’ve learned over the years:

• You think deep frying Peeps would be cool.  It is not.  The peep will melt into the oil, leaving you nothing but a clean up job.  The same is true for unbattered candy bars.  You also shouldn’t try deep frying a whole egg.  In the shell.  Or maybe you should if you think exploding eggs are cool.  Which I kind of do.
• A good batter can make a lot of things taste better.  Battered and fried twinkies?  Awesome.  Battered and fried candy bars?  Like donuts with the bestest filling ever.
• If you aren’t up for battering food, try wonton wrappers, this works really well for dessert items.  At past deep-fry events, I’ve eaten wontons filled with: bananas and chocolate, gummi worms (not good unless you like biting into molten, brightly colored sugar), hostess scary cakes (also not good), apple pie filling, almond pie filling, and my favorite this year, rhubarb filling.  Sprinkling powdered sugar on these is highly recommended.
• I’m personally a huge fan of shredding things, adding a flour-egg batter, and frying these to make fritters – like this year’s curried fritters.  A couple of years ago, I did apples and cinnamon this way, which was quite yummy.  The batter is approximately 1 egg to 1/3 flour – make enough to really coat all of the shredded whatever.

I have no desire to even look at anything fried for a good long time.  But if you have ideas for next year’s foods, let me know!

table of friedness. Just before we left for the evening. You'll note that there's not much fried food left. There are a lot of fresh veggies left. Coincidence?

It’s been 6 months now since we decided to start trying to get pregnant again.  I haven’t posted much about it, which was pretty much my plan.  At this point when we were trying for Zoe, I had had 4 “normal” cycles, and then completely stopped ovulating, and had already been to the doctor to see what was going on.  She gave me couple of blood tests, a prescription for provera to start my period, a pat on the hand, and assurances that certainly that’s all I would need, but if I didn’t get my period again, I should wait a full 90 days before coming back for more tests and treatment.  None of this coming in after only 50 days of no period.  And so off we went on our journey.  If nothing else, it was easy to know that something was wrong, and that we needed help.  This time around, though, my body is pretty much ticking along doing what it’s supposed to – except for the whole getting knocked up thing.

So I’m in this weird limbo of unexplored territory.  As far as I can tell, things are going fine, and I’m very aware of how silly it is to complain about not conceiving after 6 months.  I mean really, who complains about that?  (um, apparently me).  But it’s not like things are working out, either.  Am I back to infertile country even though it  hasn’t been a year of trying?  Did I ever leave?  Does it even matter in the end?  Is going in before a year giving up on my body too soon?  Is waiting and continuing to try on our own just staying in denial?  I don’t want to go back in for treatments – I don’t think anyone in their right minds wants to do that – but I don’t want to waste anymore time, either.  I have this strange feeling of being an impostor, of using my previous infertility as a way to get in for testing and treatments earlier than I should, but I’m pretty sure that’s stupid.

So I called the clinic.  And since it’s been over 3 years since my last appointment, I have to fill out all the forms all over again: the 13 page medical history form, the new patient registration form, the insurance verification form, the authorization to transfer medical information.  The medical history form is it’s own type of torture, though occasionally giving us the opportunity to talk about the important issues: “honey, have you ever exposed your genitals to high heat?”   (As Chris mentioned below, the answer is no, which meant there really wasn’t much to talk about.)   And the question that really got me: “Describe any emotional problems caused by your infertility.”  They provide less than half a line for your answer.

It’s a busy time at work, and I don’t have a lot of emotional reserves – not that work has been bad, I love this time of year, but it’s draining as we get ready to launch into the new academic year.  And here I am with my own homework, my own graduation requirements that I have to fulfill before I can even get to see the doctor.  Each question on the worksheet is tempting me to back out, to procrastinate just a little longer, to think that maybe if I just wait another month, it will happen.  But I’ve managed to fill it out.  Pulled out my old file to get the dates and tests and the results.  Talked with an extremely helpful insurance rep about my coverage.  Just need to send it all in now.  Off we go.

Laugh of the day:

Overheard Zoe talking to her Sesame Street stickers in the car, “oh, Cookie Monster, what are you doing on my leg?  No, you don’t belong on my leg, you want to go on my cheek!”

Sin of the day

Forgive me other farm share member, I may have sinned against you.  While packing up our corn (fresh corn!  yay!) I noticed one of the ears had a cocoon or some really big, hard insecty thing inside it.  I couldn’t deal.  I put it in your box.  I didn’t take anything out of your box, so technically, you’re getting out more corn out of the deal, so maybe it’s not really a sin.  As an aside, now I have confirmation that the corn is pesticide-free.

Unexpected discovery of the day

Zoe and I were out running errands today and were in a mall in the suburbs.  As we were walking out, I noticed the floor tiles had a bunch of fossils in them.  Lots of very cool amonites (they look a little like swirly snail shells, but cooler.  I pointed them out to Zoe and she started hunting for them.  Some people have this gift that they can find fossils anywhere.  The geologist that I worked for in high school and college had that knack.  He literally stumbled over previously undiscovered dinosaur tracks.  Multiple times.  I never had that gift, I’ve only ever found the most common of fossils.  On the off chance that this skill is learned and not inherited, I figured I’d start training Zoe early.

I’m as big a fan of facebook as anyone, love that I can keep in touch with friends, get back in touch with old friends, get to know new friends.  I’m pretty open on fb, but there’s still messages that I compose, sometimes even write, but I can never bring myself to click “Share.”

Friend request / invites never sent:

• It seems weird to ask to be your friend, 20 years now since you told me you didn’t want to be friends anymore.  Your explanation didn’t really make any sense to me, though if I’m honest with myself, I think its because you thought I was lame.  But I liked you, and I wonder how you’re doing and hope you’re doing well.  And I don’t think I’m lame.  But I worry that asking you to be a facebook friend will just sound lame to you.
• I wish you were on fb, or that I had any other way of getting in touch.  I wish we hadn’t lost track of each other.  I developed a crush on you the day I met you, but if I’d known that it would end our friendship when we got romantically involved, I never would have gone there.  It wasn’t worth it.

Posts I will never leave on a friend’s wall:

• I miss our talks.  I don’t know why things are different, but I’m pretty sure it’s me.
• It’s been really fun catching up with you on fb.  Thing is, I do not remember you.  At all.  We have friends in common, and went to the same school at the same time, and you seem to remember me, so I’ll believe that we knew each other, but it’s a little weird.
• It was more than 10 years ago that we talked about our plans for the future.  Both of us talked about wanting kids with our respective partners sometime in 4 or 5 years.  I think about that conversation some times and wonder about you and your partner.  Did you go through infertility like we did – are you still?  Did you change your mind?
• I wonder if you know just what you meant to me.  Every 17 year old girl should have someone who really looks at her, and tells her she’s beautiful.  I needed that at that time.  You probably didn’t know that.  But I wish we’d had more time to just talk and get to know each other.  I don’t know how to start a conversation with you now.

(I have this blog set up on facebook, so I could share a link to thispost with all my fb friends, but I can’t quite do it.)

Crazy weather day today.  It started with an email from our farm share farmer – the one who has had such a tough year already.  They’d just gotten out from under the bad weather in the early summer and we’d gotten a couple of really nice deliveries.  They had a long and pretty severe hail storm last night that produced quarter inch hailstones and really destroyed much of their crops.  Again, the difficulties of farming, and the fact that a season’s harvest can be wiped out by a single stroke of bad luck is really brought home by all of this.  The pictures of the watermelons and squash and tomatoes with hail damage were pretty heart breaking.

We didn’t get any hail where we are, but it did rain most of the day today.  Early this afternoon, I was walking through the reference room of the library when I heard the rain.  Except that I heard the rain inside.  Which is generally not where you want to be hearing the rain, especially not in a library.  There were leaks along the windows in the room, and a couple in the middle of the room and in the front lobby.  Those have been reported and looked at and the water has been cleaned up, but it’s still worrisome.

Later this afternoon, I heard from a friend across the country that there was a tornado in Minneapolis.  I checked and saw that there was a tornado warning in the suburb where Chris works.  Chris was pretty surprised by that news when I called him since he’d not heard anything about it.  It didn’t hit that suburb.  Instead, the tornado hit south Minneapolis, downtown Minneapolis (and then north of Minneapolis, too).   We live in south Minneapolis (technically southwest, but we’re only 8 blocks into the southwest part).  According to the reports, there were no warnings issued – it just caught everyone by surprise and that may be the scariest part.

The tornado is reported to have touched down about 15 blocks from our house and then move north into downtown.  It damaged the church in downtown Minneapolis where Chris and I were married (the damage was relatively minor, just to the steeple).

I work 40 miles south of Minneapolis, and normally it doesn’t seem so far away, but today it did.  It was hard reading the early reports that listed damage in areas that are an easy walk from the house.  So hard not to be able to just get out there and see what, if any, damage there was to our our house.

Turns out there was no damage.  Not to our house or our yard or our neighborhood.  Apparently our street was something of a river for a while, but the water cleared out pretty quickly.  When I got home, though, there was no idication whatsoever that there might have been a strong storm earlier.  Well, other than the helicopters I kept hearing just to the east of us, presumably taking pictures of the areas with damage.

After dinner, Zoe and I went for a walk, Zoe hoping for puddles to jump in, me just wanting to see if the neighborhood was ok.  It was a gorgeous evening.  The sky was clear and the air was clear and still and cool.  Hardly anyone was out when we first headed out – any other cool summer night, there would have been a ton of people about.  By the time we got to the lake there were a few more people out.  And no visible damage that I saw, though we walked west – the opposite direction from the area that was hit.  There were also no good puddles for jumping in.

The most recent reports I’ve read say that there are no reports of injuries or deaths, which is amazing.