Where everybody knows your name, part 2

One of the drawbacks of living in a lovely little close-knit urban neighborhood where you know 80% of the families with kids and always run into a friend when you're at the farmer's market is that inevitably, you will pop into the drugstore for your monthly HPT stock-up and spot the father of a classmate of your daughter's, waiting in line at the pharmacy counter with his two kids, two feet away from the HPT shelf.

You will consider turning right around and heading out of the store, but you literally have no other time when you can buy the precious tests, unless you risk running into a coworker at a drugstore near your office (way worse). So you will skulk in a neighboring aisle waiting for them to leave, like a guilty teenager trying not to get spotted buying condoms by a busybody neighbor, until you realize that their transaction is taking way too long and the ice cream in your shopping bag is melting. You will take a deep breath and make a mad dash, head down, darting out into the open just long enough to grab the familiar pink box, hoping that the argument the dad is having with the pharmacist will distract him from noticing what you're about, and that the older child will not recognize you without your daughter in tow. You will tuck the box under your arm while you wait in line at the cash register, and wave cheerfully at the little family as you leave the store.

You will realize later that you were being silly and that this dad probably could not have cared less if he did see you buying HPTs, if he even recognized the box at all, and even if he did, he probably would have forgotten about it before he got home. The mom, on the other hand, would definitely have known.

Heart attack of the day

As we have all learned from watching Cops, trying to escape the police via high-speed car chase never, ever succeeds. So it is some small comfort to know that the jackhole who, in attempting to avoid being pulled over in his fancy automobile*, DROVE UP ONTO THE SIDEWALK FOUR FEET AWAY FROM MY CHILD**, will surely be rotting in jail tonight.

*Probably stolen. Or full of drugs. Either one.

**That is the last time I ever let her run ahead of me.*** My throat still hurts from screaming.

***At least the squad car in pursuit stopped long enough to let me run up and grab her before itself screeching off down the sidewalk, sirens blaring.

Sunrise, sunset

Today was Bat Girl's first day of preschool (sob). We were taking an official first-day-of-school picture in front of our building when the lactation consultant we saw when BG came home from the hospital happened to walk by with a friend. They admired the photo, asked where BG was going to school, and told us they had both gone to that very same school 50-odd years ago. The LC didn't recognize us, but laughed in delight when I reminded her that she had come to see us when BG was a newborn.

It felt like a nice way to come full circle.

Awake

I should really be sleeping right now. We have a preschool tour in the morning (gulp) and I should be getting some rest and I'm exhausted from getting up before dawn for u/s and bloodwork. But lately I've been having a lot of trouble falling asleep--last night I went to bed at 11:30 and lay in bed awake for an hour and a half. And trust me, for the last 2.5 years I have had NO trouble falling asleep whatsoever, so this is really unusual for me.

Oh yeah, about that u/s and bloodwork--I got my period yesterday. I guess I wasn't really surprised, since the chances of me getting pregnant this cycle were pretty small. But I won't lie, I was still having these fantasies that somehow it would work, and wouldn't we all be so surprised! Whee! But no. I guess this explains why I was UNBELIEVABLY CRANKY on Monday.

I went in for monitoring today, CD2, because I didn't think I'd be able to make it all the way down to the clinic and back before the aforementioned preschool tour tomorrow. So I'm back on 75 IU Gonal-F starting tomorrow, in for bloods and u/s Monday. Dr. SF specifically wanted me to start stimming tomorrow instead of today, so that my first check-in would be on Monday (when he's in the office) instead of Sunday, because he didn't want one of the other docs to drop my dosage without checking with him, since, as he said, "Your ovaries tend to shut down when we drop your dosage." I will say, my clinic is definitely a huge machine (you should see the number of women in the waiting room during monitoring hours), but it's little things like that that always make me feel like I'm well taken care of.

We'll be able to do one more cycle now, and then since we'll be traveling the week of Thanksgiving and the week before, we'll have to take a break. If this one doesn't work, I will probably request an HSG during my off-cycle, just to make sure that my tube is still clear. (I had an HSG in 2005, which is of course how my UU was initially diagnosed, but it's been four years and I assume it's possible things could have gotten gummed up a bit, what with getting pregnant and having a c-section and just generally getting older.) I actually asked the nurse about doing it this cycle (forgot to ask Dr. SF when I saw him) and she said they prefer to do it during an off-cycle anyway.

After Thanksgiving, if I can time it just right with Provera, we might be able to squeeze in one more try before we go away for Christmas. Then we lose our IF coverage and I don't know what we'll do next. I'll have enough time to stock up on meds while I still have the insurance, so a good chunk of the cost of a cycle would be taken care of. But obviously I'd much rather I just got pregnant now. Hear that, universe?

Meanwhile--preschool! Ack! This is one of two schools we're looking at for BG for next year. It'll amount to a little over $10K for full days, 5 days a week ("full day" for 3-year-olds meaning 9 am-3:30 pm). That's pretty affordable for Big City--typical preschool tuition is more like $13-15K for half days. Not sure where we're going to come up with this money, but we'll worry about getting in first. As soon as the preschool applications are done, of course, I have to start the apparently multi-year process of negotiating the city bureaucracy to get her into a decent public kindergarten--which we're going to have to do, because private school tuition past preschool ain't gonna happen. Or we could move to the suburbs...and pay the $14K/year in property taxes instead of private school tuition. Remind me again why I live here?

Hm, I guess it's not so surprising that I can't sleep, after all.

A bunch of unrelated (well, sort of related) points, in lieu of a real post

• I got braces two weeks ago. As in, mouth full of metal (though the front middle brackets are tooth-colored). I've been eating a lot of soft foods and really miss chewing. I'm told it will get better. Am already getting used to myself looking like a teenager (I even have a face full of zits!) and look forward to being carded.

• Re: zits, I went off the pill in December. Not for a baby-making reason, but because my COBRA hadn't kicked in properly yet after I lost my job and insurance wouldn't cover it. It was only $35 but I didn't want to deal with the hassle of trying to get reimbursed later. I think I also had a thought in the back of my mind that I'd like to see what my body does on its own now, just for information's sake. Not that we were having much sex anyway.

• Since then I have had my period exactly once. First post-pill cycle was 58 days long. Current cycle is going on...60-something? 70-something? We have actually had a surprising amount of sex in that time but I'm fairly certain I haven't ovulated. This is actually worse than when I went off the pill to TTC five years ago--back then I at least started out with a few 40-something day cycles.

• Will probably make an appointment with Dr. SF, just to get some bloodwork done and see where we are at. With the new COBRA subsidies, it's pretty affordable to keep my insurance, which has OK IF coverage, and we may want to take advantage of that sooner rather than later, because we may have to change insurance, because...

• We are talking, seriously talking, about moving. To another big city, 200 miles away. I love Big City but it is hard to have even a halfway decent quality of life here, especially with kids, unless you have a lot of money, and we are finally waking up to the fact that we are never going to be rich. This other city is where my husband's extended family lives and where he grew up, so we would have built-in community there. I could continue freelancing and my husband could continue SAHDing and we could afford a lot better quality of life.

• On a lighter note, I'm on Twitter now, though I still haven't figured out if I like it. If I "know" you (we've commented on each other's blogs) and you're on, too, email me (citygirltales@yahoo.com) and maybe we can follow each other. (Sorry, I have to be kind of strict about this because I'm tweeting under my real name.)

• We ended bottles and high chair all in the same week. BG is now bottle-free and sitting in a vintage Kinderzeat (precursor to the Tripp Trapp--vintage because it's the chair I sat in as a kid, which my parents saved for all these years). Bye-bye to diapers is the next project.

• There is no good way to transfer floating poop from the bathtub to the toilet. Well, no, there are several effective ways, just none that leave you feeling particularly good about yourself.