Summer is here.

The High School and College graduation celebrations have ended, all the local children are out of school, the Memorial Day sales are over and our temperatures have hit the triple digit mark. That puts us in the slower summer period. We have a lot to look forward to this fall, so I'm anxious for the summer to be over.

Ty Pennington has designed a new line of furniture that Howard Miller will be producing call Home Storage Solutions. Since we are the largest Howard Miller Wine & Spirits dealer in Arizona, we have been given first right of refusal on the new line for Tucson. They are limiting the line to their current dealers for now and only two dealers will be chosen per city for their partnership program. After taking a look at it, we are extremely excited for it to hit the market this fall. We are going to take advantage of the slow summer to move our bar section to a less discrete section of the store which is also larger so that we can make room for the Home Storage line. We would like to keep it next to the Wine & Spirits so we can take advantage of the name recognition, with the bars too.

We are also very excited that we get to take a vacation this year! We will be going back to Hawaii in September for a week. This will be a little less than 4 months since I started the new medication to increase egg quality. So, we are hoping to be able to schedule our next IVF round once we get back. We know I will have to be on birth control pills for at least a month to get my cycle where it needs to be to coincide with the clinic's schedule, so it will probably November before I start the injections.

I also want to congratulate my cousin Michelle on her graduation. We're very proud of you and know you'll love NAU!

Follow up dr appt.

Not much has been going on around here. The store has been slow, which was good for me. I needed to have some time to clear my head. It has picked up a little bit this week and we're gearing up for a busy weekend. Our neighboring store is having a big Memorial Day Sale, like always. We'll take advantage of their advertising and highlight our clearance items and put some smaller items out on the sidewalk to draw some attention our way.

I had an appointment with the fertility doctor yesterday. He thinks the PCOS I have is causing some egg quality issues considering they were able to get 20 eggs but very few quality ones. He had me start another diabetic medication that helps increase egg quality in women with PCOS. It can cause liver issues though, so they only give it to women who have more difficult cases. I guess we now fall into that category. They'll check my liver functions every 3 months to make sure it isn't causing me any problems, though. It takes 3 to 4 months for it to actually improve the egg quality so, he wants me on it until we are ready to try another IVF.

As I mentioned before I was having quite a bit of cramping after the transfer. He said this was very good news and shows that at least one of the embryos did hatch and implant. He said my lining was really good and that the transfer couldn't have gone any smoother. He is confident that getting better quality eggs is the answer for us.

I told him I was a little concerned of hyper-stimulating again. He said that in my case it was a big surprise because even though my estrogen numbers were a little higher than they liked to see, they weren't so high as to cause any concern of hyper-stimulation. Also, most women don't get sick like I did until after they get pregnant. I will be on the same medications (so the crazy sayings will start all over again, ha. ha.) but a lower dosage, and I will probably take them for a longer period of time. All of this is supposed to support better egg quality as well. All in all, I would say it was a good appointment.

I hope everyone has a fun and safe Memorial Day Weekend.

Test Results.

Well, our little snow peas didn't make it.

I had a blood test on Friday that showed hCG (the pregnancy hormone that comes after implantation) at level of 25. So at least one of our little embryos implanted.

Today I had a second blood test to make sure the hCG levels were still going up. We needed a level of 75 to confirm they were still growing and developing.

Sadly, the level went down to 15. Which means it stopped growing. So now I stop all the medications and wait for it to pass.

Waiting… waiting… and waiting some more.

Our final blood test is on Monday. This will tell us if we’ve been successful this month or not. Only 1 day left.

I was actually very calm and relaxed all week. Then Friday came around, and now I’m nervous. This has been such a long road. I’m not sure I can imagine it ending. Yet, at the same time, I can’t imagine it not ending. One thing is for sure, I am ready to be moving on to the next phase in our lives.

I’ve had quite a bit of cramping this week. Rachelle has been my research queen this week. She looked it up and found quite a few people saying that cramping is good, but headaches are bad. Good news, I haven’t had any headaches.

I hope all the Mom’s have a wonderful Mother’s Day!!

Our First Pictures

Everything is going great! We couldn't be more excited or more optimistic! Both our little snow peas thawed out perfectly. Here is a picture of them.

It turns out that they weren't thawed until the morning of our transfer because our appointment was so late in the morning. This picture was taken about 2 hours before the transfer.

The bigger one is the one that was perfect before freezing. By this time, it had done exactly what they expected it to and was in the process of re-aligning it's self. Meaning that all the cells in the middle were moving around to the outside.

But it looks like we have some sibling rivalry going on already. The smaller one did everything it was supposed to do, and has already re-aligned it's cells and was already growing trying to catch up with the bigger one. The embryologist was very happy about this. Because the small one was doing so good, they upped our odds from 40% to 50%!

We also have a picture of the actual transfer:

The big black spot is my bladder (I had to drink a lot of water to get it to just the right size).

In the green squares you can see the tube they used to transfer the embryos.

You can't see the embryos because they are microscopic, so the lab puts an air bubble behind them which you can see. That is what I put the red circle around. The embryos are very sticky so they like to make sure the air bubble moves out very slow, which it did. This tells them that the embryos are very close to where the air bubble shows up. This was a perfect transfer!

Now we wait for a blood test to confirm implantation.