I'm a Smart One

Thank You

I think that my previous post, Passport Children, is by far my favorite post of the 463 total that I have written here. It is my favorite not because of what I wrote, but because of what you wrote (or will write, for those of you who've yet to comment on it but might later). Truly, yesterday's responses were the best series of comments ever here, many of which were like individual blog posts in their own rights.

When sharing my surrogacy experiences with you, I write about infertility through the lens I share with my intended parents, as surrogacy is a shared experience. I write about infertility from the scope of how my intended parents have been affected by it and how that affects our shared journey as a whole. It has been a long time since I felt like I've been able to write about infertility and my feelings about it both in the general sense and how it applies to me specifically. I can't very well write about the angst I sometimes feel being a mother after infertility alongside writing about Chance's losing, and finally lost war against infertility. I could have, but it would have been selfish of me and besides - I'm always so mentally connected with my intended parents and being emotional supports to them that I have little impulse or desire to think about the personal demons of my own. My demons seem almost trivial when held against the ones which have led my intended parents to surrogacy and also to those which many of you have faced and are facing.

Pain Olympics - I know that it's all relative and each and every pain is valid and should be validated. The ideas I shared about Passport Children have been thoughts that I've carried since becoming a mother, but until writing it out just two days ago, those thoughts were more of an amorphous amalgam of tangible, yet ineffable feelings that I continually failed at being able to crystallize into clearly-defined words. I know now that part of the reason why I couldn't verbalize it is due to my tendency to minimize and invalidate my pains in the light of others' pains. I don't believe that all pains are equal, but I do believe that people deserve to have their personal pains validated and have support given for those pains without having the fact that someone else has it worse being thrown back in their faces. I hold firmly to this belief when supporting others, but somehow had difficulty with being able to apply it to giving support to myself and allowing myself to receive support from others.

I'm glad that I was able to force myself into writing it. Last week, my students viewed the movie Finding Forrester. Briefly, a reclusive writer who won the Pulitzer for the only novel he ever published (Sean Connery) becomes an accidental mentor to an inner-city prodigy. To get around a writing block, the elder Forrester tells young Jamal, "Write the first draft with your heart and the second with your mind." I've seen the movie a million times but for some reason, in that moment of watching it last week, that phrase resonated within me as it never had before. I had to get around my own block by not letting my mind keep my heart from staying open long enough to release my personal pains. It wasn't easy, and there were several moments when I was tempted to save the post to my drafts folder and revisit it again later. I pushed myself to find the words, to get it all down and out and then stand back and look at it from afar, the way one might appraise a statue in a museum.

I liked what I saw, both heart and mind, and I am relieved that you did, too. Many of you were able to open up your hearts and dig deep into facets of your pains and also your understandings of the pains of those around you. "Passport Children" was like the plug which held back many other related thoughts; now that it's out of the way, it seems like everything else can breathe and flow freely, and I'm excited to feel that finally I have regained the ability to have a steady tempo with my words and ideas. Your comments have given me even more food for thought. I keep reading through them again and again. Some made me cry. On others I nodded my head in agreement and understanding.  A few gave me powerful aha! moments of insight, and I sense that those are seeds of an internal shift in paradigm.  I will be incorporating many of your comments into future posts. 

So, thank you. Thank you for opening your hearts to me and to each other and for sharing so candidly. Thank you for finding this piece worthy of the Creme de la Creme. Unfortunately, last week I selected a piece which I didn't feel was necessarily my best work of the past year, but it was one which I felt best represents my presence here in this community from the perspective as a surrogate. In general, the past year was somewhat bleak and I had difficulty writing through most of it. At the time, I didn't feel like I had a stand-out piece of work of the caliber that I would have liked to submit. Thankfully, Mel in all her brilliance came up with the Golden Haiku, and I will be submitting "Passport Children" to that. The trouble is that I am long-winded by nature and I am having difficulty squeezing the essence of that post down into a 17-word blurb. Any takers?

Passport Children

In April of 2008, I wrote this in a post titled "The Girl Who Knew Too Much:"

Sometimes, a lot of the time, actually, I feel stuck between two worlds. I identify more closely with the infertility community, but I have four beautiful children. Four. The abundance and life that are they is what it makes it possible for me to feel comfortable, if not somewhat unbalanced, in the fertile Land of Good and Plenty. I feel like they are my passport into that world. I am allowed to be there, but I am not from there. I can speak the language and know the culture, but it's not in my blood. I sometimes feel like I am a traveler in a foreign land. At child-focused venues such as birthday parties, playgrounds, and school functions, I can't help but wonder how many of those children are also passports, and if they are, I wonder if their parents feel as out of place - as lonely - as I do.

In the eight years since I've become a parent, the presence of the aforementioned loneliness has waxed and waned depending on whether or not more pressing thoughts like trying to conceive and making it safely through pregnancy again (and again) took priority over mulling feelings of separation from the general mothering community. While working for and carrying the second and third pregnancies, my thoughts were so consumed with the babies within and the ones I already had to fret much about my interactions (or lack thereof) with other mothers. However, in the spaces between the delivery of one pregnancy and the attempts to achieve another, my thoughts again turned to separation I felt from the general population of mothers - the other 90% who luckily landed outside the spectrum labeled infertility. Now that we are completely finished with building our family, there is little reprieve from the question that begs to be answered: Why do I still feel like an outsider?

I've thought long and hard about this and the answer, while there are several splinter causes that lead to the effect of feeling out of place, it all boils down to one truth - being a mother after infertility splinters even as it fulfills.

Mother after Infertility - even the phrase itself is splintered, implying that I am not just a mother. I am a mother after a condition and not just a mother in the natural order of life. Fertile mothers, especially those without any losses, just are. 

Even as a mother, I'm still surprised by how often ease of conception comes up in conversational playground/birthday party/school function chit-chat among mothers.

Mother One: I have two, how many do you have?
Mother Two: We have three, and you?
Me:  I have four, plus my nephew. (but I'm infertile *thought but not said*)
Mother One: WOW! You must have your hands full!
Mother Two: Yeah, that's why I got 'em tied; if my husband and I kiss for too long I get pregnant.
Mother One: Same here, except he got snipped. I had the babies, so he can get the sterility!
Me: wince at 'sterility' but rebound quickly with an insert of fake laughter
Mother One: What about YOU? You probably BOTH had to get snipped to keep number five from popping up!
Me: (DIDN'T YOU HEAR THAT I WAS INFERTILE, BITCH?) Uuh...we don't have to worry much about that.

Blatant boasts of fertility/blithe unawareness of infertility is actually easier for me to deal with, because then it's clear where the other stands. They're fertiles. Check. Got it. Be on the standby for potentially-stupid comments. 

When among mothers and there isn't any mention at all about the ease of achieving pregnancy (which at least in my experience seems to be a rarity), that is when I wonder if there is anyone else sitting there feeling like they are on foreign ground, readying themselves for the possibility of bombs that they must deflect away from their infertile hearts.

This splintering of being a Mother after Infertility is at the forefront of my mind even more so when I am in a situation of meeting new women when there are no children present. Children are like little status symbols. When children are present and I can connect them to their parents, my thoughts go something like this: 5 women present, and all have been referred to as "Mom" by one or more of the 9 children here. We all have the label of "mother" so we all speak the same language, even though some of us are natural-born citizens and others, like me, speak Mother as a Second Language. Try to relax and avoid speaking with an accent. When in Rome, and all that.

However, when there aren't telltale passports running around, my thoughts go something like this: 11 women present, err on the side of caution and assume that all are infertile or have dealt with infertility. Tread lightly, because the talk will invariably turn to children and babies and it's possible that someone here hasn't made it that far yet, and when someone asks and I have to answer, "Yes, I have four," someone else might be mentally yelling at me, "BITCH, DIDN'T YOU HEAR THAT I WAS INFERTILE!" I don't want to unwittingly have to force someone into playing the Wince and Rebound game. I understand. I remember all the times in the 2.5 years of trying that I had to hope that my plastic, fake smile would hold back tears and act as a protective shield against conversation about stretch marks and morning sickness. I remember what it was like to not have a passport, to have to hide the fact that I was an illegal alien.

So, when in the company of women whose mothering status is unknown, I have basic rules of etiquette which I follow with almost flowchart-like precision:

1. Don't mention children until it's mentioned to me. Answer quick and dirty -- "I have four plus my nephew" -- then move on as quickly as possible.

Which, let me stop right there, because the fact that I am raising the equivalent of a small African village makes me somewhat of a freak of nature in both camps. Moving on as quickly as possible is almost never possible. As much as I try to downplay it, others magnify it.

Woman A: I have three kids, and you?
Me: I have four, plus my nephew.
Woman A: OH MY GAWSH, YOU HAVE FOUR CHILDREN AAAAAND YOUR NEPHEW?
Me: Mmmhmm.
Woman A: Oh, my gawsh, girl, I don't know HOW you do it!
Me: We make it work.
Woman A: Well WOW, it must be CRAAAA-zzzy there!
Me: Mostly, but we like it. (NOW WOULD YOU SHUT UP ALREADY! DIDN'T YOU NOTICE THAT WOMAN B HAS THE PLASTIC FACE AND HASN'T SAID ANYTHING AT ALL!?!)

No, Woman A didn't notice, and why would she when she seems to have no grounds for needing to know defensive moves like the Plastic Face and the Wince and Recover? And how could Woman B possibly know that I'm originally from the Land of IF and that I also speak her language of dpt's, dpo's, IUI, IVF, HCG, HSG, TESE, MFI and so on?

Now that I'm typing all of this out, I've had something of a revelation. Much of my social awkwardness stems from projected assumptions. With one foot still planted in infertile memories and the other planted in the present motherhood, I know how the Kym of Ten Years Past viewed a woman who, like the Kym of Today, has 4+1 children. The Kym without Passports would have assumed that it was easy for the Kym with Children to get those children. She would have probably been a little sadder on the day she met Kym with Children, as those children would have magnified all the ways in which her body was failing her.

That image of myself is projected onto the face of every woman I meet. It's like a reflex - a muscle that I can't relax. I don't want to inadvertently hurt women who are still where I was ten years ago. So in social situations, it still feels awkward when discussing children and babies. Even here in my own space, the term "mommyblogging" makes my skin crawl, though essentially that is what I do when recounting the hilarity of life with el Cinco. Whenever I publish those posts, there is a part of me that can't help but feel like at least a few people who read them are hurting just a little bit deeper than they were before they read it. It may sound strange, but I always send a little mental apology out into the Universe when I click "publish" on el Cinco posts. What surprises me time and time again, is that those are the posts that tend to receive the most comments. I subconsciously exhale a sigh of relief and think, "Whew -- no one screamed BUT DIDN'T YOU HEAR THAT I WAS INFERTILE, BITCH! at me."

The bottom line is that I probably over-think things when going into social situations with other women, and most of the awkwardness I feel is probably self-created rather than imposed upon me. However, if my awkwardness and reservation keeps someone else from having to revert into the Plastic Face, it's worth it.

Still, I can't help but wonder if there will ever come a time when I will be able to view my children as just children and not also as walking metaphors for my passports out of Hell. No...I don't think I want that, either. I think that keeping sight of the fact that my children are passports is what keeps me grounded and empathetic, and I know it is what drives me as a surrogate. I think what I really want is balance, some sort of reconciliation between between the two sides of me and how those joined sides interact with others.

And therein, I think, lies the answer to my original question, which isn't really an answer but is more a case of one question begetting another:

I still feel like an outsider because infertility hurts.

Why, after everything, does it still hurt so much?

************************

I have much more to say about parenting after infertility, especially as it relates to the different ways in which infertility is resolved (including adoption and donor gametes). This post serves as a sort of springboard for further ruminations in the days to come. In the meantime, please comment, if you can:

*If you're a mother after infertility, do you find yourself still feeling awkward in social situations with other mothers? How do you handle it?

*If you're still in the process of trying, do you feel like you're always walking around with a Plastic Face shield up, preemptively on the defensive just in case conversation heads down THAT path (like I once used to do)?

*If you're a mother but have not had to experience infertility or loss, do you feel socially-awkward when around other mothers? I ask this question because I have no basis for comparison. In my mind's eye, it has always seemed to me that mothers without difficulty (as opposed to mothers after infertility) must have it easy as I have it complicated. I realize that this is an assumption on my part and that there may be factors that I am unaware of that make it difficult for you to talk about your children and parenting as well.

Because I'm an Idiot

The fact that I labeled my previous post "Smart Cookies" isn't ironic so much as it points out just how much of a dumb ass I am. You may not remember, but my original header before I went all Superwoman featured a graphic based on this shirt (which is, in fact, how the name of my blog came to be):

My blog subtitle used to be "Or a dumb one, depending on who you ask." My blog title is not really a claim of intelligence. It's actually a nod for how I am varying shades of smart ass and dumb ass depending on which part of my brain is more (or less) functional from day to day.

In my last post announcing the reopening of Frank's Etsy shop, my brain was clearly in KYM IS A COLOSSAL DUMB ASS mode. Two reasons:

1. I entered the link to Frank's shop incorrectly, which means that those of you who tried to use it ended up going nowhere further than Etsy's home page. There is a reason why I went into Education and not Business or Marketing. I've gone back and fixed the link in the last post, but here it is again (the right way, this time): Frank's Big Ones.
   (Special thanks to Nicole for helping me figure that out. I LOVED your and your husband's Halloween costumes. Did he socket to you? I slay myself.)
2. Through the couple of months that we were closed, Frank and I discussed varying prices for the cookies and shipping. The ones that I painstakingly entered into Etsy and into the previous post just before the launch were the WRONG ONES. This, I blame entirely on Frank because he is equal parts indecisive and genius cookieman. He flip-flopped several times, made a decision, I acted on said decision, then last night he said, "DUDE - wrong prices!" Then I picked up the nearest cookie and threw it boomerang style with Matrix-like precision, clocking him straight between his eyes and knocking him out cold. Okay not really, but for a split second I did envision myself having a Trinity moment and knocking Frank out with one quick flick of my hand. SO - all of that to say that the REAL prices are:

• $16 per dozen for the Nice cookies and $18 per dozen for the Naughty Cookies.
• Shipping: $7 for the first dozen and $4 for each additional dozen. 

For easy comparison to where we were priced over the summer:

• SUMMER prices = $18-20 including shipping.
• CURRENT prices = $23-25 including shipping. Basically, it's only $5 over what we charged in the summer, which I don't think is too bad for the massive amount of cookie you get in the order.

Also, when Lori posts her review this Sunday on All Thumbs, there will be a new contest to win a dozen of Frank's Big Ones. Be on the lookout both here and there for the contest announcement.

Unrelated, but very important side note: Have you submitted an entry for the Creme de la Creme yet?

Get busy deciding what your best post of the past year is. Click through to find out how you can submit your entry to the list.

I've submitted mine; don't wait too long to submit yours!

The Best of the Adoption/Loss/Infertility Blogs of 2009

IN CONCLUSION (I hate when writing pieces end with "In conclusion" because DUH! - of COURSE it's the conclusion; you don't have to tell me. Stuff like that only works with The Bible: "IN THE BEGINNING..." right at the beginning because DUH! - it's GOD and He can pretty much have the Bible written however He wants to):

A.) PLACE AN ORDER - the link is www.FranksBigOnesBakery.etsy.com.

B.) PLACE AN ORDER - prices are up only $5 from where the were in the summer.

C.) Read All Thumbs this Sunday to find out how you can PLACE AN ORDER and have an entry in the contest.

D.) Submit your entry for the Creme de la Creme. 

E.) I'm a Dumb Ass.

I've Seen Your Picture, Your Name In Lights Above It*

Good people of the Internet, I have an announcement:

Julie -- the Julie of A Little Pregnant -- said that I was one of her favorite people inside the computer**.

I have arrived.

Julie, let's do lunch. We'll listen to Steely Dan and muse on their lyrics while drinking Kirschwasser from a shell (but there will be no San Francisco show and tell, as I've heard that the phrase means making out and/or gettin' busy. I'm flattered, but really -- my San Francisco show and tells are reserved for Frank). I'll have my people call your people.

*********

Curiosity question: Do you think of certain bloggers as having somewhat of a celebrity status? I don't mean people like Dooce who truly are celebrities. What I mean are people within our little nook of the blogosphere who have been writing for a while and have such a large following that when they've tracked little, tiny you back to your blog and left you some words, you feel extra-special.

Are there any who you wish you really could do lunch with?

I've been lucky enough to have Calliope and niobe as guests in my home and I fully admit to clapping and doing a little happy dance the first time each of them left comments here.

So tell -- who are your personal blogger celebrities?

*One dozen free Big Ones to the first blogger who can tell me the song this line came from and the name of the band. No Googling allowed. We're working on the honor system here. If you win and you Googled and you choke on your cookies...well, you know why.

**Julie undoubtedly has lots of favorite people inside the computer, but as a long-time reader (but admittedly, a nearly full-time lurker) of her blog, her comment on my widdle bwog is worthy of a post of its own. Yes, I am kind-of a dork.

ICLobstersWithin

What kind of an idiot leaves a heavy question like "What are you afraid of"as the newest post on the first day of ICLW?

That would be me. There are many heartwrenching comments in the post below and it seems as though it was a bit cathartic for some people to be able to voice some of their fears aloud, especially considering the blogging community we are a part of. Generally, though, I like to leave posts of a lighter nature here for the first day of ICLW.

So to make up for it, let's take the same question, only with a lighter expectation of answers. What are you afraid of, as in phobias? Things like clowns, spiders, the dark, and Sarah Palin (oh, yes I did go there).

I'm terrified of flying, so much so that I literally get the bubble guts from just watching news coverage of plane accidents. Dude, seriously - lock your trays into their proper upright positions, then tuck your head between your knees and kiss your ass goodbye. 

~~~

For tonight's Show and Tell I have for your viewing pleasure on of the most hysterical things that I have ever seen. While in Mt. Pleasant on Saturday, Frank and I spent some time in the arcade of a local family fun park. The first game you're met with almost as soon as you walk in the doors is one of those catch-a-prize-with-the-giant-you-control-it-robot-claw things. But there was something strange....

 

What the...what the frizzle, I thought. Is that seriously what I think it is?

I leaned in closer and saw that it was.

Then I burst into laughter so raucous that when I inhaled to catch my breath, spit went down the wrong way and I damn near choked myself into asphyxiation. 

See what others have brought to Show and Tell this week over at Mel's place.

Would you believe me if I told you that I dreamed about catching a Palin-faced lobster? I shudder.

Fear

I don't intend to pimp Kyra's blog each and every time she writes a new post, but I was so blown away by what she wrote today that it inspired tonight's post here at Smart One. She dropped some serious knowledge and the profundity and understanding of which she wrote caught my breath, especially considering the fact that it came from a third grader.

For me, this is a time of a lessening void in which I am bolstering my courage against the fears that the past couple of years have left me, like inconsiderate and rude parting gifts left behind on the nightstand. Today, Kyra wrote about fear. She doesn't write about her fears, but the universal truth she intuits about the human condition of fear...well, now having read it, I feel a lot less fearful.

What are you afraid of?

Let this be a conversation; I responded to my own question in the comments to begin the dialogue.

They Are Smart Ones

Today is report card day, and it solidly confirmed what I've always known - my children are nerds. They are set to inherit the thrones of the next generation of World Geeks.

Kyra and Jaiden (3rd grade) both earned straight A's. Kyra's grades ranged from 96-99. Who the hell gets a 99 in math? I sure as shit never did. Jaiden's grades ranged from 92-98. His academic style is such that he absorbs everything as soon as it hits his ears, but he'd much rather speed through his work so that he can get back to reading his "pleasure reading" book that he makes careless errors here and there. He is occasionally off-task in the possible-makings-of-a-class-clown-but-he's-so-damned-cute-with-his-brilliant-mind-and-quick-laugh-so-everybody-likes-him-even-the-teacher-so-he-can-get-away-with-being-goofy-sometimes kind of way. His desk is a disheveled mess with books thrown haphazardly inside and papers hanging every which way. He is the one who most reminds me of myself when I was a student, which half charms and half horrifies me. I was a brilliant mind indeed right up until around 4th grade. The brilliance remained (I am a Smart One, after all), but that brilliance was smeared with a healthy dose of boredom cum procrastination, and by the time I reached middle school, it had morphed into full-blown underachiever status. I do sincerely hope that Jaiden continues with his nerdy but affably-harebrained personality.

Kyra, on the other hand is Miss Priss in the classroom. Unlike her brother, she rarely has time for pleasure reading because despite absorbing knowledge faster than a sponge sucks water, she meticulously double-triple-quadruple checks her work until it is perfect. Her desk has her books neatly arranged a la OCD from bottom to top/largest to smallest on the right half. On the left half of her desk are her personal notebooks and folders, scribble-free and arranged by color. Her pencil box is a perfect arrangement of glue, scissors, crayons (boxed in ROYGBIV order by gradient shades), and assorted writing utensils. Every once in a while, in a Scarlett O'Hara God as my witness tone, she bemoans something to the effect of, "Mama, I had such a headache today because people wouldn't stop talking even though Mrs. Scott told them to stop. I had to focus hard to tune them OUT because my work was my priority and I WILL NOT allow myself to be distracted by people who don't care as much about their work." What I say is, "Good, Sweetie -- it's good that you're able to focus and do what you need to do." What I think is OMG, people are going to think she's a goodie two-shoes freak and she won't have any friends because no one will want to play with the teacher's pet who always blows he bell curve and she'll end up one tease shy of pulling a Carrie and killing a quarter of the student body with just a look of her feline-slanted eyes. I need not worry, though, because she has plenty of friends who love to giggle over scented stickers and chase the boys on the playground. Besides, any kid who writes stories like "The Clumsy Boy" (new story on her blog) is bound to be considered One of the Cool Ones by her peers. (Note: I did not edit her story. I simply opened the Compose screen, went to give Kaelyn a bath, and fifteen minutes later, voila - "The Clumsy Boy." That work is 100% Kyra's, and the grammar, writing, and overall storytelling is impressive for an 8-year old, I think.)

Jordan's report card made me squeal because as he is in the first grade, this is his first report card with REAL grades. In my school system Kindergarten students receive grades of DNM (Did Not Meet), Meets, and Exceeds (EXC) for an assortment of skills and concepts, so for me first grade always feels like the true telling of how my kids are handling school. Jordan also earned straight A's, with grades ranging from 96-100. ONE-FREAKIN-HUNDRED, in both Social Studies and Science. He has the same teacher that Kyra and Jaiden did for first grade. She's kind and loving but academically tough.  She treats her 6 and 7 year olds like miniature adults so while you will see her greet them with warmth and love, you won't ever catch her using sing-song kidspeak with them. I adore her. She takes a no-nonsense approach to teaching and challenges her students as much as she can without pushing them to frustration levels, so I know that Jordan isn't exceeding just because she's watering the material down or making it too easily accessible. Jordan is the one who had me showing my personal freak flag when by the age of 3, he showed little interest in learning his letters, didn't give a squat about numbers, and could hardly be bothered to pick up a crayon and coloring book. By the time they were 3, the Twinz could identify both upper and lower case letters and knew most of their sounds, and by the time they were four they were heading into learning sight words and developing decoding skills. Jordan showed little interest in learning too much of anything until he was actually in Pre-K. Then he just SKYROCKETED. One thing that has always been consistent about Jordan is that he is laid back. He was the easiest of all our babies and is just overall a pleasant kid. He's a weird blend of quiet and loud. Introverted and extroverted (but probably more introverted). Bookish and athletic. Sensitive. Kind. Smart. Very easygoing...developmentally speaking, this kid never did anything early, but he was never late, either. Like with walking - he did very little cruising or practice walking. I wasn't exactly worried, but I still had to keep reminding myself that he was his own child and comparing his timeline of milestones to that of Kyra and Jaiden's wasn't right. Sure enough - one day Dani held out a chicken nugget to almost 1-year old Jordan and the boy stood up and RAN several steps to it. Who needs to take one first step when you can run several? And so it has been with Jordan and school. He is running away with it and I am clapping like the village idiot for my MonkeyBoy.

The Teej (4th grade) has grades which range from 72-98, with the highest in Language Arts and the lowest in Math. We are so proud of him, and what's even better is that he is proud of himself. One thing I don't think I ever shared about TJ is the fact that he has Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). Academically, he struggles a bit with Math. His understanding of Reading and Language Arts as a whole is stronger, but he's hit or miss with various concepts within those subjects so depending on what skills are being taught, he's either quick with mastery or needs remediation to achieve it. Either way, he works hard and is a dedicated student who truly enjoys learning even though he knows he needs extra help sometimes. Last year got off to a bit of a rough start both academically and behaviorally. On his first report card he had an F in Math and very low C's in Language Arts and Science. We don't have D's here, so in actuality he was just a few points from those also being F's. Those grades didn't come as a surprise as his teacher stayed in close contact with Frank and me throughout. He received extra help both at school and at home and still struggled. The kid just couldn't stay focused well enough to control his behavior (fidgeting, attention bouncing, talking, etc), so it was hard for him to focus on the remediation he received. After much consideration, we discussed it with our pediatrician. Feedback from the teacher and our observations helped him determine that TJ did indeed have ADD, and he prescribed a low dose of Concerta. He only takes it on school days and it has made a world of difference. He still has all the same academic struggles, but at least now he has the attention span to be able to focus on and absorb the help that he gets. So today when upon my arrival at home he ran out of the house waving his report card yelling, "AUNTIE KYM! I DIDN'T FAIL ANYTHING AND I GOT A "SATISFACTORY" ON CITIZENSHIP INSTEAD OF "NEEDS IMPROVEMENT" AND I GOT A 98 IN LANGUAGE ARTS...I'M SO PROUD OF MYSELF!," I jumped and yelled right with him.

It's been a good day for the Nerd Herd.

Do I sound like I'm bragging?

Because I totally am.

B is for Bullets...

... and not just the kind you you use to shoot people. As I'm low on time and high on info, here's a classic drive-by post:

• Kyra, my dear, sweet, budding writer of an 8-year old, whose once before had a narrative posted here, has decided to start her own blog. This has now been bumped to Step One in my quest for world domination. I realized that by starting so early, I could groom her to reach Doocelike proportions by the time she's 18 and then Frank and I will be very rich, indeed. You certainly don't have to, but should you feel so inclined, please stop over to Kyra's Writing Boutique and leave a comment on her introductory entry. She would be tickled pink. (If you are some freaky Internet perv, please know this - her blog is set up through my Google account and all comments come through me first. I may not have achieved world domination yet, but please be assured that that won't stop me from tracking you down and beating the sorry shit out of your candy ass if you even think of trying to cyber-molest my little girl via her blog. Seriously. I will go skraight ghetto and fux you up.)
• Slowly, but surely, things are moving ahead with the next surrogacy journey. I'll have a lot more to say about my current match (love her!) in the coming days. We probably won't get to cycle until early Spring, but last week my IPs (intended parents) had their phone consult with Dr. Sleepy's colleague so the ball is definitely rolling.
• WINNER! Last week I offered a free dozen cookies to the first person who correctly answered my allusion to Chicago's musical number "He Had It Comin'" and listed three pet peeves. The first person to answer the allusion lives in South Africa (Hi, Rose!) and is unfortunately out of the shipping range, so I considered the winner to be the first person who still mentioned the song (even though Rose had already done so) and listed her peeves. So, Baby Making Journey, you win! Email me for instructions on how to place your order!
• Glee - is anyone watching? What do you think of THE storyline? You know the one I'm talking about. Let's discuss it.
• What's the weather like where you are? Are the leaves changing colors yet? These are serious questions here. Where I am in the Dirty South, we don't have Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter. We have Warm & Rainy, Hot, Hot as Hell, and Christmas. The leaves might fall off somewhere around November, but they sure as shizzle don't change colors much. I am craving a true Autumn in a bad way - crisp, cool air and a blaze of fiery-hued foliage are what I want. I haven't had that in more than 20 years.
• Has anyone read (or is planning to read) the new Dan Brown book "The Lost Symbol?" I read it on Monday (school freakin' furlough day, so I was home - UNPAID, grrr).

Speaking of cookies: You addicts can get your fix again! Until we decide the best way for us to move forward BIG TIME the way we want to, I'm going to take orders via email only (and not through Etsy or the new Website). All of the information you need is available on this download: Download Big Ones. Check out the new varieties and prices, and if you'd like to put your hands on Frank's Big Ones (heh!), follow the directions provided in the download! You know you want some.

I keep thinking that SOON the school year will slow down, but it just hasn't happened yet. I have some extra work-related stuff on my plate this year which requires a lot of extra planning time at home. My blogging -- especially the commenting aspect --it does suffer. Sniff. For the love of cheese - it took me 12 hours just to write this one lousy post! I will be back to making the rounds soon. I promise.

Bringing it around town so that I can do some commenting tonight:
Blog - read Kyra's
Surrogacy - soon!
Winnner - Babymakingjourney!
Glee - let's talk about it
Weather - I can haz some purty colerz in mah treez, pleeze? You haz got em?
Book - I read one (this is a huge accomplishment considering the lack of time)
Blog again - making an effort to comment more
Cookies - you can order now

This must be the lamest post I've ever written here. Or maybe not, since I'm bringing back more cookies than Timberlake has sexy.

Never Paper, Always Plastic

After the heaviness of Heartlight, I thought it might do my soul good to follow with something a wee bit more lighthearted.

Frank has a knack for leaving purchased items packed in the plastic shopping bags that the bagger put them in during checkout. Here's the thing - he will put the items away in their proper places, but will not unbag them first. Loaves of bread are placed on top of the fridge in the bag. Packages of chicken, roasts, pork chops, and other meats are placed in the chest freezer in the bags. Boxes of mac & cheese, Rice-a-Roni (the San Franciscooooooo treat!) and various other side dishes are placed on the pantry shelves in the freakin' bags. Windex, lemon-scented Pledge, Pine-Sol, and other cleaners are left in the cabinet under the kitchen sink, still in the plastic grocery bags. Two hazards for the price of one! BONUS!

On Saturday while Frank was at class (sucks to be him, with a class on Saturday mornings!), I went on a cleaning rampage. Heavy cleaning may not sound like a noteworthy event, but in my case, I assure you that it is. My impulse to go on a cleaning dervish comes less often than a total solar eclipse on February 29th, so when it happens people usually just stand back and watch with their mouths agape in awed wonderment and take pictures that they later caption I WUZ HERE. It was those damned plastic bags which set this one off. 

Intending to make tuna sandwiches and French fries for lunch, I went to the refrigerator for a few eggs to boil. 18 Grade A extra large eggs. On the shelf. In the yellow, squeaky, Styrofoam container. In a plastic bag with KROGER stamped in blue on the side. It was sitting right next to the Miracle Whip, which was in a bag of its own. I growled a little and may have paired Frank's name with a choice curse word under my breath. Then I proceeded to the freezer to get the fries. I don't have to tell you what I found there.

Have you ever watched that show Snapped, the documentary-type show which chronicles when women do just that and KILL someone, usually a husband or significant other who has pissed them off that one. last. time? Somewhere in the depths of my mind, I heard it -- that little *snap* -- and instead of plotting murder, the result was the cleaning dervish.

I cleared all the bags from the two freezers in the garage: the chest freezer (where the meats are stored), then from the standing freezer (where all the other frozen stuff is stored), then from the freezer half of the fridge in the kitchen (where the important stuff like ice cream is stored). Eleven total among the freezers (I know this, because the mania sparked a sort of OCD drive to count how many effin' bags I found). Then that rolled into wondering how many more bags I'd find between the cabinet under the sink and the pantry (7 more) which - hey! While I'm in the pantry, I might as well throw out anything that's expired or stale or that we'll never get around to eating, anyway. And since I'm clearing out the pantry, I may as well clear out the fridge and give that a good scrubbing, and since I'm throwing out expired stuff, I may as well go through the medicine cabinet and throw out all the old meds. And here is the lotion I've been looking for, but it belongs in the bathroom and dude -- is that pee on the floor next to the kids' tub? I'd better go get the bathroom cleaner and get to work in here and look! -- there's no toilet paper in here...I'd better go get some from the linen closet in the hall and damn! -- it 's a mess in here so I should refold these towels....

Frank got home and the house sparkled and smelled like lemons.

His eyes widened in amazement, and then he checked the calendar to see if it was a leap year.

"I got you something," he said, with the prideful excitement of a child who is about to give his mom the painting he made in art.

"Oh, yeah?" I said, perking up in anticipation for my prize. "Is it something really important, like something with a lot of sugar and fat and calories to recharge me after that cleaning rampage I just got finished with?"

"We're in each others' minds again -- I stopped and Baskin-Robbins and got you some jamocha almond fudge ice cream! I know it's your fave." He threw an air-kiss in my direction, then put the pint of ice cream in the freezer.

In. the flippin'. bag.

~snap~

I took the bag, jumped on Frank's back like a rabid Outbreak monkey, and suffocated my husband.

He had it comin'.* 

TV producers will be calling at any moment to book me for an episode of Snapped.

So tell...what are some of your pet peeves?

*The first person to comment with the reference to the allusion and a list of at least three (more are welcome) of your peeves gets a free dozen of Frank's Big Ones (which will not be sent in a plastic grocery bag). Your peeves can be directly related to your significant other or any peeve in general.

Plastic bags in my freezer are perfect only if they contain husband-saving ice cream. Other Perfect Moment Mondays can be found at Weebles Wobblog.

Heartlight

On my birthday in February, we were caught somewhere in the middle of our first of two beta hells. We'd already received the first beta; it was low enough for us to know the "pregnancy" was likely doomed but high enough to warrant a second beta to just to be sure that we weren't giving up too soon. As was the routine for all of my appointments (no matter how small), Chance and Apollo met me at the hospital, this time bearing my birthday gifts.

Chance is not merely an artist, but a true, university-educated artiste, skilled in the ways of crafting something spectacular out of nothing special. She hand-stamped a plain white gift bag with hundreds of hearts in different shades of pink, and painted a solitary word in the corner:

Each gift inside was thoughtfully connected to our experiences together up to that point. Apollo gave me a compilation of short stories by Ernest Hemingway. On the night of our transfer two weeks prior, the two of us had a 2am discussion about authors we enjoyed. He was almost appalled to hear that I'd never read more than two of Hemingway's short stories. Wanting to correct this literary slight, he gifted me with the compilation and bookmarked his favorite story with a note about why it was so. Apollo was right; how I ever managed to overlook Hemingway is beyond me.  

Chance gave me pink pajamas (pink is her signature color) and my very own Reproducina, the rainbow farting unicorn. 

My Reproducina was a twin to the unicorn that Chance had bought for herself weeks before. We used them for fun here on this blog, as they were a light-hearted representation of all the hope we had for our journey together despite the hardships that had brought Chance and Apollo to surrogacy in the first place. As silly as the unicorns were, Chance's act of purchasing a tangible representation of those hopes was a major step for her. Receiving a unicorn of my own also symbolized the connection between the two of us.

The unicorn made cry, but the gift that really brought me to my knees was the jar. It was a simple jar. What once contained jam, now encapsulates our relationship. Small, hand-punched hearts (also in shades of pink) cover the lid. Inside, there is an assortment of larger hearts, and on each heart Chance wrote a word or phrase that related to my life, her life, and our lives together in our journey.

Some of my favorite things or things that reminded her of me:

My family:

Times we spent together:

"You had to be there" moments of hilarity:

Sparkly, Skittle-fart reminders to be gee-golly positive:

Support we relied upon so heavily from both specific individuals and the ALI blogging community as a whole:

All that we held our breaths in prayer for:

When I think of Chance, I often find that my gaze turns to this jar. Now, long past February, the second cycle in May, and the subsequent conclusion of our surrogacy journey, we know that the story does not conclude with the happily ever after that we all hoped it would. The tale which surrounds the jar is melancholy, but within those glassy walls there is the essence of all joy we hoped to have.

Embossed along the top of the jar are the words Bonne Maman. In French, it means "good mother."

She would have been a great one.

Remembering all that should have been.

Who else is standing at the front of the class this week? Show and Tell with Mel.

Stuck Like Chuck

I'm trying, people. Really, I am.

Open compose screen.

Stare.

Drum fingers uselessly on the keyboard.

Ooh! "Glee" is on! Why in the hell is blond-haired wifey always playing psychofreaknutcases? She was a looney in "Nip/Tuck." She is a half-psychotic mutant in "Heroes." She was actually a normal soccer mom type in the first season of "Prison Break," but they killed her off within the first few episodes. Now here she is in "Glee" being a Nutrasweet control freak fake preggo (wtf?) manipulator. Typecasting, anyone? What was I doing? Oh, right. Writing...

Drum, drum, drum.

There it is, that dastardly little cursor. Blink, blink, blink. It's taunting me, that vertical blinking sonofabiznitch. 

I'm frustrated. I'm tired. I'm stuck.

The atypical stagnant nature of this blog seems to be like an awkward mirrored analogy of my life right now, and there is an almost ineffable quality to it.

Stuck.

That's about as close as it gets.

What do you do when you're stuck?

Whether that question was rhetorical or not is up to you.

MIA

I know I've been away too long when there are lurkers (HI!) who come out of the woodwork to ask just where the hell I've been, or when the good women of BlogHer tap a virtual finger on my computer screen to kindly remind me that I should post at least once a week to run ads, and it's been more than two since I've done so.

Two weeks?

Didn't I just write about TJ shaving his head and Jordan peeing all over the place?

That was the fastest two weeks of my life. Which - y'know - I've had several sloooooowww two week spans here and there, so it's quite surprising to write about boyish bathroom antics, blink, and then realize that two whole weeks have gone by. 

In the past two weeks:

• I had a severe ear infection which kept me out of work 3 out of 5 days in one week. I absolutely loathe missing school due to sickness on my part and avoid it at all costs, so saying that I missed that much work due to being ill should give you an idea of just how sick I was. One Monday afternoon my ear itched a little. Hmm, that's peculiar, I thought in an absentminded sort of way as I sat at my desk grading tests. By the time I got home a few hours later, my right ear felt like it had been stuffed with lead weights and the entire right side of my face was swollen. As in, I-hope-you-killed-the-fucker-who-hit-you swollen. At that point, though I looked like I'd been clubbed with a brick I still didn't feel too bad, but after much nagging from Frank, my sister Dani, my mom, and my dad, I relented and agreed to miss work and see the doctor the next day. It's a good thing I did, because somewhere in the middle of the night it felt like the brick that hit my ear began pummeling the rest of my body. What can only be described as crusty snot drained from my ear and an invisible, evil troll poked steely daggers through the side of my face and into my brain. Que dolor. Frank dragged my sorry ass to the doctor the next day, steadying me as we walked into the office because my equilibrium was completely out of whack and I was so weak that I could barely even lift my feet. I think the doctor may have used an expletive when he peeked into my ear canal. I know I did, because even just touching my earlobe made me want to scream. Ear drops, mega doses of antibiotics, Motrin, and another day's absence were prescribed. I went to work on Thursday, still swollen, half-deaf, and lethargic. My principal quite literally told me that she'd kick my ass if I came to work on Friday. Seeing as how I'd already been kicked in the head and I had no interest in having a sore ass as well, I kept it safely at home again and was feeling much better by Saturday.
• On Wednesday night of that same week, my mother rushed my sister Chanel to the emergency room. She'd been sick for a few days prior with what seemed like a severe flu. The ER doc rushed her through triage and into a bed with an IV in each arm and threats of a central line through the groin, as her blood pressure was dangerously low and conversely, her pulse was dangerously high. Her red blood cell count was lowt and her white blood cell count was through the roof. She ended up in the ICU for 3 days and a regular room for another 2 days. After a battery of tests it was determined that she had a severe infection which spread through her entire blood stream and settled in her kidneys. Well, it was either that, or it started in her kidneys and then spread through her bloodstream. The doctors weren't able to deduce which it was, but they were definitely able to tell that the illness wasn't caused by her ulcerative colitis, which she's been living with for years. Her condition was so severe that she could have died, a message that was delivered to my mother not in those exact words, but in the somber tones that nurses and doctors used to say things along the lines of, "It's a good thing you brought her in when you did because she's really, really sick...." Thanks to the stellar health care, she's now really, really better, to the extent that she ate a cow's worth of ribs over the past two days.
• Kyra, who missed most of a week of school herself two weeks ago due to Strep, missed another day last week due to a 24-hour stomach flu.

After being slammed with various health issues over the past couple of weeks, I think that we are now *knock on wood* cootie-free. Thanks to all of you who've emailed or commented your concerns, and extra thanks goes to those who've dug through old posts of mine to fill a square for Blogger Bingo. I felt ultragooeyspecial when people came specifically looking for me to mark off a square or two.

I'll be back to your regularly scheduled dumbassery this week. :)

I <3 Lesbians

I heart lesbians, especially ones who make homemade monoclepods and sweaterbirds and write about peeing. I knew I was definitely in love when I saw this week's picture of Harriet Tubman in a bad ass rocketship. Seeing as how this is the first day of ICLW, now that you've come, when you leave here click over to Bionic Mamas and say hi (even though they aren't on the ICLW list this month). Sugar Mama and Bionic Baby Mama are writing a tandem bring-on-the-baby blog, and they're relatively new to the IF blogosphere. Definitely click over to support them, as it is their first month trying to conceive. If the typical challenges of fielding stupid questions like, "Which one of you is the man?" and having to pick a frozen papa isn't enough, Bionic Baby Mama (who will be the frozen papa recipient) has two cervixes. Cervices. (Cervixes is grammatically incorrect, but cervices looks and sounds too much like crevices, which, when you think about it, is pretty damned close in definition to cervices, but I digress....) Their blog is refreshingly smart,  candid, creative, and Mama Moses in space is there. Need I say more? Tell 'em I sent you.

I've given you a gift of a new blog for ICLW. Give me a gift and leave a link in the comments to someone else's blog or singular blog post (or even an entry of your own) that's so gee-golly good that you think I should read. I'll comment on each and every one left, and I'll tell 'em you sent me there.

After all, I'll have the time on my hands this weekend to do it. I'll be spending it here, laid up in my bed moaning Swing Low, Sweet Chariot. Rocket-riding Ms. Tubman must be comin' for to carry me home because I am hallucinating stars. I've been watching el Cinco so vigilantly on the Cootie Watch that it wasn't until Frank noticed that I was running a fever (102.3^o) that I realized I felt like ick.

Man Candy

If the mental image wasn't so disgusting, I'd illustrate some sort of analogous comparison between my brain/blog posts and a clogged toilet/someone too busy to flush it, but then that would imply that my thoughts are for shit when really what I have are a ton of semi-brilliant posts and little free time in which to write them.

But alas, I am too busy with the start of the school year to sit and write all the things that are clamoring to be written, and a simple drive-by post just simply won't do.

So, until I can sit and write about my big blogger meet-up from a couple of weekends ago, allow me to point you in the direction of Heather's blog Geek by Marriage. I had an extended visit with her and her darling hubby Jase, and she has been writing about the weekend in great detail. If you read the drunken Twitter post and was like, "I guess you had to be there because this burboned baboon babble is soooo not funny," Heather's sober write up of our (largely) drunken weekend will make much more sense (and is much funnier). She is writing about the weekend in installments, with the first one starting here: Introductions and BBQ!

Calliope, Carrie, and Trish have each also written some words about the weekend, and Cali's features some photos.

Until I'm able to slow down enough to write more than this inane drivel, here are a few photos from when Heather and Jase went with Frank, el Cinco and me for some Water Park Shenanigans:

 

Eeeeebony and Iiiiiiiiiivory...

 

Man candy

 

The Sexy...Frank haz it.

El Cinco les gusta a nadar a la piscina. 

Hopefully I will find some time to flush the sparkling gems from my mind and onto this blog over the weekend.

How (not) to Be a Southern Belle

So. Say you live somewhere in the vicinity of the coastal Georgia/Florida border, and you're sitting at home sippin' on Hatorade (pinky up, because despite all the hatin' you are, after all, a lady) because you didn't get to go to BlogHer. What do you do?

A. Spike your Hatorade with Hennessy and get so sloshed that you don't give a flying flip about anything anymore.

B. Touch your fingers to your chest and say, in an airily prissy Southern belle voice: "Why Ah DO declare! Peh-haps one day Ah, too, will meet with uuh-thuh writin' women, but until the good people of BlogHer deciiide to host their lil' get-togethuh in Atlanta, I'll just sit he-uh an pine away like the delicate magnolia that I am."

C. Say, "Fuck it," take matters into your own hands, and arrange a little get together of your own.

Hatorade makes me gag, I'm only Southern by default of being a military brat, and when in doubt you should always choose C (duh), so either this coming Thursday or Friday I'm meeting up with Calliope, her true Southern belle beauty of a mom (who incidentally knows that a PEE-can is something you sit on in the bathroom and a pe-CAHN is nut, so say it right). Of course Cali's handsome, Captain Adorable W will be there. Wanna come hang with us? Either email or let me know in the comments whether Thursday or Friday is better for you.

Even if no one else makes it but us, Calliope plus her family and me will still have our little Savannah get together.

You, Ah declare, can stay home and sip Hennessy Hatorade, if you prefer. Just remember to keep your pinkies up.

Drive-by Procrastination Post

I have a zillion things to do on my Around the House To Do List, so what better thing is there by procrastinating and throwing up a quick drive-by post on my neglected blog? There are things I plan on discussing here just as soon as I stop Twittering and playing on Facebook knock a dent in the laundry and help get two cookie orders finished. A quick preview:

• I go back to work in less than two weeks on August 3 and the kids start school again on August 6. I've spent the last couple of days trying to figure out where June went. I mean, I seriously had some trouble trying to figure out just what the hell I did in June. I checked back through June's blog entries and umm, yeah. Late May/June pretty much sucked. I think I'm getting a little bit too good at blocking out heartache. I damned near forgot the whole month.
• "Mommyblogging" and how there's something about that term that makes my skin crawl, but I can't quite figure out what it is. Essentially I guess mommyblogging is what I do when I post about el Cinco, but I need to figure out why I freeze up a little each and every time I post about them. It's time to get them down and out so that I can process them better. Expect some posts about Parenting After Infertility and what I call "Passport Children."
• I need to let you in on who my new match is with.
• Wii Active: totally fell off the horse thanks to the cookies. Mind you, I haven't been EATING the cookies (save for a few bites here and there), but we've been so busy with the cookie biz that I haven't had time to exercise. Rather, by the time we get the time to do so, the last thing we want to do is exercise. We're going to start the 30-day Challenge over from the beginning on Monday.
• Speaking of cookies, big announcement: today, we are going to list three of each item on Frank's Big One's Bakery on Etsy. When they're gone, we're going to go into "vacation" mode and won't reopen until mid-September. We had NO IDEA that you guys would attack the cookies the way you did. NO FREAKIN' CLUE! We thought we'd get some sympathy orders in much the same way that you'd give a five-year old a quarter for a watery cup of lemonade at their cardboard corner stand: Aww...wookit how cute you two aaarre trying to sell some coookiieeees. You guys bought cookies. Then you had a cookie mouthgasm (to use Heather's word) and told other people to buy cookies, and they did too. People all over the country had Frank's Big Ones in their mouths (ha!), and suddenly we had a zillion orders and we were baking 18 out of 24 hours a day (literally). But we were baking gleefully, clapping like happy idiots every time we got more orders or another great review. So, you've kept us busy. So busy, in fact, that in order to better serve you in the future, we need to close shop for a bit in order to retool to handle the welcome workload. Right now our oven is capable of only churning out 15 giant cookies every 1.5 hours. Next month we're going to upgrade to a sleek new convection oven, in which we'll be able to get 15 cookies in only 20 minutes. Also, as of next week, the back-to-school rush begins for us. I have to start getting my classroom back in order next week and as I've already told you, we all start school again in the first week of August. We want to spend some quality, non-cookie time with el Cinco with the last bit of summer that we have left. The brief hiatus will also give Frank time to perfect the much-requested Peanut Butter and Oatmeal Raisin Big Ones, along with a couple more specialty cookies that he's been working on. When we reopen in mid-September, the cookie prices will be going up by a few dollars. Right now we're doing a teensy bit better than breaking even and we'd umm...like to see some actual profit. We've had lots of feedback from people saying they would have been happy to (and would have expected) to pay more for such huge cookies, so we're not going to sell ourselves short. Or too cheap. Or whatever. When we re-open, you'll be able to order from Frank's independent, off-Etsy Website/blog. Ramble, ramble, ramble...all of that to say this: ONLY THREE OF EACH ITEM ON FRANK'S BIG ONES BAKERY WILL BE AVAILABLE UNTIL MID-SEPTEMBER. HURRY AND ORDER NOW AT THE DISCOUNTED RATES OR YOU'LL HAVE TO WAIT UNTIL MID-SEPTEMBER. ONCE WE'VE SOLD OUT OF THE CURRENT INVENTORY, WE'RE CLOSING SHOP UNTIL MID-SEPTEMBER! GET YOUR COOKIE ORGASM NOW!
• You guys rock for having ordered so many cookies and for helping to spread the word!
• Hell's Kitchen - feisty Marine guy is going to get his ass chewed next week.

That's all for now. I promise a post with real substance and thought soon. For now, I need to go do something productive. Right after I check Facebook....

Frank's Big Ones Bakery is Open for Business! - PRICE CHANGE UPDATE

Price update!!! At the suggestion of several savvy ladies, we've made an adjustment to the cookie price and shipping costs.

Cookie costs are now either $12 or $14 per dozen. They were previously $8 or $10 per dozen.

The shipping cost is now $6 flat rate for USPS Priority and an additional $2 for a second dozen.
It was previously $10 flat rate for the first dozen and $3 for an additional dozen.

Both the Before and After amount to either $18 or $20 total for a dozen of cookies, but feedback from potential customers shows that higher cookie price/lower shipping cost is more attractive.

Thanks for your patience!

Kym and Frank

Click the button to visit the site!

Frank's Big One's Bakery is open for business! There are six varieties of cookies available and also a Six of One/Half a Dozen of the other package in which you can get 6 each of two types of cookie (thanks for the suggestion, Jendeis!)

Chocolate Chip and Chocolate Chip with Walnuts or Pecans Big Ones are $8 for a dozen.
MonkeyBoy, Sugar Daddy, Cherry Bomb Big Ones, and Six of One/Half a Dozen of the Other are $10 for a dozen.

Shipping is a flat rate of $10 for a dozen. If you order two dozen within the same order, $3 is added to the cost of shipping.

Because this is Frank's first run out of the starting gate, the first round of shipping will begin NEXT THURSDAY, JULY 9. This will give us time to get a gauge for which cookies are the most popular so that we can shop accordingly for ingredients.

Leave any questions you might have in the comments!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Now to announce the winners of the Name that Bakery and Cookie Idea contest that I held here back in April! I changed up the rules a little bit, since the original contest said that the winner would receive a dozen cookies for coming up with the bakery name and an undetermined number of winners would receive 6 cookies for cookie names/ingredient ideas that Frank chose to use. "Frank's Big Ones Bakery" was actually thought of by my teaching teammate, so she'll have an endless supply of free cookies under any circumstance. Big thanks to everyone who contributed ideas. Some of them had us laughing our butts off! Without further ado, here are the bloggy winners:

Jendeis of Sell Crazy Someplace Else wins the big prize of 18 cookies for giving us the most useful ideas!
The cookie concept of the one we call "Sugar Daddy" was mostly her idea. She also gave us the idea for a cookie that isn't offered yet - Vampire Bites. (See, Jen -- you really WERE my big winner!)

One dozen cookies goes to each of the following bloggers:

Charmed Girl of A Charmed Life? for the name "Sugar Daddy,"

coffeegrl of Okaasan Mommy for the idea of a chocolate-based cookie with cayenne (not available yet),

Niobe of Dead Baby Jokes for the name "The Devil Made Me Do It" (also not available yet), 

and Kim (who did not link a blog but I have her email address) for the tagline suggestion "where size matters."

To the winners: you can order your free cookies now or later as more varieties become available. DO NOT order via Etsy. Send me an email to SmartOneKym@gmail.com letting me know which cookies you'd like. You can order a whole dozen of one cookie or Six of One/Half a Dozen of Another (heh, I just like saying that). Jen, you can order three sets of six or a dozen plus six. 

To everyone: you most certainly don't have to, but if you want to pimp Frank (I couldn't resist) on your blog, you can. Heather of Geek by Marriage has already done so and Carrie of Letting It Out asked for a button to put in her sidebar. If you'd like to grab the button featured at the top of your page for a blog post or for your sidebar, here it is (thanks, Calliope!):

<p align="center"><a href="http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?
user_id=7267330"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/
3630/3687522686_20df14444e_o.png"></a>

Thanks so much to those of you who've already placed orders and thanks in advance to those of you who will! Frank is blushing as much as a Black man can and is feeling very aw shucks.

~~~~~~~~~

There has been a long-standing fundraiser for special members of my surrogacy community at Surrogate Mothers Online. Maria and Rick Kent have always wanted to have a sibling for their twins, who were born via gestational surrogacy. Sadly, when baby girl Hailey was just 15 months old, she was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of leukemia. Hailey is now age 3, and in her short life she has undergone many treatments, to include chemotherapy and an unsuccessful cord blood transplant from an unknown donor. Now, a cord blood transplant from the sibling that the Kents have wanted is the best chance that Hailey has at survival.

The Kents' surrogacy journey for a sibling began a year ago in May 2008. Money that they had saved for a second surrogacy journey went to pay for Hailey's mounting medical bills, so it is only through the cooperative generosity of fellow surrogates and intended parents, surrogacy attorneys and agency owners, and the Kents' community that they have been able to embark on this quest. Their surrogate, my sweet friend Jenn, has agreed to help them have a child without compensation. Former intended mother/surrogate pair-turned-business owners Jaime and Dana have represented the Kents through their agency, Surrogacy Options free of charge and have been leading the fundraising efforts. 

I have offered the members of SMO the opportunity to donate $2 of their cookie purchase to the Kent Fund. If you, members of the blogging community, would like to also donate $2 of your purchase to the Kent fundraiser, please leave a message in your PayPal Notes to Seller when you make your purchase.

OxyMORONic Show and Tell

The following is completely uncompensated, although, Powers that Be at EA Sports and Nintendo, should you happen upon this post and feel the need to grace me with gifts, I will not be opposed.

For our anniversary, Frank gifted me with the EA Active Personal Trainer Fitness game for the Wii (which henceforth will be referred to as simply the Wii Active). Before you think that from this gesture he was saying, "I love you, but DAYUM you've gotten fat through our 13 years of marriage, so here - you might want to do something about that," let me tell you that I've been asking for the Wii Active since forever. I currently weigh half past pudgy and a quarter 'til a double chin, so he got me exactly what I wanted. He even bought a second leg and resistance band so that he could work out with me. On the issue of my weight and my personal displeasure at the lump of soggy clay that is my body, Frank is the perfect support person. Though I tend to only feel sexy from the neck up, he truly thinks I'm sexy from head to toe, even when I'm sans face paint, my hair is like whoa, and I'm schlepping around the house baggy sweats and one of his old t-shirts. "I love you just the way you are," he says. "Anything you lose or whatever muscles you tone is just icing on the cake." Then turning on the cheddar he says, "I have you, so I have my cake. And I WILL eat it, too." Ahem. Take from that what you will.

Anyway, for those of you who know nothing of the Wii Active, a male or female trainer of your choosing whips your ass into shape through a series of programmed workout sessions. You make the use of the Wii controllers and a leg band so the game system can track your movement and a resistance band is used for arm-strengthening exercises. The program's 30 Day Challenge is a start-to-finish daily regimen of 15-30 minute workouts. The daily sessions get progressively more intense as your strength and stamina increase through the days. Additionally, you can do pre-made sessions or customize a workout session of your own. Activities include running, lower body and upper body exercises, as well as a variety of sports activities such as tennis, volleyball, basketball, inline skating, and even dance (which is quite funny a la Hitch, featuring dances like "do the lasso" and "bag the groceries"). The system tracks how many calories you burn on a daily basis and over a period of time. Rest days are built in, with one rest day to every two work days. The goal is to do 20 sessions in 30 day time period.

I have to admit that even though I almost desperately wanted the Wii Active, I was a bit skeptical at how effective a mere video game would be at helping me lose weight and get in shape. "Mere" my left butt cheek. Yesterday marked Day 2 of my 30 Day Challenge and let me tell you - it broke me down to such an extent that I ended up popping a Motrin. I hobbled around on legs that felt like Jello, as yesterday focused heavily on lower body work with various lunging and track activities. I broke a sweat like you wouldn't believe and burned a little over 160 calories in 20 minutes time. Muscles that I forgot existed woke up and spoke to me for the first time in years: "Where the fuck have you been?" they bitched, and they made my legs ache for the rest of the night in revenge for me having ignored them for so long.

Along with working out, I also got back on track with the South Beach Diet on Monday. I've been adhering to it strictly. Between working out for the past three days (I did a custom workout today since it's a Challenge rest day) and restricting the carbs, I'm happy to say that I'm down 5 pounds since Monday. I know it's mostly water weight (plus the gastric disposal of the steak and baked potato I had for dinner Sunday night), but it's extremely encouraging to see the numbers on the scale heading south so soon.
I'm actually looking forward to working out again, and I'm already feeling an increase in my energy levels.

Is anyone else doin' their thing with the Active or considering it?

In other news, Frank's cookies are getting ready to go live. Sort of. About a month ago, Frank decided that since he was starting school, he didn't want to be too overwhelmed so he wanted to delay the opening until later in the Fall. My face fell, but I understood and put all my plans for his business on the backburner. But since then, at least once or twice a week one of you emails or leaves a comment wanting to know where the cookies are because isn't he done baking them yet? and I'M HUNGRY AND HORMONAL AND WANT SOME DAMNED COOKIES SO CAN YOU PLEASE HURRY UP AND PUT UP THE LINK SO I CAN BUY SOME OF THOSE BIG ASS COOKIES YOU'RE AWAYS BRAGGING ABOUT EATING, YOU SKANK, HOW CAN YOU KEEP THEM FROM US, WE CAN'T ALL BE MARRIED TO FRANK!!!

So I stuck out my bottom lip and pouted a little bit on your behalf and coerced Frank into doing a "soft opening" of his bakery. He's still working on perfecting most of his more original creations and he refuses to budge on selling those until they're to his liking, for which I can't blame him. We don't want him sending sub-par cookies to you.

Also, for now we're keeping it simple and won't be ordering all the specialty packaging bells and whistles that we priced a couple of months ago and I'm not going to dress up the Etsy shop with fancy photography of his cookies, but I can guarantee that the actual cookies themselves won't be short-changed in the least. Besides, who cares about the package that a 4-inch diameter cookie came in? It totally misses the point of having the pleasure of shoving a 4-inch cookie in your mouth. 

Additionally, we're also going to price them a bit cheaper than originally intended for now. We'll probably sell a dozen for $20-$22 with shipping included. Once he does his complete balls-to-the-walls open (and I'm thinking that probably won't be until after the new year), the overall cost between the product and shipping will go up a little. So get 'em now while the gettin' is good (and cheap).

So within the next week, you'll finally be able to purchase Frank's giant cookies in the varieties of chocolate chip, chocolate chip with either walnuts or pecans, sugar, the Aristocrat (chocolate chunks, dried cherries, & toffee), and the Monkeyboy (banana, walnut, chocolate chips).

Lori has graciously offered to write a review up on All Thumbs (after she sent one of those WHERE ARE THE DAMNED COOKIES emails and I told her I'd have Frank whip up a batch of chocolate chip cookies just for her), so be on the look out for that in the next week or so (speaking of Lori, I'll have a guest post up on Weebles Wobblog this Friday!). 

I hope to have the Etsy shop completely running and ready to take orders by Monday with the first round of shipping to start by Thursday. Once we get a feel for how much of each cookie is being ordered, we will decrease the turnaround time between the time you place an order and the time we ship it.

Just so I can start getting an early indication of orders, if plan on ordering some cookies, please leave a comment letting me know which type of cookie you're ordering and whether you'll want more than a dozen. I think we'll also be giving you the option of ordering a dozen, but with 6 of one cookie and 6 of another. Leaving a comment in no way commits you to buying, but it would groovy if you did. *cheese*

Do you want to know what we finally agreed on to be Frank's bakery name? Here's my Show part of this rather long Tell:

Clicking the banner (designed by my buddy Kimmy) will take you to Frank's Etsy shop.

When I post again letting you know that his shop is fully open and ready to take orders, I'll also announce the cookie name winners who will be receiving free cookies. We might not be offering those cookies now, but we have the intent to eventually once he finishes his recipe tweaking, so you'll get to cash in on your prizes now save it for later once more cookies are available.

The real question inherent in this post as a whole is whether or not I will avoid being a moron and undoing all the good the Wii Active is doing by having an endless supply of cookies around. Leaving myself open to such temptation just goes to show how much I love you guys.

******

See what the rest of the class is showing:

Shout

Kaelyn.

Yes, you. I'm talking to you, you little shit. You are three. And you are just so, so...so much more three than any of your siblings were. 

When I started writing in this here blog 18 months ago, I described you thusly:

Kaelyn - aka the Youngest - in the throes of les Deux Terribles - singing, twirling, bossy, flipping, bouncing, bubbly, cheeky, ball of toddler fire. It is said that the youngest are often the loudest because they must shout to be heard over everyone else. I believe this to be true, because when Kaelyn yells, EVERYONE stops to listen, even if only to laugh at this pint-sized package project with an attitude ten times her size. She is bright and sassy and has already has the spunk that is at the heart of strong women. Fiercely independent, she asks for help only if she gets so frustrated that she is nearing nuclear meltdown. Until then, if you even think to offer your assistance she will react by switching to DEFCON 4, warning that if you offer it again (You assclown, do I look like I need your help?) she WILL have a nuclear meltdown and will make your eardrums implode. She is talkative, loves anything with music and dancing, and loves to grab blankets or bathtowels, climb in your lap, and cuddle. She is a huggy exclamation point incarnate.

That part about you being loud? Yeah. I'm realizing now that it's like when I complain about how fat I am, and then six months later when I've gained twenty pounds it's only then that I see how skinny I really was so why (???) was I bitching in the first place. It's exactly like that. I must have been crazy to think that you were loud back then. If only I could twist your ear or your nose and adjust your volume level like one would a dial on a radio, I'd set your voicebox back to January 2008. Maybe then my eardrums wouldn't take steely daggers and poke the sides of my brain with them. 

And please tell me why you must call my name a gazillion times. I heard you. Do you know why I heard you? Because I'm standing. Right. Here. In fact, you are hanging off of my leg, alternately gripping the bejeezus out of my knee and yanking on my yoga pants (nevermind that I don't do yoga; those things are cozy). It is not necessary to precede the endless, diarrhea-like flow of questions with my name. Trust me; you have my attention even if you do not say my name because it is impossible to tune out the yelling.

You: MAMA!

Me: What?

You: Why are daddy's ears pointy?

Me: Because that's how he was made.

You: Oh...MAMA!

Me: Hmm?

You: Are we eating hot dogs tonight? And MAMA! Can I pick out my chips? Because MAMA! I want Doritos. The kind in the red bag and not the kind in the blue bag and not the spicy ones, either.

Me: Yes, we're having hot dogs tonight and yes, you can pick out your chips.

You: MAMA!

Me: What, Kaelyn?

You: You said I could pick out my chips, right? MOMMYYYY! Does Spunky have boogers? MOOOOM! Does dogs have boogers?

Me: DO dogs have boogers. Yes, I think they do, and I already told you that you could pick out your chips. 

You: Mom!

Me: ...

You: Mommy.

Me: ...

You: Mommy. Mom. Mother. Mommy. Mama. Mooom. mah-MEEE! Mom. Mom. MOOOOM! MAAAHMUUUUUH!

Me: WHAT!?!KAELYN,OHMYFREAKINGOODGRIEFWHAT!?!

You: Doooo some Doritos taste like boogers?

Me: *sigh*

Furthermore, Your Threeness, I think that all of your yelling has made even you half deaf. Either that, or you've mastered the art of selective hearing. My vote is on selective hearing. Why, why must your father and I repeat ourselves so? It is usually not until we threaten you with a time out before you do whatever it is we've asked you to do. You sit there idly ignoring me, pretending as if you didn't just hear me ask you to go sit down and finish eating your green beans.

I tell you again politely, and you start spinning circles in the playroom. I tell you once more, now forcefully and in that you're pushing your luck tone of voice. Tone of voice be damned, you continue to spin around, only faster now, as if challenging me. "LITTLE GIRL," I growl through gritted teeth, "do you need to go to your room until you can learn how to listen?"

"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" you scream (again with the yelling!), leaving a blazing trail of fire in your wake as you book it top speed back to your chair at the bar. Should it come to such extremes? No, but if it wasn't for your deafness selective hearing you never would have needed to be threatened. I'd use sign language to tell you what to do, but then you'd probably just throw a sign back at me to talk to the hand.

You antagonize your siblings, thereby causing them to call my name over and over and over and over again:

Teej: AUNTIE KYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYM!!! Kaelyn just kicked me in the kneeeeeeeeeeeee!
Kyra: MOOOOOOOOOOOM, Kaelyn is messing with my nail poliiiiish!
Jaiden: Ma-MEEE! Kaelyn won't give me back my Bakugooooon!
Jordan: MAMA! Kaelyn is TORTURING meeee!

Then I give you The Look, and you clasp your hands like an innocent little angel, your golden halo shining bright. The better to hide the pointy horns, my dear. 

But you know what? Though my eardrums and my patience are taking a beating, I actually quite like the fire that is in you. I stand by what I said when I described you a year and a half ago. I see you twenty years down the road as a strong, independent, can-do type of girl. You will make men clamor to have you grace them with one of your signature 1000-Watt smiles, but they will quake at the knees just the same. They will know you as the type of woman that they should be considered lucky to be loved by. So help a man who ever even thinks about hurting you; he'd better watch his balls and sleep with one eye open.

You will settle for nothing less than a man like your father, a man who will treat you as the queen as you are, one whose manhood will not be challenged by your strength. You will be a woman who has an opinion and will not hesitate to shout if she needs to be heard. I know that you will never bow in quiet submission.

You already know how to yell.

Summers of Love (or corny mush, whichever you prefer)

Tomorrow sparks the summer mushfest here at la Casa de la Smart One. Tomorrow, Kyra and Jaiden will be 8. I'm wondering how the hell eight years went by so quickly. Where did those little chicken-legged, china doll babies go? Kyra is now damn near as tall as I am and made of lanky arms and gangly legs. She's all Frank. Jaiden's bubble eyes and broad shoulders are all me. And Jordan - his birthday in blogland was pretty much obliterated because it happened to fall right smack on beta day, otherwise known as the Day Which Sucked Donkey Balls because My Beta Was only 50. Jordan's birthday didn't even get a mention, so he'll get his proper due tomorrow when I post about the Twinz birthday.

Then Father's Day rolls on next. Frank is the cookie-baking-stay-at-home-dad shiznit, so I would be terribly remiss if I didn't post something cute about him. Or snarky-funny. Something. I promised that I would not talk about the reason why he shaves his head down to nothing a la Michael Jordan is not because he wants to be like Mike (which he totally does but that ain't happening), but it's because he got smacked with male pattern baldness starting at like age 22 and now he has this HUGE bald patch right in the front and as of last week I also discovered that a second HUGE bald patch is starting up in the back of his head and soon the two patches will meet in the middle at halfcourt, so instead of looking like he has male pattern baldness (which he does) he just shaves it all off so that he can look sexy hot instead of old fart. And he is quite sexy despite the baldness, but I said I would talk about how bald he is so I won't do that, but talking about how sexy he is is still open game. Immediately after Father's Day is our anniversary, so between Father's Day, year 13 of our marriage, and his birthday (which is right around the corner on July 6), you will read tons about how squishy in love I am with my sexy Frank, but you will not hear anything about how bald he is because I'm not supposed to talk about that. Ahem.

Concluding the summer mushfest will be Teej's birthday on July 15. He's our nephew and our +1=5 child and he's almost 9. NINE! Time seems to be flying by so fast.

So! We have:

June 18 - Kyra and Jaiden's birthday (and backtracking to May 22 for Jordan's birthday)
June 21- Father's Day
June 22 - 13th anniversary
July 6 - Frank's birthday
July 15 - TJ's birthday
July 16 - Kym's brokeday

Here again

This is the part that I've grown to hate. Well, it's more like a love/hate relationship, but by now it's probably a bit more hate than love. Matching -- I was in the same place last year. That's what matching does, at least for me. It makes me think in terms of time and realize just how long I've been at this, all that's happened since then, and just how messed up it is that I've been smacked back to the start line again.

sigh

On one hand, there is a certain exhiliration that comes from trying to find a match. The ad goes up and then the inbox stalking begins. It's a bit like Christmas or Forrest's box of chocolates -- you never know what you're going to get, and it's impossible not to feel some anticipation that there will be a new ad reply each time you check your email.

But on the other, larger hand, matching has almost become riddled with anxiety. I'm hard to match for several reasons, so it seems like the replies come few and far in between. Half of those that I do get read something like WE ARE LOOKING FOR A SURROGANT, HOW MUCH DO YOU CHARGE? Instant turn-off, definite no-go. Then for the others that seem like they could be possibilities, I know that I must rehash nearly the entire history of my uterus. I don't mean to cheapen or minimize the importance of having had four healthy pregnancies, but when you weigh the good of my fertility history against the bad, the Gee, You're Screwed Up side of the list reaches much further than my uterus' list of accomplishments. In the past 18 months alone I have had one completely failed IVF and three chemicals. When you add in PCOS/IR, a slightly elevated BMI, and my own wonky hormones and lady bits, I can't help but feel like a washed up, rusty tin can when compared to the sleek and sliver vessels that are other surrogates.

I know that my personal (sub)fertility history isn't so bad that it precludes me from being a good carrier. There isn't an RE who in his right mind would have ever approved me if I wasn't. Still, there is this bag of insecurities that I carry around, knowing that my infertility is a factor that needs to be considered. Hell, if I was an intended parent looking for a surrogate and all other things being equal, it came down to Surrogate A who needed Clomid to get pregnant and Surrogate B who washes her husband's underwear and gets pregnant, I'd probably lean more towards Surro B, too.

So, there it is. Remnant sadness and wonky ovaries and all, I'm trying to find intended parents. Again. This time next year, I hope I'm writing a post of a different, much happier persuasion.

Dirty hands, kindled hearts

A couple of days ago, Tash left me this comment:

Kym, this is gonna sound all shades of wack, but in a way I'm jealous that you had an opportunity to actually help. Sometimes I feel when I stare at these stories, and go in the comments and cuss and swear and offer hugs and condolences, that it's just . . . . so little. so meaningless. And here you actually had a role to play and a job to do and rolled up your sleeves and while I'm heartbroken it didn't turn out the way *I* wanted it to, I'm just so grateful you tried.

I understand how Tash feels. There have been many times when I, too, have felt like the mere words I leave in the simple, four-sided comment boxes do little to combat the complex feelings of grief, loss, sadness, and anger that others are enduring. But having been on the receiving end such comments of support for more than a year and a half, though I empathize with Tash's feelings of verbal impotence, I respectfully have to disagree.

These words, which might seem so little, mean so very much. It takes a lot to sit on your side of the screen and tap into someone else's struggles, even if only for a moment. Whether you commiserate in the comments or only lurk and never say a word, it means everything to know that you are there, sending all your hopes and wishes and good thoughts out into the universe on the behalf of those you read. I may have "rolled up my sleeves" and gotten my hands dirty, but I think that each of you do the same every time you tap into the blogosphere. You also make a choice to to dirty your hands and try on someone else's troubled shirt for a while, and you wear your hearts on your sleeves and warm the hearts of others when you are here to support. Don't underestimate all the good that you do by simply just being here.

So, to the 90-something of you that have been here to lift me up in the past couple of weeks, I give you this small, but heartfelt token of gratitude. You're all my personal superheroes. It's little, but I know so very well how little things can mean a lot.

href="http://smartone.typepad.com/smartone/red-cape-award-supercrew.html" target="_top"> <img  alt="RedCapeAward" src="http://smartone.typepad.com/.a/6a00e54ff452948833010535b4a5bc970c-pi">

This award is for all of you to pick up and take back to your blogs if you so choose*, but I hope you won't mind if I single out a few ladies specifically:

Tash, JuliaKB, niobe (Rock Band + niobe: I've seen it and she doth rock much), Charmed Girl, MM, Kristin (who has a voice that's every bit as genial and kind as her on-screen words are), Calliope (who is a firecracker² more animated in person than she already is on her blog), Heather R (who's spoiled me rotten with gifts, the latest of which is a 6-month subscription to Pogo, which then I used to whoop her ass at Scrabble), Coffeegrl, and Miss W, WhichBox, and Kimmy (my surrobuddy) all either sent emails of support or posted support on their own blogs. I apologize in advance if I missed anyone who belongs in this category. My brain hasn't had the most clarity in the past couple of weeks.

To Nishkanu, who generously donated practically all of the meds I needed for this cycle. Charmed Girl donated the bulk of the meds that Chance needed. The two of them made the cycle possible and gave us that one last shot (no pun intended, though it definitely works here).

To Carrie, who obsessed over peesticks with me, dragged my ass through post-planning and ran errands around the school when I couldn't do it myself, and with whom I will soon get ripped on margaritas and sangria.  

And finally, to Chance, who though she doesn't feel like it, is most definitely the ballsiest woman that I've ever met.

*******

*You surely aren't obligated to do so, but if you want to pass on the Red Cape Award to another blogger, here are the steps:

1. On your blog, copy and paste the award, these rules, a link back to the person who selected you, and a link to this post: Red Cape Award SuperCrew (http://smartone.typepad.com/smartone/red-cape-award-supercrew.html). This is a running list of awardees.
2. Check in on the SuperCrew post by leaving a link to your blog and a comment to let Kymberli of I'm a Smart One know that you were passed a Red Cape Award so she can add you to the list.
3. Select as many award recipients as you would like, link to their blogs (if they have one), and explain why you have chosen them. 
4. Let them know that you have selected them for an award by commenting on one of their posts.
5. If you find that someone you want to nominate has already been selected by someone else, you can still honor them by posting a comment on their award post stating your reasons for wishing to grant them the award.
6. You do not have to wait until someone nominates you to nominate someone else.

If you do pass it on, at the very least, please come back and let me know who you've given it to so that I can link back to them on the SuperCrew list of honored recipients.

I think I lost my funny

Dude.

Check me out.

See how I walk into this room all boss and whatnot?

Lemme get my music flowing. That's my jam.

I'm feeling better, or at least I think I am.

So maybe I'll dance a little, cuz no one on the corner has a swagger like me.

Oh, snap! It's in my bones now! Jump back, homie, cuz you can't touch this.

Feeling so good that I'm on my feet so fast, cuz I'm the shiznit, y'heard?

I'm feeling so good that I'm feeling froggy now, so maybe I'll jump.

*jump*

I'mrunningI'mrunningI'mrunningWHOAmuthafarkinfastWHOA!!!

*thump*

On my aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaass again.

NoI'mnot!

YesIam.

But I gots that shwagga, so I'll get up and keep right on steppin'.

It's okay. You can laugh.

In which I ramble...

Mentally at least, I'm pretty sure that I'm back on the other side of the break point. I had to say goodbye to Chance and Apollo Saturday afternoon. We did okay through lunch and managed to part ways without shedding a tear (opting for "see you later" vs. "goodbye), but I admit to breaking out into an ugly cry the moment I got back in my van and I bawled most of the way back home.

I gave myself a week to wallow in misery (and snot), and then forced myself to get up yesterday and make the first real steps towards moving on. That's how it goes...I have to disconnect from the sadness over things gone wrong and the goodbyes, and then re-engage more deeply into the goings on of everyday life. So, on that angle I know that I've come through the worst of it...my main concern of course is for Chance and Apollo and how they are coping with needing to move on to the next stage in their life.

To continue in the vein of the parable that niobe recently posted (it's a must-read if you haven't read), it's not my bag of troubles. I don't mean that flippantly, apathetically, or uncaringly. That is only to say that as a surrogate, I choose to pick up someone else's bag of troubles labeled "infertility and loss" and try to help shoulder the burden for a while. No matter what I must personally endure while carrying it, the bag doesn't belong to me and there comes a point when I have to give it back, even though I wish like all hell that I could still help somehow.

And of course, there is that touch of survivor's guilt that I even have the choice to set that load down, to regretfully have to push it back entirely on their shoulders and then turn around and have the shameful, yet reflexive audacity to feel at least a small sense of relief that I have the option in the first place, when they don't. After working so intimately and so in sync with with them for so long, it's a complicated untangling of my mindset from theirs, but this realignment of my mind is necessary and leaves me where I know I need to be -- taking a step back to a place alongside those of you who support Chance and Apollo by proxy of supporting me,  and alongside those of you who also know Chance personally and have supported her for the past couple of years. We all try to support them best way we possibly can, hurting for them but still knowing that we have our own lives to lead. I know we all wish that the joys of parenthood could be known to Chance and Apollo, and we all hurt that their road can no longer be on a path in attempt to get them there. 

I hurt terribly for Chance and Apollo, but as far as I personally am concerned, I know that I'm over the hurdle and I'm trying to look ahead to brighter things and new opportunities. As moving on goes, mentally -- I'm there. Physically, not so much, apparently. Betas:

 

May 22 = 50

May 24 = 46

May 30 = 355

June 1 = 460-something

 

In a nutshell, this isn't viable and wasn't to begin with. TMI - I bled from Friday-Sunday. Yesterday it tapered off into nothing. With the other chemicals I bled for 1-2 weeks. Dr. Sleepy said that I will likely restart bleeding within the next few days and will "fully miscarry" (his words, not mine). Next Monday I will have another beta. If I have not started to bleed and/or my beta continues to go up significantly by then, I will be scheduled for a D&C and possibly a shot of methotrexate, depending on what the D&C yields. *sigh* I can handle this...it's just exhausting. I mean, hell -- at least we could have caught a break on the resolution of this cycle, but even that can't be easy for us. Like I said -- I can personally handle this without it leaving me a deep emotional rut, but Chance and Apollo just do not need anything else added to make that bag of troubles any heavier. I hate that they have to go through this. I completely hate it.

 

So, that's where things stand as of now on that front. I have Stubborn Undropping Beta Syndrome, otherwise known as Some Unnecessary BullShit (SUBS).

 

exhale

 

This is also where things start to feel a little...odd...around here in my personal blogland. Yes, the surrogacy and the cycling and the betas and the loss are a part of me and a very large part of why we're all here reading, but it is not all of me or even most of me, at least not right now. This is that transitional time, where the balances both in my life and in this blog shift again. I can't help but feel a little schizo and...I guess weird about writing about some of the the things I want to share. There are lots of good things going on here, too. Blogger friends to thank for keeping me afloat through phone calls, emails, hugs, and comments of commiseration or comments which simply said something to the effect of "this sucks monkey ass" -- which it did, but I laughed my ass off through the tears just the same. Funny children who are dazzled by the splendor of summer and all the potential that it holds. A husband who as of today, is now a kolidge stoodent. You should have seen him with his bookbag. Actually, you will see him with his bookbag, because I totally took First Day of School pictures of him. For the next couple of weeks, there will be days in which one post will bemoan the aforementioned SUBS and how much emotional havoc that might wreak and me and C&A, but then the next moment I'll jerk hard in the opposite direction and write about something stupidly hilarious that el Cinco did. So, yeah...for a little while it will feel just...weird and awkward to post about all that is happy joy and sunshine in my life right now, but at the same time, I know that it is right that I should, and that it is okay that I do.

 

Because after all, Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da...

 

 

...which is as it should be.

Abstract

A couple of days ago, our beloved niobe wrote an interesting post and invitation to participate, which I am going to shamelessly copy here because 1) she said everything I would have, 2) she writes better than I do, and 3) I'm too lazy to summarize in my own words, anyway:

Piet Mondrian is one of those iconic modern artists, with instantly recognizable compositions consisting of grids of dark lines enclosing fields of white and eye-catching primary colors. A complicated theoretical apparatus underlies these paintings, involving evolution towards higher planes of being and seeing and the quest for an art more real than reality itself. Mondrian took this all very seriously, so much so that when his friend and collaborator, Theo van Doesburg, introduced diagonal lines into his compositions, Mondrian reportedly never forgave him.

The picture above, however, isn't actually a Mondrian. In fact, it's supposed to be a picture of, well, me. And, oddly enough, I think it pretty much captures my physical and spiritual essence. If you'd like to create your very own personal modern art masterpiece, just go to this this site, answer a few basic questions about yourself and voilà! the portrait of you that Mondrian probably would have painted if only he'd had the chance.

Though I copied niobe's words, the picture above is mine, and yes -- I absolutely do feel like this picture has somehow managed to capture the essence of me. My first thought was that this picture is a perfect abstract representation of Frank and me. We're glued-at-the-hip close and the vertical brown and red bars seem accurately proportionate to the height difference between him and me.

My second thought -- the one that stole my breath -- was that it also mirrors my most dominant insecurity; the feeling that no matter how hard I might strive and reach, I never quite seem to measure up.

Be sure to visit niobe's post to see links to others' Mondrians.

How do you hold your hope? Revisited

A bit more than a year ago when I was on the brink of my first transfer with Mia and Urs, I wrote the below which I have copied and pasted. There is a question contained within that I have found myself pondering with increasing frequency. I do have hope for this cycle, but how do I hope for this cycle?

Yesterday Niobe wrote a short, but powerful post on the topic of hope. Will she hurt less by proxy of hoping less? How can one have positive hopes that the struggle of infertility will eventually lead to a baby when all evidence points to the contrary?

In its best light, hope is lovely, the subject of cross-stitched pillows, greeting cards, and mass-produced decorative wall prints. "Hope for the best," people say, and conveniently leave off the completion of "but expect the worst." The worst - the metamorphosed reciprocal, the rotten thing that writhes beneath Hope's fair skin, like ominous thunder in the distance of a tranquil day. Hope is as dangerous as it is beautiful; the lion is a gorgeous creature to behold, so long as it is contained within its cage.

Hope is multifaceted and the side you see is dictated largely by your past experiences. I have come to believe that hope is something borne from desperation. People don't hope for something unless there is an idea that that something might not come to be. I started not with hope, but with the ingrained expectation that I would get pregnant not too much longer after trying. After six or seven months, the expectation turned into the hope that I would get pregnant before the 1-year line in the sand. Line crossed, I then hoped that I would be able to achieve pregnancy without help, because it had become glaringly apparent that something wasn't right. When my sister got pregnant after my second year of trying, hope was a bitch that I'd grown tired of entertaining, and I approached each cycle with no expectations, or hope, at all.

Since then, I've had hope rebuilt and shattered and back again, and my previous waltzes with her determine how I approach the dance floor. This time, I'm willing to tango. But I know there are others who prefer to sit on the sidelines with their eyes squeezed shut and fingers pressed into their ears. Some don't even want to hear the music, and who can blame them when all they hear is an incongruous dirge?

So I ask - how do you hold your hope? Is it something you keep close to you, holding on to it fiercely because it's all that you have left? Or do you lock it down and turn away from it, fearful of the crouching beast and its ability to swallow you whole? If you feel comfortable sharing, what are the past events that dictate your perspective on hope? My personal view is blended, shaped a bit more by my experience with infertility than it is by my experience as a surrogate.

Hope is shifty, an amorphous mass which often changes before you've realized it has. This time, I have no desire to take hope by the hand for a spin across the floor. Her lullaby does not soothe me to sleep; instead it is the seed of night terrors. I don't want to let her melody carry me. I hear her, but I'm too afraid to listen. When -- no, if -- hope decides to curl herself around the throb of a heartbeat within, then maybe I'll lend her an ear. For now, it's just enough to know she's there, even if I don't care to acknowledge her.

I throw this question out to the blogosphere again; how do you hold your hope?

I welcome April ICLW'ers with a contest

Hi. I'm Kym, and this is my blog.

*Hi, Kym.*

The super-short story: After 2.5 years of trying to conceive naturally without the slightest bit of luck, I hit the infertility lottery and conceived girl/boy twins on Clomid. I later conceived two singletons on Clomid. Somewhere in the middle of that, I received a full and proper diagnosis of PCOS with Insulin Resistance as the cause of my anovulation and inability to get pregnant without a little ovarian ass-kicking. Now, I'm the proud mother of four bright kiddos plus one: Kyra and Jaiden, age 7; Jordan, age 5; and Kaelyn, age 3; and my nephew TJ, age 8. Read The Rundown for extended information about The SmartOne family.

I'm not your average mommyblogger, though (I actually shudder at the term). I blather on about my five (known here as el Cinco de Mio) and sometimes about my work as an 8th grade English teacher, but the primary focus of my blog is continuing to bitch about infertility in my role as a gestational surrogate. I've helped bring one family's child into the world, and I'm currently cycling for a mid-May transfer with my intended parents Chance and Apollo. We suffered a chemical pregnancy in February, but prayerfully the next cycle will be THE cycle. I hope you stick around for the long ride. You and the embryo/s, that is.

Enough about me - this post is really about my sexy man Frank. I'm totally going to brag here:

• high school sweethearts
• married for almost 13 years, together for 16 years
• medically retired from the Army following his 1998 diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis
• blessed with remarkably good health despite the disease
• the bomb-diggety stay-at-home-dad since the twins were born
• starting college in the summer for a degree in Physical Education
• cleans the house
• does the laundry
• does homework time
• chases el Cinco around the house for tickles and body slams and karate
• cooks 95% of what we eat (the other 3% is fast-food and the other 2% I microwave)
• bakes as a hobby, and if all of the above isn't enough to get you hot, here's another:
• now aiming to open an Etsy cookie shop

Long-time readers and Frank-lovers, did you catch that last one?

FRANK IS GOING TO OPEN AN ONLINE COOKIE SHOP!


A man who cooks and cleans and is great with kids and feeds me homemade, ginormous cookies? Rrrrraaawwrrr.

Don't be jealous, ladies; be helpful. I'll share (but no pinching of his butt. That's all mine).

We have many of the cookie variety, packaging, pricing, and design concept ideas worked out, but what we need is a name for his bakery. It needs to be something that reflects Frank. He has a schmoove, Rico Suave kind-of appeal. He's quiet, laid back, more of a casual observer than an active participant. He's the candlelight and rose petals in the bubble bath type, the gentle giant with solid, silent support. He's also quirky with a killer sense of humor. His bakery name should reflect that.

We'd like for the name to have some sort of inclusion of his name or nickames: Frank, Maestro, BarneyMac, B-Love, or any derivation thereof. (Those nicknames were all earned from his Army days; he was the casanova that all the girlies flocked to, but he was taken already. *insert evil laughter here* Sucks to be them.)

For further inspiration and so you can get a better sense of Frank's vibe, below is the general concept of his shop and cookies. Which, it should be known that I'm the brainchild behind much of this. It goes something like this:

Me: You know what sounds good? A big assed cookie with an overload of chocolate. Chocolate batter, chocolate chunks, and maybe white chocolate chips.

Frank: (tapping chin with finger) Hmm. Sounds good.

Me: And it needs a sexy name, because it's a sexy cookie.

Frank: A sexy cookie?

Me: Yeah, there's something kindof naughty about it. You should call it the Menages Trois.

Frank: (sexily swiveling his hips around) Oooh, you mean like me, you, and the cookie doing naughty things in the bed?

Me: (flatly) Uuummm, no. I was thinking more like the marriage of those three types of chocolate in the unholy, sinful, and fattening but oh-so-delicious circle of baked goodness.

Frank: I can do that. Can I do you, too?

Me: Chocolate first, Mister Cookie Man. I have my priorities.

But I digress, sort-of. Where was I? Oh, yes - the bakery concept:

All cookies will have Frank's signature compact disc-sized porportions. Size matters (heh), and it is the size of his cookies that will be the major selling point. Click here for a picutre of one such cookie.

There will be "Nice" and "Naughty" cookies. We're not sure if Nice/Naughty will stick, but there will be the involvement of seductively opposite words like "Innocent/Sinful," etc. We're open to suggestions.

The "Nice" cookies will be your basics: chocolate chip, chocolate chip with walnuts, sugar, peanut butter, and oatmeal raisin.

The "Naughty" cookies are the premium varieties, the special recipes that were born in either my mind or his:

1. The Menages Trois: chocolate batter, chocolate chunks, white chocolate chips
2. The Monkeyboy: banana, chocolate chips, and walnuts (this one sounds like a naughty name, but it's really named after Jordan)
3. The Aristocrat: dried cherry chunks, chocolate chips, chunks of Skor candy, and toffee chips (Chance thought of this one)
4. Wake Me Up Before You Cocoa: coffee-flavored cookie with chocolate chips and chocolate/mocha icing drizzle (still working on this one)
5. Get Lei'd: pineapple chunks, coconut, and macadamia nuts
6. Appleholic's Anonymous: apple chunks soaked in amaretto, amaretto-infused batter, pecans, extra cinnamon and nutmeg (this title isn't exactly PC, but damn, it's funny)

His packaging colors will be brown and teal. His tagline will be "These ain't your Grandma's cookies." Get it? Grandma's cookies? As in, not the brand name Grandma's cookies? I slay myself.

So, here's the contest: leave some suggestions for his bakery name in the comments. You can enter as many times as you'd like to. We'll pore through all of them and select the one we like the best.

You can also leave suggestions for either sexy/quirky cookie names (and we'll develop the recipe), recipe ingredient ideas (and we'll develop the name), or both.

We're open to any and all other ideas for marketing, packaging, etc.

The name contest winner will receive a six-cookie sampler and anyone else who suggests some ideas that we end up using will recieve a two-cookie sampler.

There is no time limit; this contest is open for as long as it takes us to land on the right name.

Okay, creative people of the Internet; gimme whatcha got!

Straight from the bowels of hell

I find that I'm throwing myself into reading and obsessing over all of your blogs, but when it comes to writing over here in mine, I can't brain cuz I have the dumb. Seriously - my mind goes blank and my fingers go numb, that panicky feeling threatens to tighten my throat and mental clarity goes all fuzzy.

For some reason, it feels more comfortable to keep a low profile on this cycle. I don't know how much or how little I'll write about it. Today I might not want to say much, but tomorrow I might be freaking the fuck out about something and will need you all to calm me down.

Speaking of freaking out about something -- where the flip is my period? I'm not talking about the one at the end this sentence, ether. I swear -- I can't even stay regulated on freaking birth control pills now. Tomorrow morning I'm supposed to have my baseline lining check, but it will completely defeat the purpose to pony up to the stirrups without having started my period.

The Lupron is being especially bitchy to me this time around. I think that stuff is really repackaged demon piss. Somewhere there is a secret, dark, dank cave where there are rows of trapped demons, their slimy skin burning fluorescent red with rage. Their pointy little peepees are suctioned into tubes, and their boiling hot piss is whisked away down chutes into the Holy Room. This is where it's mixed with a byproduct created from the pee of nuns. Some genius thinks that this is what will exercise the demonic residue, but oh no! No holy nun pee can combat the demon juice that I inject into my thighs every night. There is a reason why Frank's term for Lupron is "Bitch in a Bottle;" that shit makes my head spin. He just might smack me with a Bible and ward me off with a silver crucifix. Amen.

So anyway, I don't want to not say anything here, either. A few people really dug my video blog and suggested that I do some others. But uuuhh...WTF should I talk about? Nancy did a kick ass Q&A video blog session a few weeks ago. You ask the questions and I'll answer. They can be about surrogacy or me or el Cinco or something totally random. Anything that's a good distraction and gives me something to fill the blog space will basically work, because I don't want to go totally quiet in between bouts of freakoutedness.

That's all for now. I'm going to shoot up tonight's demon piss and play Rock Band with the fam. Y'know...anything to NOT wonder about where my freakin' period is.

Sock It to Me Week 2009 ~ The Sockeroo

According to Dictionary.com, sockeroo is defined as a notable success. We might not all have successes on our individual journeys, but what we never fail at is offering support to one another. We're like a good pair of socks: no matter our different appearances or compositions, we provide warmth, comfort, and support.

Welcome to The Sockeroo - a list of notable successes in the support and warmth found within this blogging community. If you have written a Sock It to Me post, plug in your information below. Be sure to read some of the other posts and leave those bloggers some warm and fuzzies in their comments.

Be sure to visit this post to pick up your badges for participating in Sock It to Me Week. There is one badge for those of you who both exchanged socks and wrote a post and another badge for those of you who only wrote a post.

Sock It to Me Week ends on April 13, but there is no expiration date on adding posts to the Sockeroo.

Sock It to Me Fall 2009 will start in September!

How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news (Romans 10:15)*

Kym,
thanks for arranging this exchange...so fun!
I gave you three pair of socks for extra thanks; you deserve it!

Ballerina socks for grace, spa socks for relaxation, and kokopelli socks for luck in your infertility endeavors!

Enjoy! And thank you again from all of us!

         Jessica

PS: You completely do kick infertility's ass...good luck in your coming cycle and all you do! God bless!


*Scripture imprinted on the bottom of the card Jess sent to me.

By nothing more than pure coincidence, Day One of Sock It to Me Week is also Day One of injectibles. It seems fitting and appropriate to have these two events occur in tandem. I've never had a shot feel like a hug, but it did. Socks from the beautiful Jess warmed my feet and the donated Lupron (you know who you are!) warmed my heart.

All of you out there warm my spirit. When I started writing this blog a bit more than a year ago, there was no way I could know how far your support would reach. You will carry Chance and me through this cycle. I will need you and the good news of your support that you bring.

For all of my verbosity, any words of gratitude that I could ever create would only feel clumsy and inadequate in comparison to the swell my heart feels when I think of all of you, my friends inside the computer.  Try as I might, I'll never get it right...

...but know that for everything I can say, my heart feels infinitely more.

Thank you all.

Sock It to Me 2009 Awards

If you stopped by earlier and couldn't get the codes to the buttons to work, try them again. Some idiot I put in the wrong information, but I fixed it. :)

Yup. Dems ma feets. See those socks? They weren't sent to me by my sock buddy. I'm saving writing about those socks for tomorrow. No, these socks pictured here were sent to me by the lovely Heather of Geek by Marriage, and they are just the start of what was in the big box o'gifts that she sent to me this week. I am humbled by her unflagging (and hilarious!) support and that of all of you who come here.

Sock It to Me Week 2009 officially kicks off tomorrow. Each of my posts this week will fall in line with a SITM Week post; I will write specifically about how dynamic this community is, how I've come to depend on the support that you all offer, and ways in which specific bloggers have rallied to help Chance, Apollo, and me.

Remember: if you didn't sign up for SITM in time to get in on the sock exchange, you can still participate by putting up a post on your blog sometime this week about how you find warmth and comfort in the blogging community. Once you've posted, come back to my blog and leave the permalink to your post in a comment. I'll keep a running list of all the SITM Week posts so that you can read what others have to say. Maybe you'll discover some new blogs and make some new connections. Leave some comments for others; like Mel says - "comments are the new hug," so leave some warm and fuzzies for others as you travel through the posts.

Everyone who participates gets an award to post on their blog (if you so desire)! If you only did the post, here is your badge:

<a href="http://smartone.typepad.com/smartone/2009/04/sock-it-to-me-week-2009-the-sockeroo.html" target="_top"> <img  alt="SockItToMeParticipant" src="http://smartone.typepad.com/.a/6a00e54ff45294883301156e8c12ac970c-pi"></a>

If you participated in both the sock exchange and the posts, here is your Elite badge:

<a href="http://smartone.typepad.com/smartone/2009/04/sock-it-to-me-week-2009-the-sockeroo.html" target="_top"> <img  alt="SockItToMeElite" src="http://smartone.typepad.com/.a/6a00e54ff45294883301156e8c12b6970c-pi"></a>

The Sock It to Me Week post is already up. I'm looking forward to reading everyone's posts!

Cloudy with a chance of disquietude

I know that I'm supposed to be saying something.

I owe you pictures and commentary about Sam's birthday party. I will get to that, I promise. But it just so happened that Chance's cycle day 1 fell on that day, too. Cycle day 1 - the official green light. The GO button on this cycle was pressed on that day. The fact that Sam's birthday party and the start of this cycle coincided in some sort of odd cosmic collision felt...weird. Not exactly ominous, but not exactly fortuitous, either. It felt like something, though. An indecipherable omen, impossible to tell in the moment whether it was indicitive of something to look forward to or something that may never be seen.

If this were a movie, this would be the point at which the skies suddenly grey, the wind speeds up enough to lift the hair from your shoulders, and everyone glances nervously at the sky when the foreboding thunder rumbles from afar.

I'm scared.

Get ready for the upcoming Sock It to Me Week 2009

Did you miss out on the fun of the Sock It to Me Exchange? If you did, there's still a way that you can participate. The 62 bloggers and blog readers who signed up for the exchange about a month ago were assigned sock buddies to send a special pair of socks. The second leg of the Sock It to Me is coming up next week. During Sock It to Me Week (SITM Week), which is April 6-13, each of the participants will post a picture of the socks they received along with a post about this community provides them warmth, comfort, and support...just like a pair of cozy socks.

If you missed out on the exchange, it's too late to send and receive a pair of socks, but you can still participate in Sock It to Me Week by putting up a post about how this community has been a source of support and "warm and fuzzies" for you.

Here is what all SITM Week participants, both old and new, need to do:

1. The week of April 6-13 is Sock-It-to-Me Week. Post a picture of your socks (worn or not worn) with a link back to the blogger who sent them to you. The topic of your post should be about what the support of this community means to you and how it has helped and is helping you. It's a week for warm and fuzzies. Like ummm...the socks.
    
2. When you post, come back here with a link to your post and I'll keep a running list of the entries.
   ***If you missed out on the socks and are only putting up a post, please also come back with a link to your SITM post and you will be included on the list.
3. On April 5, check back here to pick up your Sock It to Me participant award! Everyone who puts up a post gets a badge. Those who participated in the sock exchange part gets an Elite badge. Now don't you feel all special?
4. Optional: Help spread the word about Sock It to Me Week by posting about it TODAY with a link to this post. If already have the original SITM badge posted, please take that one down and replace it with the one below. Here's the code to a badge to promote SITM Week:
   
   <a href="http://smartone.typepad.com/smartone/2009/03/sock-it-to-me-week-2009.html" target="_top"> <img  alt="SockItToMeWeek" src="http://smartone.typepad.com/.a/6a00e54ff45294883301156e8c12be970c-pi"></a>
   
   
   

Lastly, I need your opinion: the SITM Exchange has been so much fun and many people unfortunately didn't find out about it until after the deadline. I'd like to make SITM a tradition. Do you think this project should be done yearly or every six months in March and September? I think doing it more frequently than every 6 months might be too much, but doing it every 6 months might give new bloggers a chance to participate without having to wait a whole year until the next round. Thoughts? Please let me know in the comments. 

I can't wait to read everyone's posts!

PS:
I give mad props to my surrobuddy Kimmy for always answering my call for help with graphics. She designed all the SITM badges and also my kick-ass header. If you don't have any comments for me, drop Kimmy a line with a note about the awesomeness that is she. I know I've mentioned her before, but allow me to brag on her again. Surrogates after infertility like myself are a rare breed indeed. Kimmy is one of them. She had triplets after infertility, donated eggs to her sister (twins resulted), and she also went on to deliver TWO surrobabies - brothers a couple of years apart. She's a Superwoman in her own rights. Am I kissing ass? Totally. I have to keep her happy so she'll keep helping me when I whine about needing this, that, or the other. Just kidding. Love ya, Kimmy!

PSS:
Remember that ridiculous post that I wrote a couple of months ago featuring Reproducina the Rainbow-Farting Unicorn and Fertie the Fuzzy Fertili-Bunny? Kimmy took that graphic that I made and used it to surprise me with a new signature for my posts at Surrogate Mothers Online:

Does the girl have skills or what?

Well that was fun

Trish, who is both my coworker and high school classmate, pretty much summed it up in a comment on my last post: I never knew you had it in you. Contrary to the crazy inyourfaceitness displayed here, I'm very quiet at work and was most certainly quiet in high school. There were no instances of wild drinking  or raucous parties from me. Ever. Even on the rare occasion that Frank and I have alcoholic beverages in the house, I might drink three wine coolers or a similar fruity drink MAX before I feel soft around the edges and I end up falling asleep before finishing the next drink.

I must say that it was some kind of a thrill to have continued to drink through The Sleepies and straight into The I've Lost All Common Sense and Everything is Funnies.

We all woke up at various intervals between 7:30 and 8:00 this morning. Dani seemed to have forgotten about falling asleep for a few minutes in the middle of the kitchen floor and Chance and Apollo nearly laughed themselves to tears AGAIN about me falling out of the chair. Apollo had a bit of a headache. I didn't feel what could be classified as a hangover, but I definitely felt The Dizzies and Numbies. Still, I managed to cook breakfast (I KNOW, right!?! I cooked and not Frank) without torching the eyebrows off my face.

Last night was most certainly worth the brain cells that I'll never get back. Apparently I lost more than a few, because this morning when I read my HELLO, WORLD -- I'M DRUNK OUT OF MY MIND post I was amazed. I mean, I distinctly remember proofreading that post before I published it. What you read is the EDITED version. Can you imagine what a clusterfuck it must have been before I "fixed" it?

Six double shot glasses -- two for a buck at the Dollar Tree.
8 bottles of brightly colored alcohol -- $70
Getting shitfaced with your family and making and ass of yourself in front of the whole world while in the midst of a drunken stupor -- priceless.

Share a priceless drunken stupor moment of your own. I've all given you the gift of letting you laugh at my inebriated expense. Now it's your turn!

Welcome, IComLeavWe'ers!

Welcome, March ICLWers! I think that many of you have probably already visited my blog, but here's a fun little introduction for you newcomers to SmartOneville.

The alphabet a la Smart One:

Apollo, my intended father, earned his arsonist badge. Last week he torched a meadow. Seriously.
Bacon - I'm eating some right now. Pork rules.
Chance and Apollo are my intended parents, but even better, they're family.
Dishes - I don't do 'em.
Eighth grade English teacher
Frank is my husband. He cooks and makes delicious desserts like a mofo.
Georgia girl by default, but born in California.
Hater of assclowns who think they know everything.
IVF#2 is coming up mid-May. Most of our meds were lovingly donated by our bloggy friends.
Jaiden, age 7 and Jordan, age 5 are my sons.
Kyra, age 7 and Kaelyn, age 3 are my daughters. All four were conceived on Clomid.
Love cookies. Probably too much.
Military brat; I lived in 8 different places by the time I was 12.
Not really as smart as I profess to be.
OMG! Fuckernuts and manbiscuits and pricksicle and fucknuttery are some of my favorite words.
Procrastinators like me, let's unite! But let's do it later, okay? I also have PCOS. Good times.
Quizno's spongmonkeys crack me the freak up.
Rugrats - Frank stays home with them and he kicks ass as stay-at-home dad.
Sam is the name of my surro-son. He'll be two in just a few days!
TJ is my 8-year old nephew who we're raising. He's a funny kid.
Unicorns that fart rainbows might be roasted come May or June.
Very much in love with Steely Dan.
Wondering almost non-stop if this next (and final) cycle will work.
XXX-rated movie of me would probably blind you.
You soooo totally don't want to see me naked. *I* don't want to see me naked.
Zzzzz...I just put you to sleep with this boring introduction, didn't I?

I'm a finalist - please vote for me!

For the second year in a row, I'm a finalist in Lori's Limerick Chick contest.

As of right now, I'm also in second place again, so please click the button below to vote for me!

My entry:

Here is a limerick for all of us-
together we laugh, cry, and fuss.
With a double-fisted zinger
we give infertility the finger,
you sonofabitch, you make us all cuss.

I'm a Limerick Chick 2009 - Vote for me!

Lori's annual Limerick Chick contest opened and will close in the space of about a day. I had such fun with it last year, and I'm glad that I'll be able to get my limericks in under the wire. Last year I was a finalist and ultimately came in second place with this poem:

There was a Black surro named Kymberli
who played a good joke at delivery.
The nurse with affright
exclaimed, "This baby is White!"
Kym pointed, "He's for them and not me."

My second entry (which didn't place in the finals) was written about Niobe:

There is a deft writer named Niobe
who uses allegory and euphony and hyperbole.
The photography - classic,
the writing - fantastic,
though some might need use of a dictionary.

I ended up losing to her limerick - damn her and her hilarious invitation for people to blow her if they mispronounce her name.

Below are my entries for this year. Keep an eye on Lori's blog to vote when the polls open!

       

Entry 1:
Here is a limerick for all of us-
together we laugh, cry, and fuss.
With a double-fisted zinger
we give infertility the finger,
you sonofabitch, you make us all cuss.

Entry 2:
As UTERUS' first beneficiary,
she was blessed with a healthy, safe pregnancy.
Lover of plaid and blue Grover,
rocks at header makeovers,
Calliope has Snork in her occupancy. 

Thank you, Mutual of Omaha

I like seeing how people managed to land here in la casa loca de la Smart One. As I was just now taking my daily peek through StatCounter, I was mildly surprised to find this:

A little further down, I saw several entries which looked something like this, each one coming from a different location around the United States:

I clicked through to the ahamoment.com/pg/features link and found this:

That small victory that I said I felt the other night when I wrote this? I feel that again, except a little more. It's easy to deduce that someone at Mutual of Omaha has been assigned the task of trolling through the Internet to gather blog posts and articles that make mention of their current Aha Moments campaign. Infertility is not their priority, but they are clearly not afraid to treat infertility as an "untouchable" or an "unspeakable" as so many other businesses do.

I like the fact that whoever it was at Mutual that clicked through to this blog actually took a minute to read what I had to say and give it the title "Opening the Infertility Conversation." It's small steps like this that do exactly that -- open conversation about this oft-shadowed issue of infertility and bring it through to the minds of people who might otherwise have never stopped to consider infertility and how it impacts those who deal with it.

This post isn't about me. It's about how thus far, eleven other people have found my blog through the Aha Moments page. Maybe those other eleven are also dealing with infertility. Maybe they're not. Either way, word about infertility is getting around, and in a positive way. In their own small way, this campaign is helping make it known that regular, ordinary people deal with infertility and loss every day and that we have voices that need to be heard. We are not scandals to be gawked at or pawns to be used in heated backdoor political debates. Like anyone else, we are regular people just trying to find our way through some tough obstacles, and especially in light of recent infertility-related spotlight events, it feels good to be treated as such.

And for that, I have to thank Mutual of Omaha.

**********************************

I was neither paid or compensated in any manner for the above post, nor did I write this post with the intent to be compensated.

But uummm..to the Powers That Be at Mutual of Omaha, if you want to compensate me in some way for this gushy appreciation post, far be it from me to refuse. I'll even work for you part-time. Have you seen how I can work the Internet? Do you need someone else to troll for Aha! posts? The job qualifications can't be that difficult: MUST BE ABLE TO USE SEARCH ENGINES EFFECTIVELY. MUST SPEND ALL DAY ON THE COMPUTER. Check and double-check. Watch how I rock a wicked hyperlink.

Do you need a part-time writer? Have you seen my mastery of humor? How I can jerk a tear? How I can do both at the same time?

My email link is up there on the right. Click it. It's ^UP THERE.^ Or use this one: kyrajaATyahooDOTcom.

Dude, seriously.

I'm your gal.

Sock it to each other

You guys are awesome. There are just over 60 participants in the sock exchange, and it's even gone international with bloggers from Canada, Australia, and Japan playing along. This has been so much fun to organize and arrange, and I've had fun clicking around through blogs that were new to me. Check out the participant list and click through to a few of the blogs that you've never been to before. There are lots of wonderful voices to be heard there and a few who are new to the blogging community. If you are a participant and do not see your blog listed (or mention of your name if you are a non-blogger), please leave me a comment and I'll get you added to the list ASAP.

A special thank you and shout out goes to the roller derby sarcastic fantastic Nancy, whose last-minute sock exchange post and "killer" graphic design skills led to 12 new participants joining in yesterday.

Majority of the match information was sent out on Saturday afternoon. If you signed up late Saturday evening or on Sunday, your match information will be sent to you this evening. I did all of my sock correspondence through my Yahoo account, and the powers that be here at the school system have blocked out access to all free email accounts. Therefore, I have to wait until I get home this evening to send out the rest of the matches.

I looked all weekend for a pair of socks with a particular graphic on them and didn't find what I was looking for. Finally last night with a half-asleep spark of Aha!, I got the idea to look for iron-on patches of the graphic I wanted. I checked eBay and lo and behold, someone has a whole store of iron-on patches (who woulda thunk it!) and had 5 of the patches I wanted in-stock. I ordered two of them then went to search the sock websites for the perfect pair of striped knee socks. My sock buddy (who I will keep a secret until she gets her socks) will be the recipient of semi-homemade socks. I think even I can handle pressing an iron to a pair of socks.

So tell me - how's it going so far with your sock progress? Have you been to visit your sock buddy's blog yet? Found socks? Are you just having fun so far looking at various websites for funky socks?

I'm really excited about this project. Like ***JAZZ HANDS*** excited.

Sunday's To Do List

1. Wash the orange marker scribbles from Kaelyn's face despite the fact that she said her make-up is sooooo pretty.
2. Go to Savannah with Chance and Apollo to have last beta drawn.
3. Get coffee on the way there because Daylight Savings Time has us all draggin' ass.
4. Come home and eat the delicious barbecue food fares (namely, Tequila-Lime spare ribs) that Frank will prepare in our absence.
5. It will be over 80^o today, so perhaps we'll spread a bunch of blankets outside and have a picnic.
6. Email the last few entrants of the sock exchange. 
7. Search online for socks to send to my sock buddy.
8. Write lesson plans for the week. Debate on whether or not the objective "After being connected to remote control shock collars, the students will be able to exhibit proper behavior 100% of the class period and will also be able to demonstrate understanding of appositive, adjective, and adverb clauses with at least 75% accuracy" will be grounds to have me fired.
9. Wash the girls' hair.
10. Get Frank to cut the boys' hair.
11. Eat more barbecued chicken.
12. Watch Big Love and Flight of the Conchords.
13. Either fall asleep at a reasonable time or stay awake to start the first edition of the Chronic Insomniac Theater here at Smart One.

What's on your Sunday To Do List?

The inbox monster ate my homework

I think my email inbox has a monster that is a distant relative of the sock monster. You know the one that hides in your dryer and eats 2 out of the 5 socks that you put in there, so it seems like random socks just go missing? Poor Tash tried to email me over several days and there is no record of her contact. They didn't get filtered through to my junk mail and I didn't accidentally delete them. They're just not there. I also had a situation where a kind person who is donating meds didn't receive an reply which I sent to her last Friday. Thankfully, she followed up today and sent along her Skype name, so we were able to make arrangements through a short chat this morning.

So to be safe, I have to assume that some of you may have emailed me about participating in Sock-it-to-Me and I haven't received the information. Therefore, I'm extending the sign-up period to this Sunday, March 8. I will still send out the matches through the weekend, but I want to give everyone the chance to sign up. If you've already posted about the exchange on your blog, can you please post about the extension to help the word get out? Thanksabunchamillion.

Good things for you to know:

1. I have sent a return email to everyone that I actually received an email from. If you sent something and I haven't written you back, it's likely that your email was chomped by the inbox monster, too.

2. Alternate methods of contact:
        a. you can email again at kyrajaATyahooDOTcom

        b. hit me up on Skype -- my username is kymberli78. If you add me, please send a message    letting me know who you are so that I don't think you're a psychofreakstalker and deny               the request.

3. Here's the list of participants thus far:

Mommy in Waiting
Life in the White House
Angry Infertile
Dragondreamer's Lair
I Married Barney Rubble, Now What?
Bella and Her Fella
ISO and the Golden Egg
Eggs Benedict Arnold
All Grown Up
Ny New Reality
Geek by Marriage
3 of a Kind Working on a Full House (today is her birthday, so please go wish her a happy one!)
Kelly (non-blogger, but avid blog reader!)
Not So Newlywed
Mojo Working
Parenthood for Me
The Johnson's Have Angel Wings
Childbearing Hips
The New Life of Nancy
Baby Smiling in the Backseat
I Won't Fear Love
Scared and Scarred
Life Induces Thoughts, Mostly Random
Dead Baby Jokes
Jubenvilles (private blog)
Life and Times of KimboSue
Can You Imagine
My So-Called Life
Contrary to Popular Belief
Isn't TTC Supposed to Be Fun?
Tales of a Brown-Eyed Girl
Were You Looking for Me?
I Want to be a Mommy
Letting It Out
A Little Hope
Awful but Functioning
Lilly of the Low Plains
The Happy Hours
Live, Love, Give
It's Just Me
Wrong Turn to Babyland
Learning to Accept My Infertility
Who Shot My Stork?
Schroedinger's Zygote
The Problem with Hope (private blog)
Sell Crazy Someplace Else
Embracing Happenstance
It's Either Sadness or Euphoria
Our Life
What a Long, Strange Trip I'm On
Reproductive Jeans
So It Goes
Do Without Doing
Staying Above the Water
Alexandra (non-blogger, but avid blog reader!)
Okaasan Mommy and More
Life Goes On
Arpac's On the Move
Wendy
Vanilla Dreams (private blog)
Quiet Sanctuary
Cat's in the Cradle (private blog)
Wishing, Hoping, and Praying

The ghetto-sexy Io of Who Shot My Stork called me a biznatch in the comments and said she was participating, but I still need her info. So hit me up, ho!

If your blog or name isn't there and you should be there, please contact me via one of the aforementioned avenues or you can always try to email me again by clicking on the link up there under my picture.

Everyone, be on the lookout for your sock assignments through the weekend! If you haven't heard from me by Monday morning at the latest, please leave a comment for me somewhere on my blog!

In other random news....

The lady that Chance and Apollo are renting from has grown increasingly psycho in the past month. So...as of yesterday they are "homeless," as they like to joke, and are now shackin' up with me and the Crazy Crew. Apollo DEMANDED that he be given the sheets with the poo smeared on them, but much to his dismay, Frank had already laundered said sheets. Boohoo. Or maybe Boopoo. Their dog is running around trying to hump my dog, so we have our own little canine freakshow going on. Hopefully Chance and Apollo will be able to find a new place to rent soon, but in the meantime, it's nice having them closer. But so help me Cheeto and for the love of Spam, if my dog AGAIN manages to get knocked up before I do, I will lose my flippin' mind. Someday I need to tell you that story.

Even better proof that I'm raising them right....

This morning Jordan woke up wailing about a stomach ache. His 101.3^o fever confirmed a day home from school with Gatorade and chicken soup (if they don't have Gatorade and chicken soup when they're home sick, they insist that they will be sick forever). He crawled into my bed and made little weak whimpering noises through SpongeBob.

Kaelyn said to Jordan, "Are you sick? I will take care of you, Jo-Jo. You're my big brother. You need some medicine? You want some grapes?"

"No," he replied, "but could you lay down with me and watch cartoons?"

And so she did.

And he stopped whimpering.

Three things...

Spinning off of the Sock-it-to-Me Exchange, Baby Smiling in the Backseat has an interesting and thought-provoking post up for today's installment of her Thoughtful Thursday series. If you haven't been reading along on her blog regularly (like me, because aye eeemmm stooopeeed for reasons which I will explain below), you have been missing out on some brilliant writing.  When I do make it over to her blog, without fail I am given reason to laugh (see her uterus cookie Show and Tell post) or pause to think, and those are the type of posts I enjoy the most. Please make a point to stop over and respond to her post today, because I'm looking forward to reading others' responses.

As for my stupidity, it's actually better described as pure laziness. I'm missing out on lots of good blog reading, especially from bloggers who I've read before simply because sometimes it seems too much like work to open up Google Reader and copy/paste new addresses to add blogs to my list. See what I mean? LAAAAZZZZYYYY. I'm much more inclined to add a blog to my reader if there's a handy little ADD ME TO YOUR READER or FOLLOW THIS BLOG link somewhere in the sidebar. So starting today, I'm taking off my lazy pants and putting on my hot damn, I'm efficient AND sexy pants and I'm updating my Google Reader and my blogroll.

If you're not on my blogroll and want to be and/or you want to be added to my reader and/or you think I should be reading you regularly and I'm not, please help me out by commenting here, being sure to include the link to your blog.

**********

Need Menopur or Bravelle? My sweetie-pie surro-friend Kimmy is donating some meds to me, but she also has 6 vials of Menopur and 7 vials of Bravelle that she'd like to donate to someone who needs it. Kimmy is another post-infertility surrogate like myself. You wanna talk about a superhero? She and her sister did a shared IVF cycle in which she was the ED. Her sister delivered twins and Kimmy delivered triplets. Kimmy went on to become a gestational surrogate and has delivered two sweet boys (a couple of years apart) for the same family. Simply amazing. She's still passing on the love by way of donated meds, so if you're in need of either Menopur or Bravelle, please comment or send me an email.

********

Semi-side note here: did anyone else other than me notice that last night's season premiere of America's Next Top Model was peppered with pregnancy/infertility/loss comments here and there? Twice someone asked if they planned on "having children" or "procreating," one contestant was hit with an unexpected prick of grief when asked if she had any children and had to explain that yes, she had a daughter but she had a seizure and died when she was a baby, and another contestant emphatically expressed that NO! she's not having children because the world is going straight to Hell.

My mindless television half-failed me last night, because my mind was regretfully half-refocused on the things from which I had tried to be momentarily distracted.

I probably am the only nut who noticed those things.

Yet another drive-by update

Cycle and med donations update: We are waiting to receive our calendars for our next cycle. I can't believe how much of a blur the last two weeks have been. I think I sort-of went into a type of brain-dead state when it came to the resolution of the last cycle. When our nurse coordinator called on Monday to give me the results of Sunday's beta (down to 7.1, not quite totally negative, repeat on Saturday), she asked how many days I bled. In my mind popped "five days," but when I did the math it came out to be 11 days. 11 days? What the hell did I even do on those 11 days? I hardly remember them from a uterine point of view. But yes -- it was 11 days and now it is done. Chance's CD 1 was yesterday, and now our cycles might be too close together for us to use this cycle as the starting cycle. Our nurse, Cari, is going to discuss the plan with Dr. Sleepy and get back to us hopefully today, because if we use this cycle I'll have to be completely negative by tomorrow, which means I'll have to go for another beta tomorrow instead of Saturday, because Chance has to start BCPs tomorrow if we're going to use this cycle. How's that for an unnecessary run-on sentence? So, we'll see - we'll either start now or at the beginning of April.

On the meds donation front: overwhelmed with gratitude ----> Chance and me. Here's how it went down: we need at least 4500 units of Follistim. Sweet Kate had 900 units to donate, but when she went to mail it she saw that it was three months expired. Dr. Sleepy is against using meds that far gone. So sad. (But Kate, please send me your address because we're still so, so very grateful.)

Then, several people said something to the effect of "Damn! No Follistim, but I have some Gonal-F that I could send if that's what you needed." Then someone put the bug in my hear that Follistim and Gonal-F are practically identical and might be able to be used interchangeably. Too impatient to wait until Monday to get the answer from our nurse, I cross-posted my question on each of the regional SIRM message boards and all of the REs -- the great and powerful Dr. Sher included -- said that the two meds are identical and if we had access to "free" Gonal-F, then it made no sense to pay for Follistim. One RE even compared the two to choosing between Ghiardelli and Godiva chocolates. Hmmmmkay.

So all of THAT being said - things are looking good on the meds front because Dr. Sleepy agreed with the SIRM docs. Dr. Sleepy said that to be safe, we should have enough for 14 days of stims at 450 units per day, for a total of 6300 units. We have been blessed to be given 4500 units from one blogger (THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!), so that leaves us with 1800 units of Gonal-F still needed. If you are able to donate, please comment or email me.

From other bloggers or surrogates we're also being sent: a total of 66 Vivelle patches (out of 70 needed), a complete 2-week Lupron kit, about 50 estrace pills, and 3 vials of PIO.

It's amazing, and we are humbled. When I started this blog over a year ago, I never would have guessed that it would result in a heaven-made match with Chance and Apollo and so many hands and hearts of support lifting us up. I must stop now. I might cry. And then my students will think that I've finally gone off the deep end. But we thank you all, more than my clumsy words could ever fully express.

Sock It to Me: Thanks to those of you who've signed up already! There are almost thirty participants thus far! If you'd like to participate and haven't signed up yet, be sure that you do so by this Friday, March 6. If you've emailed me to sign up and you haven't heard back from me yet, please either leave a comment here or try to email again. Sometimes my inbox eats emails, and I want to be doubly-sure that I don't miss anyone who wants to join in.

A couple of clarification points:

1. The exchange is open to ANYONE! I've had a couple of people tell me that they were hesitant to participate because they didn't feel "in" the community enough. ALL are invited to join in - everyone from those still in the struggle to those who moved on to other paths, to those who are now parenting after infertility. I even have a few surrogates on the list, as like me, they've placed themselves in the line of fire to help others achieve their dreams. So if you've been hesitating up to this point, hesitate no more - SIGN UP!
2. The person you send socks will not be the person who sends socks to you. This way, instead of making one new connection, everyone will make two new connections. I think it's more fun to have it jumbled up that way. 

Sock buddy information will be emailed to everyone after sign up closes and by this Sunday at the latest. I'm so excited about this!

Do you have no idea what Sock it to Me is? Click on that button over there up on the right to find out.

Georgia lawmakers are ready to lay down a heavy hand on IVF, thanks to Octomom:
I was determined not to say anything about the utter clusterfuck that is the Octomom and her nutzoid RE, but I'm being forced to do so. In a kneejerk reaction to the huge medical costs incurred by the state of California and its taxpayers for the care of the octuplets, a Georgia Senator has drafted two bills that will be presented on Thursday that if passed, will severely limit IVF procedures, gamete donation, and embryo adoption here. I first heard about this on Murgdan's blog last night and I am outraged. I'm sure she won't mind if I copy and paste the information directly from her site:

The Georgia Senate Health & Human Services Committee will hold a hearing on two bills: SB 169 and SB 204 this Thursday, March 5, at 9:00 AM in Room 450 of the State Capitol. At the hearing, the committee will hear testimony on the bills.

Georgia Reproductive Specialists along with other Atlanta fertility clinics, RESOLVE and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) oppose both of the bills. The hearing is open to the public and you are encouraged to attend the hearing and send a letter to the Committee members before Thursday. Senate Bill 169 would restrict doctors' ability to perform IVF in accordance with best medical standards.

Here are the key provisions:

• No more than 2 or 3 eggs could ever be fertilized in a cycle; if a woman produced more eggs, they still could not be used.
• Only 2 embryos could ever be transferred to the uterus, unless the woman is age 40 or over (then a max of 3).
• No extra embryos could be cryopreserved. If they are created, they have to be transferred.
• No financial relief, such as insurance coverage, is proposed to help with the added financial burden of using less effective treatment. Patients will still have to pay out of pocket for less effective treatment.
• Bans all financial compensation for donor gametes, such as egg donor, sperm donor, or embryo donation, which would reduce the pool of available donors in Georgia.

SB 204/HB388 is an embryo adoption bill. It would subject embryo donation to all the same provisions as required by law for adoption of a child. This would subject infertility patients needing an embryo donation to go through the judicial proceedings, home visits, and other procedures required for an adoption. We do not believe that such treatment is appropriate or needed for embryo donation.

If you care about open access to the best care possible to let the Committee members know before Thursday that you oppose these two bills.

If you live in Georgia and you want to contact the members of this committee, you can send a letter through this RESOLVE site. Click here for more information.

Georgia citizen or not, PLEASE consider sending each of the committee members a letter in opposition to the two bills TODAY. We have to do what we can to keep some assclown politician from further limiting already limited childbearing options in infertiles.

Drive by to the Drive by: I thank ALL of my bloggy friends for the love and support shown to us, we still need 1800 units of Gonal-F if you are able to donate, Sock-it-to-Me is open to everyone and the sign up ends on Friday, March 6, and please email the assclowns on the Senate committee so that Georgian infertiles aren't limited any more than they already are.

Over and out.

Passing along some awards

Honest Scrap: I received this one from Julia S at Life after Infertility and Loss, Jo from Mojo Working, and two other people who I'm so sorry that I don't remember. I looked back through 20 pages worth of comments to see if I could figure it out and I couldn't. If you're one of the other two who passed this award to me, please let me know so that I can show my gratitude and properly link back to you.

Here are the rules:
1) Choose a minimum of 7 blogs that you find brilliant in content or design.
2) Show the 7 winners names and links on your blog, and leave a comment informing them that they were prized with "Honest Scrap." Well, there's no prize, but they can keep the nifty icon.
3) List at least 10 honest things about yourself.

I wracked my brain coming up with things to write about, but this ended up being one of the funnest awards to do:

1. I'm a procrastinator in the worst way. I work best under pressure and will have major tasks until the very last moment possible. Then I end up making myself sick with worry that I won't get finished in time, but the benefit is that I'm able to stay focused on the issue at hand and my work is always impeccable.

2. I always knew that I'd either be a teacher or a doctor. Through high school as I needed to narrow down which route to take, I couldn't decide what type of medicine I wanted to practice, though I always teetered between obstetrics or pediatrics. Both felt like too much pressure, as I couldn't bear the thought of missing a diagnosis and not being able to save a child's life and the thought of losing a mother and/or baby in childbirth chilled me to the core. Teaching felt safe and comfortable, and as it was always one of the two things I wanted to do, I'm extremely happy with my career as a middle school teacher. However, if I knew even an inkling back then of what I know now or if I had some means of going back to school and switching careers, I'd either be an RE or an infertility counselor. Psychology has also been a long-time passion of mine, and I think I have a natural knack for just "getting it."

3. I'm a slob. It's true. Organization is not my strong suit. In my classroom if my desk is an ungodly wreck I can tell you exactly where something is. As soon as I straighten things up, I can't find anything and forget where I put stuff. At home, there's never any less than three hampers of clothes in need of wash and no less than three that are clean but need to be folded and put away. I hate laundry, and so does Frank. Take two lazy people in wedded bliss and laundry becomes a never ending, never finished task.

4. My ain't-never-gonna-come-true fantasy dream is to be an Academy Award-winning actress, getting the Oscar for playing a role of a truly unhinged woman like Sybil or Mommie Dearest. 

5. If the only music I could ever hear for the rest of my life was Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life and Steely Dan's Alive in America, I'd be quite alright with that.

6. Sex in the City personalities - I wish I was a Carrie, but I know that I'm a Charlotte. My mom and sisters call me a prude.

7. I own just one skirt and one dress and haven't worn pantyhose in years.

8. When I was four, I asked my mom to take me to get my ears pierced. I screamed when the lady did the left ear and refused to let her do the right. I absolutely REFUSED to get my right ear pierced until I was 25, so I've only been able to wear earrings in just the past 6 years.

9. I'm only 5'2" and I'm constantly picked on by my family for being so short. They call me "Shorty Doo-Wop."

10. My middle name is Kymberli. My first name is Soncera, which my mom got from the 1950 James Stewart western Broken Arrow. The basic plot is based on historical events in which White man Tom Jeffords befriends Apache chief Cochise, a union which facilitates the ending of the decade-long Apache war. In the movie, a fictionalized romantic subplot enters when Tom Jeffords falls in love with and marries the young Apache medicine woman Sonseeahray. My mom has always called me Sonnie or Sonnie K. At home, family and friends always called Kym but at school, I went by my first name. By the time I got to third grade, I got tired of teachers and other students always stumbling over my name and I wanted to spare them the embarrassment of trying to pronounce it. I teetered between being deciding to use either Kym or Sonnie as my preferred name. Sonnie felt more special because generally only my mom and my favorite aunt called me that, so I went with Kymberli as my preferred name. I made the switch in fourth grade, but some teachers along the way still insisted on calling me Soncera. No big deal - if they wanted to trip over my name, that was up to them. One teacher could never get it right and called me everything from "Sorcerer" to "Sincere."

This award is making the rounds with rapid speed, so if you've already been Scrapped, just know that I think you rock, too. I'm passing this to Carrie, Trish, Heather R, Wishy-Wish, Mtnhighmama, Amber, and Sara.

Lemonade Stand from the one and only super-blogger Kristin:

This one is for those who use the lemons in their lives to make lemonade, or who help do the same for others.

Here are the rules for The Lemonade Stand Award:
1. You must link back to the person you received the award from.
2. You have to nominate 10 bloggers who are deserving of this award!

girlh, Sara (gas passer), Stacey, Debbie, Erin, Jess, Heather R, Kate, Nancy, and Stacie.

The Sisterhood Award, also from Kristin: The rules for this award are simple...
Put the logo on your blog or post.
Nominate at least 10 blogs which show great attitude and/or gratitude.
Be sure to link to your nominees in your post
Let your nominees know they have received the award by leaving them a comment on their blog
And be sure to link this post to the person who nominated you for the award.

Here are some of the ladies whose support and sisterhood means the world to me, Chance, or both of us as we try to get from here to there:

niobe, Tash, charmed girl, Julia, Becky, Quiet Sanctuary (M), luna, and of course, Chance herself.

Honestly scrapped with a side of Sesame

I was given the Honest Scrap Award by at least three different bloggers sometime within the past two weeks when I was hiding under the blog with my covers over my head. I'll be damned if I can remember who gave it to me. I want to do that post and pass it on, but I want to give credit where credit is due and link back to the three bloggers who gave it to me. I also need to pass on the Lemonade Stand Award, but I know that Kristin gave that one to me; I distinctly remember crying over that one. So, if you're one of the three who gave the Honest Scrap, can you let me know who you are? I know -- I suck.

Speaking of Kristin, she has a post up about a warning label on flashback Sesame Street DVD (WTF???). Kristin put up a YouTube clip of one of her favorite Sesame Street clips and asked for others to do the same. I posted the links in her comments, but I wanted to put them here, too, just because I can. And Grover is funny.

This is one of my all-time favorites -- Grover as the waiter and Simon the Sound Guy:

 

Smokey Robinson and the rather annoying, stalkerish orange Letter U with "You Really Got a Hold on Me":

The Ladybug Picnic:

The Oinker Sisters with "New Way to Walk"

And who doesn't love the Pinball Counting animation sequences?

Does anyone other than me remember Nickelodeon's Danger Mouse and Bananaman? Would it be so hard to get some old reruns of Fraggle Rock going? I watched an episode of the new Electric Company last week and I was pleasantly pleased to see that they stuck to some of the old basics, like the shadow-profile-people breaking words down into phonics:

Left person: SH
Right person: IT
Both together: SHIT!

That's good stuff.

So tell -- what are your favorite old school TV shows?

Sock It to Me

Today while I should have been paying attention poetry project presentations (if I hear one more kid pronounce "hyperbole" as hyper-BOLE instead of hy-PER-bo-lee my head just might explode, ha!), but instead my mind just kept getting sidetracked. You see, all I could think about was this blog and all the people and support who are just a few clicks away.

I am in bloggy love with you. There. I said it. You have my heart and I think about you all the time.

There are several times a day when I think to myself, "I am soooo blogging this." No matter how hard and cold this path sometimes is, there is this part of me that always feels the love that emanates from this here 'puter, sent through cyberspace from you to me. I carry you with me each and every day and I am strengthened by you.

So, here's how my free-association-I-should-be-paying-100%-attention-to-the-projects-but-I'm-not-because-I'm-in-bloggy-love-like-a-sappy-little-teenager-thought process went:

Ohmigosh! Kate just donated 900 units of Follistim! Do not let these students see you start tearing up. -----> Gee, I love my bloggy friends. ------> They give me the warm and fuzzies, just like a cozy pair of socks. ------> Just like those crazy socks I bought for Chance and me for our transfer ------> I wish I could send a pair of crazy socks to all my bloggy friends so that they could feel the love, too-------> LIGHT BULB!

It's The Great Sock-It-to-Me Exchange. The warmth you feel from your bloggy support is a warm and fuzzy pair of snuggly socks (metaphor!). Take the support with you for a trip to the stirrups. Wear them when you're chasing around your battle-won little person. Put them on when you have something to celebrate or when you need a hug. Wear them as a physical reminder of all the people inside your computer who you know care for and are thinking of you. 

Here's what to do:

The sign-up deadline has been extended to Sunday, March 8! Sign up now! Please email me at kyrajaATyahooDOTcom to sign up because I've been having some trouble with my regular email link. All buddies will be matched up by 11:59pm March 8.

1. Sign up runs from now until Friday, March 6. Email me (the link is under my pic up there on the right) with your snail-mail address, blog title, and blog address by then to participate.
2. I'll will send you the information for your "sock buddy" by Monday, March 9.
3. You have until Saturday, March 21 to send the socks to your sock buddy.
4. The week of April 6 is Sock-It-to-Me Week. Post a picture of your socks (worn or not worn) with a link back to the blogger who sent them to you. The topic of your post should be about what the support of this community means to you and how it has helped and is helping you. It's a week for warm and fuzzies. Like ummm...the socks.
5. When you post, come back here with a link to your post and I'll keep a running list of the entries.
6. Optional - help promote the Sock-It-to-Me Exchange by posting about it now with a link to this post. Here's the code to a badge:

<a href="http://smartone.typepad.com/smartone/2009/02/project-sock-it-to-me-.html" target="_top"> <img  alt="SockItToMe" src="http://smartone.typepad.com/.a/6a00e54ff452948833011168968b16970c-pi"></a>

Who can't use a little extra support? Consider your Sock-It-to-Me socks your "support hose."

Duplicitous leap

It is a rare occasion when Frank pisses me off to the utmost of pisstivity, angered to such an extent that I feel the urge to whack off his manbiscuits, saute them, then serve them to him for dinner. Saintly spirit be damned -- even Frank the Fantastic has moments here and there where just as with any man, a stack of Bibles and vat holy water does little to exorcise the pesky demon that sometimes crawls into hidden crannies of their cranial spaces and tugs on the lever labelled PULL HERE TO SAY SOMETHING STUPID TO MY WOMAN FOR NO OTHER REASON THAN I'M A TESTOSTERONE-LADEN ASSHOLE. So, I did what any other hormone-sensitive woman would do: I pushed the TAKE A RIDE ON THE GUILT TRIP RAILROAD button and reduced him to his bony, shameful knees, where he is currently grovelling for forgiveness. *ahem*

Also, the business of This Is Over is now mostly over. Saturday hung like a kryptonite albatross from my neck, not a burden of guilt, but one of regret. It is impossible not to weaken when feeling your or your friends' shouldhavebeen flow into the neverwas.

By way of weeks, this last one sucked.

But, that is the past.

What lies ahead is a cliff. There are no next steps. No forks in the road. No options, no alternatives, no divergence in the yellow wood with one worn path and one less travelled. For Chance and Apollo, there is only this precipice, this last move more leap than step. This is it. It either works or it doesn't. Of course, there's no way to tell which of those endings will come to be, but one thing we do know for sure is that good or bad, this cycle will be the last cycle.

It is a heavy thing indeed to know either the end of something or the beginning of something is in you, but not up to you. Heavy, indeed.

It's even heavier knowing that this cliff that our toes are edged on is one carved from the end of financial reserve. I don't know much about anything, but it seems to me that ending the quest to have a family is even more painful when the heart is still willing but the logistical ability isn't anymore. It is begrudgingly grinding to a halt when the inertia of your movement still pushes you forward.

As such...we need help. The cycle will proceed without it, but every little bit makes it that much easier. In Chance's own words, "I am not even embarrassed about it anymore, because this will be it. The end, and that kills me, the thought of it. But I'll just have to accept that this is it, and my life is what it is, but without any kids. It's pretty brutal, but I'll have no choice but to accept it. Embarrassment pales in comparison to that." It sure as hell does.

So, assistance with the procurement of meds is something for which we would be eternally grateful. Just spreading the word if you would be so inclined to do so would be immensely helpful. What we will need:

4500 units Follistim
Lupron (to total two 2-week kits)
70 (seventy) 0.1 mg Vivelle dots (at least)
20 cc progesterone in ethyl oleate (at least)

Everything else we need for cycling is either relatively minor in cost or we have meds remaining from the last cycle. Chance will also take Saizen this time around, the same growth hormone that seemed to improve Mia's response in her last cycle with me. As Saizen isn't widely prescribed yet, it isn't likely that anyone has any extra sitting in the fridge door just waiting for the expiration date to pass.

If you have any leftover meds that you are able to donate, please email me at the link under my picture with what you are able to give and in what amount. A la Bleu, I'll put the list in my sidebar and will update as the offers (hopefully) come in.

With all of your words of support and comfort and much needed humor (you guys seriously crack me up when you sprinkled FUCKS! of disappointment in the past couple of weeks), I feel that I have received far more than I have given. I thank you greatly for that. All of your emails and hugs sent through the divide have meant so, so very much to me. You are the wind beneath my red cape, and I give a shit how utterly corny that sounds; it is the truth.

And with that, I'm off to take a long, hot shower and run out the hot water before Frank comes home from the gym. My own demon has nestled its way into the revenge section of my brain and is jumping on the PETTY BITCH button. Oh, me so evil. :)

Humor me - What have YOU done when your Petty Bitch button is switched into the "on" position?

"Not to be" is the answer to the question

It just wasn't to be this time. There was some evidence of placental tissue in the uterus, but not much more than that. Thankfully, there was nothing to indicate an ectopic pregnancy. However, there were also no indications that this has any chance of developing into a normal pregnancy. No gestational sac. No yolk sac. No baby.

I stop meds today and will have another beta drawn in a week. If I have not started to bleed by then or if my levels are still going up, I will be scheduled for a D&C.

Chance and Apollo are doing about as well as can be expected. There are decisions to be made, and there is a game plan already established if they decide to proceed with another cycle. Dr. Sleepy took great care and spent extra time with the four of us (Frank the Fantastic included). We reviewed the previous cycle, he explained his plan for tweaking a future cycle, and gave us about a 40% chance at achieving a healthy pregnancy.

So, that is that. I'm sure I'll have more to say on the finer points of the post-nogo powwow in the clinic conference room later, but those are the basic details. I am glad and highly appreciative that Dr. S made it such a priority to speak with us immediately after the ultrasound. One thing I hate is having to wait for questions to be answered. I process the present better when there is already a plan for the future. Having unanswered questions hanging around makes it impossible for me to begin to move past something, so I am grateful that Dr. S made sure that we left with the answers that we needed before we left. I heart him.

After leaving the clinic, we did what we do best after appointments - we ate, and I think we're all now at least five pounds heavier than we were this morning. We had a long lunch at an exceptional Gullah/soul food restaurant here in South Carolina and talked some things through, already working towards putting this cycle to rest and shaping our thoughts and hopes around what might come next. Chance and Apollo are headed back to Savannah. Frank and I decided to stay here in town overnight. We left Jekyll Island at 5 am. Frank always does all the driving and he's zonked, considering the fact that we didn't got to bed until after midnight. And me -- well, I need some time to fully process and destress, or I won't be any good for el Cinco. I don't want to fall to pieces when Kaelyn looks at me with that eye flutter that's all hers, or when Jordan and Jaiden crack up into their characteristic maniacal laughter, or when Kyra -- the observant one -- puts her hand on my cheek, tilts her eyebrow-furrowed head, and asks, "What's wrong, Mommy?" It would be too much, and I know that.

As odd as it sounds, I just need to be an infertile right now, not a mother after infertility. I need to cry for Chance and Apollo without the complication of what I can only describe as survivor's guilt. Tomorrow. I will be okay tomorrow, and el Cinco's bright faces will be a much-needed salve.

I thank all of you for the warmth, the kindness, and the flood of support that you have shown to us through this cycle. I have no qualms about being a support hog or beggar, so I hope you haven't used up all your energy on this cycle. We're going to need so much more of it when we make another go of it. I wish that I would have had better news for you today, but I'm so, so very grateful that you're here to help us through.

Superbad

So. A long, long, loooong time ago when Chance and Apollo were here at my house and we were freaking out about the slow rate at which her follicles were growing, Frank had on a shirt that says, "I am McLovin." It sounds completely irrelevant, right? Well, that shirt spurred a conversation about the highly inappropriate but oh-so-sophomorically funny Superbad, the movie from which came the quote on Frank's shirt. Oh, how Chance loves that movie, so before she and Apollo left, Chance rubbed her hands all over Frank's manly chest in effort to channel the power of McLovin. "Let me have a good ultrasound with better follicle growth tomorrow," she quipped as she continued to rub McLovin on Frank's shirt.

The next morning she had a lot more follicles and the ones that were already there showed significant growth. Ohhh, McLovin, how I love thee.

Frank wore his McLovin shirt to the transfer. It seemed to be good luck, after all, and we needed every bit of it possible. That night at Chance and Apollo's rental cottage, Chance and I took a picture of our feet (clad in the wacky good luck socks I bought for us) in Frank's lap.

Frank and I use our TV as our alarm clock. I usually fall asleep before Frank does. Before Frank turns the TV off for the night, he changes the channel to CNN Headline News. We're usually awoken by Robin and Company. This morning when the TV came on at 5:30 (when I should have been leaving the house at 5:30), it was not Robin that I heard. I heard some funky 70's music, and it was apparent that I was hearing the opening credits of some movie. I woke up all the way when I heard the music end and the crude, teenage humor begin. Well I'll be damned. It was Superbad. 

This morning when waiting to be called back for my blood draw, I told Chance that that had to have been a good sign.

It was.

My beta today was 330. To recap:

11dp3dt = 13
13dp3dt = 25.

Dr. Sleepy said he would have been happy with 100, which sounded a good bit low to me, but hey - he's the one getting paid the big dog bucks and I just teach 8th grade. Figuring out the doubling, I would have thought that 300 would have been a more appopriate number, but I trusted Dr. Sleepy's judgement and today was praying for at least 100. In my heart, I wanted the number to be between 250-300. So to hear that the number was 330...well, that was just icing on my Superbad cake.

We've been told to continue to be cautiously hopeful. They are mostly concerned about the risk of ectopic, but my guts tell me that the Skittle has snuggled in exactly the right place. I have an ultrasound with Dr. Sleepy at our main clinic in South Carolina on Sunday morning at 10 to make sure of that. 

We have more time. We have today. We have this chance.

I am happy.

Next post  --  tune in tomorrow to read about amazing birthday gifts that Chance and Apollo gave to me, and also about the general awesomeness that are Chance and Apollo.

Speaking of cake...I know how much you all love food porn, so here's a pic of the birthday cake Frank made for Chance. It's a hot water chocolate cake with chocolate ganache and buttercream frosting. I previously posted the recipe here.

 

I wish I could send you all pieces of cake. When it comes to supporters, I have the best. I gotz mad love for you guys.

Surrospark

This afternoon at the end of a rather hellacious day in the not-so-dangerous minds that are my 8th graders, I sat down to check my email and was left a blubbering, snot-dripping fool by a message I had received from a newbie surrogate named Angie. I immediately wrote her back and among other things, asked if I could copy and past her email here. This is not to brag (not entirely, anyway), but  rather to speak to the power that our blogs can have.

Though it's not a novel thought, lately I've been completely in awe of how strong the ties that bond can be from blogger to blogger (I consdier lurkers bloggers, too). Chance and Apollo are here and I am carrying what could ultimately be their child* -- knowing that this amazing relationship which has grown to be an expansion of my family began with a simple post on niobe's blog... well, it's just breathtakingly overwhelming.

Through our screens, we become intertwined and immersed in others' lives, finding ourselves relating to these familiar strangers more than we relate to some of the people we've known our whole lives. Connections are made. Lifelines are thrown. Hands are held. Journeys are begun. And if we're lucky, we can feel ourselves becoming better people because of it.

Thank you, Angie, for giving a greater purpose to my writing. Get that blog up and running, girl. There's only so much you can get out on SMO, and I want to be all in your bizzness about your upcoming cycle! You are an inspiration, and I can tell that you will be a wonderful surrogate.

Hi Kym,

My name is Angie and I am a new member of the SMO board. I wanted to share this with you, instead of posting it on the board, because I didn't know how you would feel about me singling you out. I have been reading your blog lately, and just wanted to share my feelings. I tried to keep the "creepy stalker vibe" to a minimum, haha. I really enjoy reading your writing and wanted to express my gratitude for it. Sooooo, this was intended orginially for the SMO board. I just copied it word for word and pasted it here. I'm not good with words, but I think I got my message across. Without further ado:

After carefully considering my options as to where the best place to post this thread should be, I decided to post it here under the "Uplifting Stories and Poems". Not because I have something uplifting to share, but because I am new and found what I think to be one of the most uplifting and heartwarming journies I have ever had the pleasure of reading right here on SMO. I wanted to share it with everyone, and extend my appreciation and admiration for this person and her wonderful story.

Since making the decision to become a surrogate, SMO has been my lifeline and comfort (and even sometimes an indulgence). I came across Kym's blog one evening while doing my ritual browsing of the SMO site.  I began reading her "Home" page and was immediately sucked in by the offbeat humor. Since that night, I've sorta lurked around her blog from time to time, and finally (because I am computer stupid) figured out that there was an archives section and began reading Kym's blog from the very beginning. Last night, I read from February 2008-April 2008. I just finished May this morning.

There were many times when I hit the reply button to an entry she posted nearly a year ago, but chickened out for whatever reason. I have laughed, cried, laughed until I cried, cringed and felt every other emotion under the sun one hormonal, soon to be "bellymommy" (knock on wood) could have in one day. Anyone who has read an entry knows the articulation she possesses. The knack she has for converting feelings and situations into masterfully worded perfection. Reading her blog is like finding a book series that cannot be put down once picked up, and I cannot wait for the next volume to hit the proverbial shelves.

For those of you who have not had the chance, go on over and check out Kym's blog. I am sure you will find it nothing less than fantastic.

Kym, I want to thank you for sharing your adventures via your blog . I am hooked. I sorta feel like you are a IF/surrogate/parenting mascot. You speak often of how the media negatively portrays surrogacy. I believe that if one of those New York Times hot shots sat down with you, your family, and your surrobaby for an hour and read your blog, they may have an entirely different perspective to share. Surrogacy is a huge decision. It can be scary and make one feel like you're alone sometimes. Your words shed heavenly light and for me, solidified this as something that I was meant to do. I belong here, doing this, at this time and for these reasons. It's a good feeling to have, especially for those of us who have really never had a clear path in life :) You are truly an inspiring individual, and I hope (I know, not a word that you use loosely) I have even half of your "surrospark" on my journey.


Keep writing, Kym! You have one more #1 fan :)

Thanks,
-Angie

*You have no idea how much my finger-trembling and stomach-lurching it took to type that statement. We have a 30% chance of it turning out that way. Instead of feeling jinxed by claiming the favorable odds, I'm going to try to own it and throw all my weight behind it. I want the ladybug onesie story for us.