Growing Family

After more than one year of trying, one miscarriage, and one round of infertility treatments, we are (obviously) super excited to announce that we are expecting our second child in early June. This will come as no surprise to some of you, but is certainly news to many of you, so I’ll try to fill in some of the details.

We learned when trying to get pregnant with Emilia that we are not one of those couples that can nicely plan pregnancies around our personal lives. It took us a full year of trying to get pregnant with Emilia, who defied all convenience by being born one month before the end of my first semester in the PhD program. We ideally wanted to have our second one about two years after Emilia was born; since we knew our history, we got to work on it early. But after about nine months of trying, I finally took my pile of charts (I’ve spent more than two years of my life trying to chart my body’s ovulation signs) to the doctor to ask why I was having so much trouble identifying when I was ovulating. Turns out I am not as incapable as I thought—I couldn’t identify when I was ovulating because, most months, I wasn’t. In the nine months we’d been trying, the doctor said I’d ovulated probably twice. We made plans to start Clomid—one of the most common infertility drugs, which is used to induce ovulation—in the following cycle. I went home with the newfound knowledge that I did in fact know what I was doing with all these charts—that it was just a matter of waiting until there was actually something to identify—and, in some sort of crazy coincidence, I ovulated and we got pregnant before even starting the treatment. That was back in May. On July 4th, however, during my first days at the Summer Institute for Intercultural Communication in Portland (on a holiday right before a weekend and while out of town for an extended period—I think that’s the definition of inconvenient), I started bleeding and eventually miscarried.

So it was back to the drawing board. Once my body was fully recovered, the doctor okayed us to start Clomid. This involved two early ultrasounds, a week of pills, and a shot to my stomach, all involving very precise timing. Thankfully, the first round was a success, and we found out about a month ago that I was again pregnant. I’m now about 10 weeks along. We had an early ultrasound (because of my history) that confirmed things were proceeding as they should, and have already heard the heartbeat twice. So, we are finally letting the reality set in that we’ll have another kid come summer time, and wanted to share the news with you, our friends and family.