I took a big step today and made an appointment with our RE for March 13th to discuss when to start the process on Baby #2.  I meant to call back in January to set this appointment up for March, but I kept putting it off for some reason.  I don’t really know the reason – I just know that I wasn’t ready to commit to a discussion on the topic.

My dilemma is this – I’m still nursing M.  I only planned to nurse him for 6 months, but it’s gone so well (not to mention that I truly enjoy it!) that I just kept doing it.  I’ve been pumping all along because I figured I’d need to stop prior to his first birthday to do all the pre-testing for an FET if we wanted to space the kids two years apart.  So I have a deep freezer full of breast milk for when I stop nursing M.  The problem is that I don’t want to stop nursing him.  I enjoy it.  I love that I’m the only one who can provide this for him and that it affords me 4-6 long snuggles a day with my favorite little guy.  I will stop when he’s a year old because I want him to have the independence to be able to go on play dates and drink from sippy cups (and keep on playing while doing so) versus cozying up to dear old Mom when he’s thirsty or hungry.  I am emotionally ready to stop at one year.  I’m not emotionally ready to stop prior to one year.

I wasn’t too concerned about this because I figured our RE would want me to stop nursing for, say, one month before testing and then moving onto a cycle.  Stopping at one year would then put a cycle in August and that would be that – if it worked, the kids would be 22-23 months apart which would be great.  However, I saw on someone’s blog last night that their RE won’t do the testing until she’s been done nursing for 1-3 months.  That is what gave me pause.  That is what has me upset because if that’s the case, if I quit nursing at the end of June when M is 12 months old, I wouldn’t be able to test until he’s 13-15 months old and then cycle probably a month later (so between him being 14 and 16 months old).

All of this has then led me to think about child spacing and the fact that IF-ers don’t really have the opportunity to plan such things.  When you require IVF (or an FET), you only get 3, maybe 4, chances at conceiving in a given year.  If we cycled in August (which is my current plan) and it worked, then the kids would be 23 months apart.   Now, I’m no newbie to IVF so I don’t expect it to work the first time.  Then, you get pushed out to late November, which would put the kids 26 months apart (which would be good).  If that didn’t work, then we’d push out to March which would put them 29/30 months apart, and so on, and so on.  Very quickly, your child spacing plans could go to crap and you could easily end up with kids spaced way further apart than you had hoped.  Or – maybe it would work the first time and the rest would be history.

I just don’t know what to do.  This is why we’re meeting with our wonderful RE on the 13th.  I’m actually excited to see him – I like him a lot!

Until then, I’m just going to keep on nursing M and enjoying every minute of it (even the minutes that occur in the middle of the night because he’s not the best sleeper!).