A friend is in a bind and just asked me to watch her 10-month old from Sunday night through Wednesday. Before I responded, I of course had to consult with Hottie.
Hottie loves babies.
Hottie said, “yes.”
I agreed on one condition… That we won’t revisit the third baby talk once this baby leaves our house. I really like things the way they are.
Hottie smiled…. And agreed.
😉
Also known as, “Getting reading to sell, sell, sell. Yes, we’re really done.” (I’m feeling 100% at peace with it!)
… There will be no reconsiderations on the size of our family.
I had my annual appointment with Dr. H two weeks ago. He asked where we were on family planning, I told him about our recent decision to stop at 2 kids, he talked about wishing he’d had a third but that two is easier, and then we talked about my uterus. He said that between my post-delivery appointment last August and now, he’s “lost two kids to that.” I asked, “a uterine window?” and he said, “I don’t think you understand what you had.
He explained it quite frankly. That what I had (uterine window) was simply a pre-rupture – that given its location, size, and the size of Bryson, that even minor laboring would have caused a rupture of “catastrophic proportions.” The uterine window is what happens just before a rupture – it’s all that’s there keeping the baby in the uterus and it’s only a very thin, clear membrane that is incredibly fragile. He said that if we chose to have a third baby, that it must be a singleton (“MUST”) and that he’d deliver at 36 weeks to reduce my risk, “but I lost one of those babies at 22 weeks and the other at 34 weeks – a planned 36 week delivery wouldn’t have saved them.” My chances of having another uterine window are between 40% and 50%.
So we’re really done.
Hottie asked, “did you ask Dr. H if he would have let M (his wife) have another baby if she’d had the same thing?” I said I didn’t ask because it was obvious – he would not have. They stopped at 2 because of their first pregnancy being septic and the second one having a health risk to the baby (but she was fine). As he said, “having a third would have been playing with fire.” That’s how we feel too.
I walked out of there a little sad. A little relieved. A little devastated. A little at peace.
I mean, there is something to be said for knowing you’re done because you just shouldn’t have more. We have a very good medical reason to stop, and we’re taking it seriously… so that’s it… we’re done.
…
It’s funny. Since writing this post two weeks ago, I’ve felt a tremendous amount of relief. Every day, I think to myself, “we made the right decision.”
I think that I was putting so much pressure on myself to want another baby, that I couldn’t step back and look at things rationally. Hottie and I wonder if our desire for a third was all due to us having embryos in the freezer. That is where Bryson came from, after all. We often referred to those embryos as siblings for our boys, rather than potential siblings. Talk about pressure!
I’ve come to realize that if we could have had babies naturally, that we probably would have chosen to stop after two children. Of course we’ll never know for sure what we would have done, but I truly think that we wouldn’t have even considered a third. Before we started trying to have kids, we were pretty settled on having just one child. That all changed after we were told we couldn’t have any kids without lots of help and science. Upon hearing that, I immediately knew I’d be happy (and LUCKY!) with one baby, but I also knew that I’d like to have two.
Never once did I think of having three kids, until, of course, we were successful on our first FET for Bryson (we were shocked). Then we started talking about those 5 embryos that we never thought would remain after an FET – we truly thought that we’d likely go through them all trying to get Bryson. Surprise! And with that pleasant surprise, we had a new conundrum in front of us. The easy answer was, “we’ll try for a third!” I think it was much easier to want a third baby than to figure out what to do with those frozen embryos.
Now, with two healthy kids and the fact that a third pregnancy would be treated as high-risk and could possibly be life-threatening, I’ve seen what everyone else has seen and I’ve come to the same conclusion that others, including Hottie, were hoping I’d come to. Hottie was on board with a third, but always said, “It’s just that we already have two boys who need their mother. I need to talk to Dr. H again about this before I’m comfortable.” I think he was like me – he wanted to want a third because that was easier than planning the alternative.
We’ll keep those five embryos for as long as we can. They are precious to us – they are all we have if we do decide to change our minds, or if we need to change our minds for medical reasons for one of our boys. I hadn’t really thought of that before and now, realizing that, I have much peace of mind keeping them right where they are.
A weight is lifted. Our family is complete. Our minds are made up. We are able to move on in a fabulous direction, no longer wondering how things will play out.
This post has been LONG in the making. Weeks? Months? I’m not really sure. But something has been brewing around in my head for a long time that needed to be worked out before even verbalizing it to anyone (including Hottie).
Recent happenings, recent conversations, recent feelings have all driven me to change my mind on something really big. I never saw this coming, but when it did come, it happened just like everyone said it would.
“You will just KNOW. You will have an overwhelming feeling that you finally know, and that you’re at peace with whatever your decision is.”
And I know now. I’m at peace. I’m happy about it.
There will be no more Courtney/Hottie babies. We are done growing our family. Our little family of four is feeling pretty darned complete.
****
I told one friend about this last weekend and her response was, “really? You were so sure you wanted three!” That’s a normal reaction – I think it myself a lot of the time. I started suspecting that this was coming when I noticed that I’d stopped daydreaming about what we would name our third baby, and when I noticed that, I thought to myself, “but you really WANT three.” But I realized that maybe I didn’t really want three anymore, and then I started wondering why I no longer seemed to want to have three.
There are so many reasons for this decision, and when I finally had the nerve to bring it up with Hottie, he agreed with all of my reasons 100%.
****
We went out for a late(r) dinner on Friday night with the kids after Matthew’s swimming lesson. We had to (gasp!) wait for a table and that went remarkably well. The kids ran around and played and had a great time while we waited with other groups of people, and it was relaxing. Once seated, we looked around at the full restaurant and smiled at each other, and Hottie said, “isn’t it fun to be out with lots of people for a later dinner on a Friday? We’re finally there!” And I said, “I have something to talk to you about.”
Right there, with the kids beside us and hundreds of people surrounding us, Hottie and I had a very rational, unemotional conversation about where we are right now, how we feel about our family, how we feel about each other, and how we’re both happy with the current state of our family. I felt relieved that it was finally out there. This was a pretty tough thing to work through on my own, but I knew I needed to really know how I felt about it before discussing it with Hottie.
****
There are so many reasons for this decision. I hate listing them out in a list because it just feels cold. Coming to this conclusion was the furthest thing from being a cold, hardened process.
I have been concerned about health and safety lately. I have a uterine issue that could, ultimately, kill me and/or an unborn baby if things went wrong. We unknowingly had that risk with Bryson, and had I labored at all prior to my scheduled C-section, the outcome could have been horrific. Two doctors told us that laboring prior to delivery would have likely killed one or both of us. I have brushed that thought aside for over a year because I really wanted another baby and the doctors said that we could most likely manage a future pregnancy with monitoring and careful planning. But lately, I’ve been thinking, “it would be awful to start laboring at home, feel the rupture, and know all along that this did not need to happen.” Knowing that there is a very real risk to having a third baby should be enough to stop me. It hasn’t been enough, but at the end of the day, that really is the deciding factor for me. Hottie has always been concerned about this and is relieved that I’ve finally realized the severity of this myself.
I love my two kids. I don’t like to leave them too often and would almost always rather have them with me than without me. I have friends who don’t feel this way about parenting, and it boggles my mind (but I don’t judge because we’re all different – I just cannot relate). I have friends who get sitters or drop their kids at the gym daycare every single day so that they can get away from their kids – and I don’t understand that. I take my kids to Tar.get and the grocery store – it’s what we do! I take them to lunch every day, and we love it! I want them with me! Sure, I need a break here and there, but for the most part, we’re a unit. I was talking to one of my friends a while back about this (a friend who does get breaks from her kids daily) and she said, “a third changes everything. I started yelling more, I needed more “me time,” I became more withdrawn. If you’re thinking you may be done with two, I’d suggest you really give it some thought. You’re the mother I’m not – and having a third could change you into the mother you don’t want to be.” This conversation was so important to me – because she’s right. I have watched so many people go from two to three kids and this very thing happened – they went into survival mode and their parenting changed. I’ve been yelling a lot lately (but have been better in the last week) because three years old is so hard for us all – and I have thought, “if I have another baby, I’ll be yelling for the next 4-5 years until that last baby is four or five.” I don’t want to be frazzled and yelling for that long.
I’m scared to death of having a girl. Not because girls are bad or undesirable in any way, but because that would be like starting all over again from scratch. I’ve got this boy thing figured out – even though my two boys are entirely different people, they are both similar in their love for trucks, sports, and each other. A girl would be the odd-man-out and that would make me sad. These boys are “as thick as thieves” and I just cannot wrap my head around having a child who doesn’t have that with a sibling, and that could very easily happen if our third was a girl. Heck, that could happen if our third was another boy. You never know, but there is a part of me that doesn’t WANT to know. I love my harmonious little set of boys just how they are!
Babysitters are so easy to find right now. People love watching two kids – they offer it up without you asking! Hottie and I have gone out on dates more in the last 2 months than we did in the year prior. We escaped out-of-town last weekend because a friend ASKED to take the kids for a weekend. If you talk to my sisters and friends with 3 kids, they’ll tell you that people, including grandparents, stopped offering to watch the kids once #3 arrived. Three kids can be daunting for babysitters and family members, and honestly, I don’t know that I’d be comfortable leaving three kids until the youngest was at least one. I remember being a babysitter and it was exponentially harder with three kids than it was with two, and that terrifies me as a parent. We enjoy getting out together, we enjoy taking a night or two to ourselves, and the prospect of that becoming harder is not something that makes me happy.
Travel – oh how we wish we could travel more with the boys. We wish that the kids were at a point where I could bring them with me to meet Hottie out in Seattle or wherever else he may be for a work trip. We are SO CLOSE right now to that being possible – like NEXT SUMMER close! I would have no fears of traveling with the two boys without Hottie – but I can’t say I’d be willing to do it with three. Actually, I know I wouldn’t be willing to do it until they were all much older. Hottie travels to fun places enough that this is something that I’m ready to do ASAP – and next summer’s trip to Seattle will be the trial trip for me. It will involve a layover, each boy having their own seat on the plane, and no breastfeeding. It is time. It is time to move on and travel with these kids! We’re all ready!
And while I’m talking about travel, Hottie’s work schedule now involves travel every other week for anywhere from 3-5 days at a time. This is exhausting for me – bedtime is our worst time of the day when Hottie’s gone and it makes me feel like a bad mom. No one wants to end their kids’ days on a bad/stressful note. I honestly know that I don’t want to handle a third child with this current travel schedule. I know that Hottie won’t travel like this all the time, but the reality of being pregnant, tending to a newborn with two other boys who need me, or getting up in the night multiple times when I’m solo parenting is not something that I care to take on. I can’t take it on – it wouldn’t be fair to anyone.
We really, really want to be able to consider private school for the boys. Unfortunately for us, the school we would send them to is about twice as expensive as the other private schools in our area. Paying to send two children to this school is do-able and palatable. Paying for three children to go to this private school would not be an option for us. We like having the resources to travel, buy fun things, eat nice meals, etc. and paying $21,000 a year for three kids to attend private grade school would hinder all of that. Life experiences are too important to us and to our children to limit them if at all avoidable. This may seem petty to some, but it’s important to us. Part of growing your family and deciding how large it will be has to do with deciding what is and is not important to you in regards to how you bring those kids up and what you expose them to. At the end of the day, we may decide to send the boys to the public schools here, but we want to make that decision based on education and not financial resources.
One thing that worries me about having a third is that those embryos are all we have – there will be no more. If, God forbid, something bad happened to one of the boys, we could maybe do genetic diagnostics on those embryos to try to have a baby that could help our boys. I’m only willing to thaw them once since they are all we have. They are precious to me for many reasons, but they are most precious because they are all we have. They are our only chances if something bad would happen in the future. I like knowing that they are there for us, and that we are there for them. They are so much more than potential children – they are hope.
One of the biggest reasons for me wanting to be done at two children is that Hottie and I are in a really great place right now. I feel like we’re finally “back amongst the living” and we’re really enjoying each other. We go on dates, we leave town together, we listen to each other because the kids don’t require AS MUCH as they used to, we do nice things for each other, and we just really LIKE each other. It took a lot of work to get back to this place – infertility really took a toll on us and then parenting young babies and kids just continued to deteriorate our relationship. We feel like we’re back where we were before we were told we couldn’t have children easily – and that feels really, REALLY good. Adding an IVF/FET cycle to our lives would only add stress, and adding another baby would take us right back to survival mode which is not where we want to be. I like Hottie too much to mess this up!
As I was contemplating all of this, we received news that a friend had just delivered their second baby who was unexpectedly born with a difficult, painful disease. That news sucked the air right out of both of us – it was so hard to even think about what that would be like. We can’t imagine living it. We have two healthy boys after years of infertility and invasive treatments. We are lucky. We won the lottery twice. How awful would it be to go for a third and possibly lose it, or lose my own life, or have a rough road in front of all of us because of a health issue with the baby? I always worried that we’d try for a third and we’d have a late-in-pregnancy loss (stillbirth is my worst nightmare) or the baby would die of SIDS or be born with poor health. I don’t want to risk our current “easy” family life for something that could devastate us and possibly kill one or more of us. How awful would it be to have a uterine rupture and know that it was avoidable? How awful would it be to lose our final baby in its sleep? I just can’t fathom it – and knowing that I can’t have a 4th pregnancy, I just don’t want to risk it. I don’t want to finish growing our family with a tragedy or great devastation. That’s senseless to me.
****
Hottie seemed almost relieved when I told him my thoughts. He is so concerned about my safety and health with a third pregnancy, and we both know that I wouldn’t enjoy being pregnant because of the risk involved with it. Every twinge, every pain, every “has the baby moved recently” scare, every ultrasound would bring stress and fear. The odds of the pregnancy ending in tragedy are… well… I don’t even know. But I do know that we “dodged a bullet” (doctor’s words) with Bryson’s pregnancy and neither of us wants to risk that again. Why would we? I was in denial for 16 months, but I’m not anymore.
****
I’m ready to sell off our baby stuff. When a friend asked how sure I was of this decision, I said, “I want to have a garage sale next weekend!” Hottie has asked me not to sell a thing since I could change my mind like I just did.
We agreed to hold onto things for a year.
I had a bad dream last night. I dreamt that I was pregnant with our third baby, and that I, somehow, forgot to go to the OB for the second half of the pregnancy. And then in the 8th month, I remembered I was pregnant and noticed I had no belly and couldn’t feel the baby moving. We went in for an ultrasound and I woke up as we were waiting to be called back, full of doom and despair because I knew we’d lost the baby. We’d lost our third baby. And having our two healthy boys only relieved the pain a little bit as we waited, before I woke up.
****
We dropped Matthew off at camp this morning, and as we waited to check him in, there was a mom in front of us with a new baby. Another mom and I marveled at how tiny the baby was, as we held our seemingly massive near-one-year olds. In that moment, reflecting on my dream, I thought to myself, “We’re not done yet.”
****
B (because of his busy schedule) will be setting up an appointment with our RE for July to discuss a spring transfer.
We’re not done yet.
I’ve been struggling for about a month about how to go about baby #3. We want a third baby, but I don’t want one right now.
It’s taken me over a month to say that out loud to anyone, including B. But I just told him, and he agrees (or rather, supports me).
He asked me why. I have so many reasons.
1. I’m enjoying Bryson so much, and feel that pushing this now really forces him into the “middle child” position too soon.
2. There just isn’t the worry like last time. No fear of, “what if it doesn’t work?”. If it doesn’t work, we have our two boys and we’re thrilled with them. We won’t stim again, but for a second child we would have (and we were dealing with my age).
3. Waiting 6 months really has no impact on my age. I’ll be 39 if we do it this fall, and I’ll be 39 if we do it next spring.
4. I’d really like to get my body back for a long time before ruining it again.
5. I have no sex drive with the nursing and lack of sleep. We’d both like for that to reappear for a while!
6. I don’t want another summer baby. I plan on holding both boys back until they’re 6 for kindergarten and a third baby may not need the extra year with two older siblings. I’d like to not even have to think about this a third time.
7. I want Bryson well established in school before a new baby comes. I felt like I was sending Matthew to school so I could have time with the new baby, and that just felt bad. Of course he has loved school since day 1, but there is still guilt.
8. This is a big one – my uterus scares me. I want another full year for it to heal before putting another baby in it.
9. I want 6-12 months of having independent kids before adding more dependency to the mix. The idea of having a third with Bryson at Matthew’s current age is exciting. The idea of having a third with Bryson just turning 2 terrifies me.
10. I’m just not ready.
This is momentous for me. I feel so relieved.
I posted last week about my chat with our embryologist about being able to pick the sex for our third child if we have a male-female mix of normal embryos. Honestly, I’m hoping that the normal ones all come back the same sex so that there’s no wondering what was left unused. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I looked into it quickly and PGD testing is covered by our insurance, so I’m assuming they’ll cover PGS as well. If it’s not covered, I’ll see if they can just do PGD testing on them, but I’m not sure they do that. But I bet they do. But I don’t really know. Anyway, because it’s looking like this testing is covered by our insurance, and we’re quickly burning through our deductible and OOP max with Matthew’s weekly speech therapy appointments, we’ll for sure do the testing.
There are a few things to really, really think about here:
So starting at the top (Do we really want to know what the sexes are of the normal embryos?), we don’t think we want to know the sexes of the normal embryos unless they’re all the same sex. We just don’t want to go in knowing that, say, there are two girls and a boy, and then start thinking about them as little people who may, or may not, be lost in the whole game of implantation, embryo development, miscarriage, etc. Like I said, if all of the normal embryos (and I use “all” loosely because we could have none, we could have one, we could have a few, but we won’t have 5!) are the same sex, sure, tell us ahead of time. But if they’re not all the same sex, I don’t want to think about the ones that may be left in the freezer or wonder if we should have chosen which sex to transfer. In this situation, I don’t want choices. I don’t know why I would want to know if they’re all the same sex, but I do. I think when they’re all the same, it’s not as easy to view them individually. I’m not sure that makes sense.
Do we want to pick which sex to transfer first, second, and so on until we’re successfully pregnant or out of embryos? I guess the answer to the first question answers this question. We knew, from the beginning of this discussion hours before I blogged about it, that we would NOT choose the sex of the embryo to transfer. There are MANY reasons for this.
First and foremost, had we had the option with Matthew, we probably would have chosen to transfer a girl – and look at what a mistake that would have been! I mean, yes, we would have loved that girl as much as we love our boys, but I believe I was truly destined to be the mother of one, then two boys. Fate knows me better than I know myself, and she knew that boys were right for me. If we’re meant to have another boy, then fate will tell us that. If it’s our turn to have a girl, she’ll tell us that instead. I believe we truly get what we’re supposed to have, so we’re leaving this up to a higher power (including the embryologists!).
Another reason we’re not selecting the sex is because we just want them to transfer the best embryo on transfer day. I am sort of over this whole IVF bullshit, in all honesty, and the idea of the anxiety of it just rattles my brain and my heart. I say, give us the best one from the get-go so hopefully I can be done with this process. I’m getting too old, and too hardened, to keep going through it (but I will keep going until the normal ones are used up in our quest for Baby #3). Now, there is a flip-side to this working the first time and that’s having normal embryos left over. Without PGS, I could have convinced myself that the remaining embryos probably weren’t viable anyway, but with PGS, we’ll know if we have normal, viable embryos left. So maybe I don’t want it to work the first time. I don’t know. My feelings on that will change, I’m sure, once we know how many normals we have.
If we choose the sex at time of transfer, do we want to tell anyone that we did so? Hell no! Well, maybe we’d tell someone, but definitely not many people. We for sure would not tell my family, or B’s family, or friends who have already expressed their opinions that choosing the sex is a bad idea. I’ve actually felt out a few people on this topic just to see what they would say, knowing full well that we weren’t going to pick the sex, and the responses have been dramatically different from person to person. I still stand by my thought that, ‘hey, someone is picking the sex (the embryologist) so why shouldn’t it be us if we want to?’ – but we don’t want to. Not everyone sees it the way we see it, and that’s OK. But knowing that, there’s no way we’d tell most people that we did pick the sex if we decided to (which we decided not to do).
Now for the questions that do apply to us since we won’t be picking the sex on transfer day.
If we choose not to select sex, when do we want to find out what the sex is of the one they transferred? This is tough. Really, really tough. Part of me thinks I won’t be able to control myself and will ask right after transfer – like seconds after they put him or her in (see what just happened there – it’s no longer an “it” and now is a “him or her”). The logical me says to wait until we see a strong, solid heartbeat at the 6 week scan. Then the crazy me pipes in and says, “at transfer, and no later than at the rising beta.” B would like to wait until the ultrasound, and I think he’s being sound and logical. Therefore, our goal is to wait until the first or second ultrasound. I can’t stand the thought of knowing what was transferred, and thinking of it as “him or her,” and then getting a BFN. I think the loss would feel compounded if I knew I lost a boy or girl, rather than a mass of cells. Those blasts are so full of hope, but to view them as pink or blue just adds even more hope to them, and consequently more disappointment if they don’t implant. So yes, at the 6 week scan. Please remind me of that in November.
If we hit the jackpot again on the first transfer, and there are more normal embryos remaining, do we want to know their sexes? No. No, no, no. We already view those embryos as babies, even though we know that statistically, only 40-50% of them are even normal (so 2-3 of our 5, if we’re lucky). Here’s the thing that gets me. Bryson was frozen – he was in the freezer for exactly 2 years to the day. Gazing at him, I know what that freezer may be holding. I know the babies that they could become. Because this will be our last baby for good medical safety reasons, I can’t know what we won’t be using. I can’t view them as boys or girls. I can only view them as the gifts they are to us in the state they’re in. They are the potential for life, and if they remain after we successfully deliver our third child, they will be transferred into me, off-cycle, where they can live out their remaining time where they truly belong. I can’t spend those hours and days thinking of them as more than the gift of hope and promise that they were and will always be to us. (Just writing this makes me tear up.)
When would we tell people the sex of the baby? Well, this one is easy. Because I can’t keep my mouth shut, as soon as we know, we’ll tell people. It will actually be fun to be able to tell people at 6 weeks what we’re having. I’ll even tell people that we had the option of selecting gender, but that we didn’t do it for the reasons above. I’m an open book, and I have no problems sharing how this whole IVF thing works.
Honestly, if I could pick the perfect situation for us, I’d hope for just one normal embryo that will transfer well, implant nicely, and develop into a perfect, healthy baby. But we all know how IVF works – there are no guarantees even when the embryos are perfect (we’ve now lost 6 “perfect” embryos) and having embryos in reserve is the insurance policy we all want. Because we’ll be done building our family with Baby #3, I truly hope we have no embryos left when we’re all done with this. If we have more than one normal embryo when we start, I almost hope we fail the first time so that we can get to the one(s) that remain. I truly believe that things happen for a reason, and if we would fail with all of them, as much as that would break my heart, at least I’d know we gave them all a chance. Not giving a perfect, normal embryo a fighting chance has to be an awful feeling that I ‘m not interested in feeling. But I may have to. But I may not.
So there you go. The answers to many complicated questions that surround this whole thing. It’s wild to think about. But fun too. But scary at the same time.
I just spoke with our embryologist about how we’re going to handle trying for baby #3. Because I can only transfer one at a time because of my uterine situation, she thinks our doctor will want to do PGS testing on our frosties so that we’re only transferring normal embryos. Makes sense to me.
So she said, “and we’ll know the genders of each one if you want to know.” Whoa! Game changer! We can request genders for transfer, or let them just work down the list of normals.
We’ve already decided what we’re going to do, but what would YOU do?
By no means is this being asked to start an ethics debate with one another, I’m just curious what you would do if you could choose gender, and only transfer one at a time. Would you pick? It changes everything when SOMEONE (you, or the embryologist) has to pick one. (If we could transfer 2, I would request one of each if we had them. Easy decision!)
Also, I got good news from them about doing a “compassionate transfer” if we do end up with baby #3, and remaining normal embryos. HUGE weight lifted!
(I would setup a poll but I’m typing on my phone.)
And a follow-up question: she said if they choose for us, that we could find out at any point after transfer (even moments after) what the sex is. Would you ask, and when in the process would you ask and why?
Okay – GO!
All the Sun For You 