Danielle has always believed that there are few true surprises in this life. One that modern medicine has eroded away at is the surprise of finding out the gender of your baby at the moment of birth. Another is if she will ever get a vacation without it turning into a history lesson taught by her well meaning but sometimes tiring husband. That one we have no control over but we can and have decided to keep the mystery alive for us until the moment our baby's life begins.
Hence we have two names picked out.
Daniel Laurence
OR
Laura Anne
So that we don't continue to refer to our baby as ItSheHim, surely harming it for life, we have decided on a much easier moniker. We decided to use the first two letters in both names, D and L, in some combination. Problems ensued.
If we used DL this was a abbreviation for a term that is not very conducive to positive happenings in baseball, the Disabled List.
If we chose LD, this also stands for Learning Disability and the lord knows we don't want to saddle our child with that.
So, in our infinite wisdom and incredible love, we have settled on:
DeeLee-Bob
The definition of which is, I believe, an alternative name for something that you are having trouble putting a name on, to be replaced later by its true label. Perfection.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Open mouth, insert feet, ankles, leg...
So I forgot the comic relief to our first visit to the doctor. At the point where we ask the first tirade of 372 questions we have prepared in advance, I manage to start my one question I have come up with in the twisted recesses of my mind with "I know that I'm just the father and my work here is done...".
Crap. If only the world outside my mouth were as clear as it is in my mind. The doctor explodes into a loud guffaw, yes a guffaw, a loud "boy you just damned yourself and I wish you all the luck you may not deserve" laugh as my beautiful, glowing, sweetest woman you ever met wife looks at me in disbelief at the words that I so artfully crafted stumble out of my mouth, clearing the way for both my feet and ankles to fill the void in my mouth.
My simple question was, as the father, does the fact that my mother, so many years ago, had a few miscarriages have any genetic bearing on the success of our pregnancy.
Sounds simple. Typical new parent question I would think. I preface it with the most selfish and uncaring sounding, way I could have found to present it. Fortunately Danielle knows me and knows sometimes you just have to say "gotta love him because he's just so dang cute". Yeah right.
I have a feeling I will hear about this for awhile to come.
Crap. If only the world outside my mouth were as clear as it is in my mind. The doctor explodes into a loud guffaw, yes a guffaw, a loud "boy you just damned yourself and I wish you all the luck you may not deserve" laugh as my beautiful, glowing, sweetest woman you ever met wife looks at me in disbelief at the words that I so artfully crafted stumble out of my mouth, clearing the way for both my feet and ankles to fill the void in my mouth.
My simple question was, as the father, does the fact that my mother, so many years ago, had a few miscarriages have any genetic bearing on the success of our pregnancy.
Sounds simple. Typical new parent question I would think. I preface it with the most selfish and uncaring sounding, way I could have found to present it. Fortunately Danielle knows me and knows sometimes you just have to say "gotta love him because he's just so dang cute". Yeah right.
I have a feeling I will hear about this for awhile to come.
The confirmation of the news
So today we finally got to go in to see the doctor to make sure that we were not just misreading the 2 previous tests through our will to conceive. Or maybe it wasn't the best piece of electronics Danielle has ever peed on.
Now this is my first visit to an OG/GYN but believe it or not I was more excited than nervous! Danielle not so much. She's excited but not looking forward to the whole ultrasound probe thing. I can understand this, if I needed to do this we would probably just keep raising our 4 dogs and 2 cats as our kids.
Anyway, Danielle gets to sport the groovy paper gown with the oh so warm paper quilt and the doctor proceeds to show us our first look at our "egg sac". Yep that's what its called at this stage. Sounds like we're giving birth to the newest creation at IHOP. But you know what? That's OUR egg sac, our beautiful little cluster of cells. We (I) cried again after the doctor left us with our grainy radar screen ultrasound pictures.
ItSheHe has my eyes by the way.
Our tentative due date is March 24th. We managed to miss the heat almost completely much to Danielle's happiness. We plan so well.
Incredible high, followed by sobering news
I wondered if I should include this since it is not about the pregnancy but I believe it to be a very important part of our journey.
The day after we found out we were having a child, Danielle's mom, Paula, received news that a a test she had taken also came back positive, but this is not the news anyone wants to hear. She was diagnosed with a very aggressive form of breast cancer and would immediately start undergoing the treatment in order to defeat it.
This must be how a manic depressive person must feel. Awesome high, walking on air, then suddenly a hard blow to your core, taking you back a step.
Danielle is an incredibly strong woman, sometimes too strong for her own good, but she learned it all from her mother. She will be there for her mom, standing strong by her side and coaching her through this, and she'll be there for Danielle as well.
Paula is a true treasure to our family and we appreciate all she does with and for us. We love her very much and will do anything and everything to help make sure she defeats this.
The day after we found out we were having a child, Danielle's mom, Paula, received news that a a test she had taken also came back positive, but this is not the news anyone wants to hear. She was diagnosed with a very aggressive form of breast cancer and would immediately start undergoing the treatment in order to defeat it.
This must be how a manic depressive person must feel. Awesome high, walking on air, then suddenly a hard blow to your core, taking you back a step.
Danielle is an incredibly strong woman, sometimes too strong for her own good, but she learned it all from her mother. She will be there for her mom, standing strong by her side and coaching her through this, and she'll be there for Danielle as well.
Paula is a true treasure to our family and we appreciate all she does with and for us. We love her very much and will do anything and everything to help make sure she defeats this.
So this begins the journey -7/20/08
Danielle and I have been trying to concieve for about 2 years or so without any success. Its been lots of practice and awfully fun trying to along the way but with no success. We (well, she) has been to many doctors to find she's "pre-diabetic" (maybe). She has endured daily shots in her abdomen and blood sugar tests (dang pricks, hehe) to regulate her condition and allow her body to ovulate. Some of this seemed to work, some seemed like we were reaching at straws. Eventually we seemed to get her out of the danger zone through diet and medicine and hoped that now her body would cooperate. We often wondered how when we looked out into the world and saw so many people who couldn't raise a cactus much less a human being, seem to find it so easy to propagate the species, yet we, two loving people with a good life to provide, found it so difficult to do so.
I even got the joy of visiting the office to drop off my little guys to find out if they are swimming in the deep end or hanging out by the steps trying to look cool while picking the pool toys off the bottom with their feet (or is it tails?). Fortunately they seemed to be olympic swimmers not affected by the tighty whities and tight pants of yesteryear. By the way does anybody know how long I should have spent in that little room? It felt that there was a timer outside the door and the staff placed bets on how long each patient would take. Hope I made someone lunch money for the week.
Along the way we both got in shape and back out of shape and gave up on the whole fertility doctor thing and just decided to let God and a little bit of doctoring take over. God is amazing we knew, and he would provide for us in time.
We have very recently decided to look into foster care and adoption, because we are interested in spreading the love wether or not we have children naturally. It seems to us that maybe we were being led in this direction and that maybe this was our way to start building our family. We met with our pastor and his wife for a wonderfully informative meeting about thier experience with foster care and adoption. We came away from that even more convinced that this was a route we should be explore and scheduled another meeting with some church members that have done the same.
On June 20th Danielle woke me up to go to church. If you know me, I don't wake up bright eyed and bushy tailed, I barely function for about an hour and after a 2 liter of Mountain Dew. Danielle is absolutely amazing when he has to wake me up, nice and easy but because I'm like a bump on a log I usually still don't respond real quick. This morning was the same sweet way but with a twist, she told me she just took a test and when I'd decided to wake up she'd tell me that there was a + sign on it. I opened up my eyes like an eight year old on Christmas Day in Disneyland dancing with Spongebob amped up on a sugar high. She's taken these tests before but this was the first time we got the plus! She waited until after church to take the next one, the "most advanced piece of electronics you'll ever pee on" as the commercial says and but this time we did not get a +. Nope, this time the little LCD computer screen said PREGNANT! Immediately we (I) cried and hugged each other as a family for the first time.
This was it, the moment we have been wishing, praying, practicing, and working towards and it felt more awesome than we ever could have imagined. Thanks be to God, our child has begun it's beautiful journey.
I even got the joy of visiting the office to drop off my little guys to find out if they are swimming in the deep end or hanging out by the steps trying to look cool while picking the pool toys off the bottom with their feet (or is it tails?). Fortunately they seemed to be olympic swimmers not affected by the tighty whities and tight pants of yesteryear. By the way does anybody know how long I should have spent in that little room? It felt that there was a timer outside the door and the staff placed bets on how long each patient would take. Hope I made someone lunch money for the week.
Along the way we both got in shape and back out of shape and gave up on the whole fertility doctor thing and just decided to let God and a little bit of doctoring take over. God is amazing we knew, and he would provide for us in time.
We have very recently decided to look into foster care and adoption, because we are interested in spreading the love wether or not we have children naturally. It seems to us that maybe we were being led in this direction and that maybe this was our way to start building our family. We met with our pastor and his wife for a wonderfully informative meeting about thier experience with foster care and adoption. We came away from that even more convinced that this was a route we should be explore and scheduled another meeting with some church members that have done the same.
On June 20th Danielle woke me up to go to church. If you know me, I don't wake up bright eyed and bushy tailed, I barely function for about an hour and after a 2 liter of Mountain Dew. Danielle is absolutely amazing when he has to wake me up, nice and easy but because I'm like a bump on a log I usually still don't respond real quick. This morning was the same sweet way but with a twist, she told me she just took a test and when I'd decided to wake up she'd tell me that there was a + sign on it. I opened up my eyes like an eight year old on Christmas Day in Disneyland dancing with Spongebob amped up on a sugar high. She's taken these tests before but this was the first time we got the plus! She waited until after church to take the next one, the "most advanced piece of electronics you'll ever pee on" as the commercial says and but this time we did not get a +. Nope, this time the little LCD computer screen said PREGNANT! Immediately we (I) cried and hugged each other as a family for the first time.
This was it, the moment we have been wishing, praying, practicing, and working towards and it felt more awesome than we ever could have imagined. Thanks be to God, our child has begun it's beautiful journey.
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