one year ago

None of today's previous post matters much when I hold our sweet baby in my arms and feel how lucky I am that he was born, that he was even conceived at all.

It happened one year ago this weekend. That Saturday night, after eight or so days of giving myself nightly shots of hormones to stimulate my ovaries and grow a few big eggs, I gave myself one more shot — the "trigger" shot — in the bathroom of the Ordway theater, as close to 8 p.m. as I could manage, so as to force my ovulation within the next 36 hours. (Fertility treatments are precision operations.) The next morning, Steve went to the fertility clinic, shut himself in a small room with an assortment of porn, deposited his sperm in a cup, and came home. Two hours later, we both showed up, and they put a speculum in me, followed by a very skinny tube, through which they injected the sperm into my uterus. Steve held my hand, and we joked as usual about the romance of it all. I remember it hurt a bit, and Steve's sperm count was lower than usual — only 6 million, when it was usually around 30 million. The nurse told us it might not hurt to come back and do it again tomorrow morning, to double our efforts. We left and drove to a nearby church for morning Mass. It was so crowded when we got there that we had to sit in two separate pews. I stared at Steve's back, feeling dejected and depressed, wondering — after two and a half years of trying — if we were ever going to have a baby. The next morning, we went back and repeated the whole rigamarole. And this time, Steve's sperm count was 12 million. You know what they say, though: It only takes one.

That Thursday was Thanksgiving, and the glass of white wine I drank with dinner was the last I would have for more than ten months. We also caught a killer cold from Steve's dad that kept us home from work for most of the next week. The idea that I might be pregnant was the last thing on my mind. The following Saturday, Steve and I put up our Christmas tree. And then I took a pregnancy test, just to get it over with. And the rest is happy history!

Here is our beautiful, miraculous boy, photographed last weekend by Wendy of Swaddlebee Newborn Photography — a young mom who came to our house nine months pregnant and took these pictures. She really captured Daniel's spirit and budding personality. I am so happy with them!





P.S. A shout-out to Megan and Gordon on their one-year wedding anniversary. If you're reading, happy anniversary!