I'm Working On It

For the past week or so I have been trying to turn my blog into something that I find incredibly awesome and very useful. I started out by reading through all of my posts since it's inception back in November of 2007, which was at the tail end of our infertility treatments. Before that time, the blog had been kept on my MyS.pace page. Over the next few weeks, I plan on bringing over a post a week from that site to this one, as it also chronicled the beginnings of our infertility journey.

I digress. Reading through all of my old posts brought back so many memories and feelings, some good, some bad, some exciting, some funny.... I read a few that helped me work through issues I'm having now because I also had them then, but by the time those issues made it to the blog, I addressed how I was going to handle them, so it became an "Oh yeah!" moment. Some of my posts brought tears to my eyes, while others got my curiosity piqued and excitement levels up (will she get the job in Texas?!). It was fun to read back through all of them and see just how far I have come.

The whole reason I was reading through the old posts was to clean out entries and information I no longer wanted out there. I also changed tags on most of the posts in an attempt to pare down the number of tags I had on my blog and to better organize each post into a topic. Once I was done with most of my reading, I began working on my layout, which is still a work in progress. I put the archive feature back up and added a "tag cloud" so that struggling infertiles, as well as myself, could easily get to posts that addressed a specific topic.

I did all of this because I want this blog to be an information outlet and to provide hope not only to others who struggle, but to myself as well. I do have a beautiful baby after years of infertility, but we want another one. I don't want my daughter to be an only child if I can help it. I want her to know the joy a sibling brings. However, we have a few things working against us when it comes to #2, and in some ways, we are worse off than we were before. Our journey is far from over in my eyes. However, we might be just fine with #2 and have zero complications. But when our journey to #2 begins next year, I want to be able to easily look back at our journey to #1.

Hopefully this new blog and layout is useful. The layout is for me, and it is for all of you.

My Own Nostalgia

Last night I was on the brink of going insane if I didn't find some kind of task to keep myself busy. Even though the moving company is going to take care of everything, my brain keeps telling me I still have things I need to do. To ease my mind I began by cleaning up my kitchen, which turned into a game of "find the aerosols," since the moving company will not transport them for us. This eventually lead to my favorite part of the evening: the boxes I brought back from my parent's house. What a trip down memory lane! I found all kinds of memorabilia from my high school years, including writing assignments from my senior English class and field charts from when I was in the marching band. Yes, I was a band geek. I played trumpet to keep a family tradition going. Laugh all you want, it paid for college. My husband loves to tease me. I even found my ACT scores. My favorite piece was a notebook of writing assignments. It was almost like a journal of my life in high school. It went from complaints about crowded hallways (I blocked out the fact that they were THAT crowded) to talking about how I met the first and only other guy I have ever loved besides my husband. It had notes between one of my good friends and me, as well as some seriously funny writing assignments I took to the extreme. I got a really good laugh. One of the absolute funniest pieces was a write-up I did on some stupid 80s video we watched one day when we had a subsitute. I wrote that the only think I learned from the video was that people in the 80s had really ugly hair and how to use words like, "gnarly and bitchin'," and that my mother slapped my face for using my new found words. ROFL! (She didn't really.) The thing that amazed me the most was that I got A's on all of my assignments. Some of them were really out there! It was just fun to see that I had a sense of humor even back then.

For some silly reason, I saved all of my marching band charts. I guess its because I remember standing outside in the hot August sun for 12 hours a day for one week to learn our new Fall Show while I carried those charts around and took notes. I would circle where I was on the chart, make an arrow to where I was going next and how many counts I was supposed to take to get there. "Pause for 12 counts, move 8 counts to next chart." I absolutely loved those band days. The kids in band were a different breed of people and we knew how to have fun. We were like a great big family because we spent so much of our lives together. The friends I remember liking most were from band. Its hard to believe that I will only get older and move farther and farther away from those days when I was not quite an adult and felt like I would always be 17. Its funny to look at the pictures of myself and see how much my appearance has changed in 10 years. I didn't think I would ever look a day older than I did back then.

All of my high school memories have been relocated to their own special box to await the day I need a bit of nostalgia again. Somehow three year's worth of memories (including year books and dance pictures) fit into one Staples paper box. I affentionately placed the lid on the box with a slight smile on my face and a warmth in my heart, and then made my way upstairs to shred and organize papers while I remissed over my high school years some more for the rest of the night.