Wanting But Waiting Tribe - 2011 - Page 2

[Hannah32]

I can't believe I'm posting in this thread! But here I am......

Please add me for 2011 September.

My story goes like this. I have a 6.5 month old at home. The first few months were really rough. He's a somewhat high needs baby and I had no prior experience. The sleep deprivation was awful and nursing really threw me for a loop. I expected every 2 hours, not every 20 minutes! Things are better now. He wakes up to eat twice per night, but my hubby and I each take a wake-up. His naps are all over the place lately, but he's having even better night sleep. 

I think I want a baby because I want at least 2 children and I'm thinking to myself....well, wouldn't it be better to get all the awful sleep deprivation out of the way? Plus, I secretly think that my second baby is likely to be easier than my little guy. That's probably dangerous thinking though.

I'm a FT teacher, so I want to time the pregnancy just like I did the first time, so I can take the same amount of time off. It worked out to about 19 weeks between summer vacation and using a significant number of sick days. I could do that again if the baby was born in the summer of 2012, preferably mid to late June, just like my current baby.

[dashley111]

   Well good luck to all of you- waiting...is SO hard!

Vero- Thanks for sharing your story!

[Mulvah]

Originally Posted by Chloe'sMama 

I can't believe I am posting here, but I am feeling the itch again.  DD1 is 2.5 and DD2 is 4 months.  I just really want to be pregnant for some reason.  So weird.  fertility did not return until DD1 was 16 months and I got pregnant the next month.  I think it is a good age range and I want to nurse DD2 at least till 18 months (milk dried up upon conception with DD2, but we dry nursed and are tandem nursing now).  I am hoping that fertility stays away at least until DD2 is around 18 months, but I am so confused by the urge to have another one so soon.

Do you want to be added to 2012? 

Also, how does dry nursing work?  Silly question, maybe, but how do you know when you're completely dry?  Did you start supplementing with milk before or did you just start when you knew you were dry?  I'm somewhat nervous about what will happen to my supply when I do get pregnant.

Originally Posted by veroxara 

Hi Everybody, I would love to join.

I have an interesting story. I had my ds1 in 1998, and it took 6 ms to conceive which I consider normal. After the 1 year of terrible post partum was gone, I was ready to have one more. After 6 months of trying I got a faint line, but I had a m/c at 7 weeks.

Then it took more than 2 years of struggle. I was confirmed with 0% chance of having a baby due to blockage of both tubes. It was terrible to hear the news, we were thinking about IF, when the next month I got a BFP, just like THAT, and dd2 was born in 2003. (Wonderful birth...Gosh!).

Anyway, 2 years later DH wanted to have one more, but I wasn't ready, just started working, blah, blah... 2 more years later I was ready, but DH wasn't. (That's how it is.) And then, 2 years ago I got pg, because we weren't "careful" enough (a dream come true, when it's not you who decides). That was out of the blue, and while it took a long time for DH to accept it, he did, and he was happy. But I had another m/c at 7 weeks. But DH had already got used to the idea of having a third, so we started "not being careful".

Of course after 4 months I started charting and obsessing. Then I got pg, and a huge BFP told me everything was gonna be all right. I even waited until week 13 to go to a doctor, thinking that if anything, it would have happened already. How wrong was I. Blighted ovum. Had to have a D/C. We both were devastated. Now DH is not keen on the idea of having a third anymore. He says 1. he is too old (43), I'm too old (39), and the kids are too old (12 and 8). So we are not TTC at least for a while. But somehuuuw we weren't careful on New Years day, and I definitely feel like pg. I have had sooooo many BFN, that I don't dare to test. I'm scared of being and at the same time of not being pg. What if this is my only chance?

Sorry for being so long. Any insights are appreciated.

I am so sorry for your losses. 

When would you normally start menstruating?  Surely it's coming up soon, right?  I would probably wait to test until a couple of days after I was set to start AF.  I really do hope you get your positive. 

Originally Posted by Hannah32 

...I think I want a baby because I want at least 2 children and I'm thinking to myself....well, wouldn't it be better to get all the awful sleep deprivation out of the way?....

There are a plethora of personal reasons (aren't there always!?) why I want to try sooner rather than later, but the sleep deprivation is one of the smaller factors.  I totally understand.

[veroxara]

Probably I would start AF Tomorrow or Saturday. I'm not gonna test only on Sunday. I just hate BFNs soo much.

You know, this really would be a dream come true, because we have been thinking about the third for a long time, and I think that we have been thinking waaay too much. (What if this, what if that...) Sometimes you shouldn't think just go with whatever God throws at you.

[JMJ]

This might be a good place for me.  DD is 21 1/2 months old.  I had no fertility signs until she was almost 18 months old, and we decided the time might be right for another one.  DD slept 6 hour stretches at night for a week or 2 in mid-December, and it was enough to get me my first postpartum ovulation.  It was a high point in our relationship.  I was giddy and in love with my husband.  We hit all the right days to conceive.  I felt pregnant.  I had symptoms of implantation at 6 DPO.  DD woke up from her nap one day, and the first thing she said was "baby."  I asked her where, and she pointed to my belly.  I hadn't told her anything about a baby in my belly.  I had an 8 day luteal phase.

I had a BFN on the day I started bleeding, but I couldn't shake the feeling that I had been pregnant.  On the 3rd day of bleeding, I had a quantitative blood HCG test.  2.  High enough that maybe I was.  Low enough that maybe I wasn't.  I'm having a really hard time mourning a life that I'm not sure existed, and I really don't know how to deal with it.  I was so sure I was pregnant.  I don't want to go through that again.  We're waiting for a longer LP before we try again.

That's also hard.  We will only use NFP for religious reasons, and DD is nursing through the night again.  I thought I was ovulating again, but now it looks like I didn't.  I'm in the "fertile" phase and have been for 2 weeks, and it could be a while with DD nursing like she is.  It's hard to practice NFP (abstinence) so rigidly when we both know we want another baby as soon as possible.  We wanted to leave it open, to let nature take its course, to just let ecological breastfeeding space our babies.  We've been charting not to avoid, but to know the due date, and we didn't plan for this.  Now, we not only don't get to have a baby yet, but we may be looking at a lot of abstinence while I wait to really be fertile.

Please don't try to convince me to use other birth control.  We believe what we are doing is best, that there is growth to come out of it.  It is just a struggle for now.  Someday, I'll understand...

[veroxara]

JMJ,

I'm totally with you. First of all, I have had at least 30 cycles throughout my IF struggle in which I was SURE I was pg, but something went wrong. First it was difficult for me to handle, because I wasn't "officially" pg, I just "knew". But it didn't stop me from trying. Somehow I got used to it that God has other plans with me. We kept trying, and I kept crying after each let down. I have had 3 m/c-s, one of which was 13 weeks, a blighted ovum. Now that was the one when as you said: " I'm having a really hard time mourning a life that I'm not sure existed". Because there was no baby in the sac.

So what I'm trying to say is that don't let this bleeding stop you from trying. I always try to think about the women of old ages, when they didn't know they were pg, so they didn't obsess that much. I couldn't not obsess, so what I did was after every cycle when I was sure and AF came anyway, I let myself cry for a while that I shook is off and started to look forward the next cycle. I did it for more that 2 years, and I'm doing it now, TTC #3...

Good luck, and I think NFP is wonderful.

[JMJ]

Veroxara, thanks for sharing your experience.  It helps to know that I'm not the only one who obscesses over babies who may or may not have existed.  I have much hope of being fertile again soon, so for now, we're waiting for a longer luteal phase before we try again.  We'll be trying again as soon as I have evidence that my LP is long enough.  It's not that we're afraid to try.  It's that we feel it's best to wait until we're more likely to have a sticky one.  DD was conceived in one cycle of trying, which makes me feel even more certain that I was pregnant and more hopeful of being successful when we do try.  There is a religious/spiritual aspect as well that we would like to be able to have all of our children baptized, and while there is nothing immoral about never getting the chance, and our church accepts "baptism of intent" in such cases, we trust that God would have mercy on unbaptized babies, but it's hard to think of my children not living long enough to be baptized.  I just can't TTC when I know that there is a reason why the baby wouldn't make it.  I'd rather work out the reason first.  Maybe as time goes on, that might change, but for now, that's where I'm at.  If I didn't know that I would likely be fertile soon, I would probably do as you did and TTC at every chance just to hope for the window of opportunity that would work, but for now, I wait.

[button-nose]

Hello! I've lurked on here for a while and I'm really hoping for a little support :)

I know a family is completely worth waiting for. I'm 22 soon, and financially I'm not in the place for a child yet. I've been with my partner for 4 years, he's 30 so is emotionally ready for a family but he's taken a temporary setback in his career to go to university to be able to further himself so that he'll have more options and a better potential income for the future.

We both talk about children like it'll be an inevitability we've been together for 4 years and unless something absolutely awful happens him and I are completely meant to be together - he's my rock.

I guess the problem is, I feel so ashamed at how broody I am. I'm a sensible person, and we're responsible with contraception, but really want to experience pregnancy and parenting so badly - but I have nobody to talk about it with! All my friends are male because I struggle forming happy relationships with the girls around me, and I can't talk about it with my boyfriend because while he's just as excited about our future family as I am, he's not a woman and he doesn't understand quite how it feels to have a very specific sense of physical vacancy. Also, my family are very career driven. My parents weren't around much when I was a kid because they came from very poor backgrounds and my mum struggled to give us a better life than she had, and they'd all feel like I was throwing my life down the drain if I had a family before 30. My sister is almost 30 and not overly keen on children, and I can't talk to her either. I do want a prosperous career too, but I equally want a family just as much.

I know it's completely worth waiting for...it's just sometimes I wish there were people who understood. I guess I just wanted to air out my feelings on here. I've been lurking for a couple of years and I love the ethic of this place and it seems there are other people who understand what I'm talking about.

Sorry for the rant...and thanks for reading if you've got this far :)

[JMJ]

Welcome to MDC, button! I think that's a struggle for a lot of people. You want to get things in order first, but they'll never be totally perfect. It's just a struggle to find the time when it's right, even though it's not perfect. That's really something for the two of you to decide, and while you will have to deal with the disapproval of your family, that shouldn't be a big factor in your decision making. It's not their life. It's yours. They'll get over it or they won't, but you're the one who has to deal with the consequences of your actions. My husband is over a decade older than me, and because of that, I got married and started having children much younger than I thought I would have otherwise. He was already in a position financially to be ready for a family, and so we got married when I was 21 and had our daughter when I was 22. I got pregnant 2 months after I graduated from college. I do feel like I was prepared for both marriage and motherhood. I just hadn't expected them to be a financial reality so soon. With my husband's job, I am able to be a SAHM, and that's exactly what I want to do. Some family members think I should have gotten at least a master's degree first just in case, but we decided that we were ready to have children, and higher degrees can wait. I am a strong believer that children should be loved into existence. This means both love for your partner and for the child. We as women were created to bring forth life with our bodies, and it is completely natural to desire to do just that, but it must go a step further. We must have such love for that child that we do everything we can to give him/her the best. We have children for their own good more than for ours. This also means loving your partner so totally and completely that you are willing to give yourself completely to him and receiving the complete gift in return. This often happens in marriage, or at least, marriage is intended to be a commitment of this sort in order to create a stable home for children. I don't know your situation to know why the commitment of marriage has not yet been made, but that could be a sign that there are some more things that need to be worked out before you are ready for children. Children are a very serious lifetime commitment... which is why we're here, wanting but waiting.

[kismetbaby]

Hugs button-nose. . .it is hard to be wanting but waiting with no one to really talk to about it.  I totally get it.  I know it's hard to get out of the broody thing when you are wanting, but here is my 2cents:  you are young and not only is a family worth waiting for, but it's worth enjoying yourself before you do the mama thing!  I waited till I was early 30s to have my first and I am really glad I did. Certainly, not everyone would feel this way and of course it can be great to have kids in your 20s I am sure, but since you know you are waiting anyway, try to think of all the things you get to experience and enjoy now that will be harder with a child.  For ex, I haven't been to the movie theater in over a year, or gotten to sit down and enjoy a leisurely meal at a restaurant more than twice since having a baby. Oh and enjoy your time with your partner, it gets so much harder to have quality adult time.

Anyway, not trying to belittle your feelings of course, just to give you the perspective from the other side a bit! :)  Don't be ashamed of how you feel, just acknowledge it and then try to embrace the time you have while you wait. I know, easier said than done though.

Hannah32--I think I am the opposite. . .I figure I want to reach a place where I get to sleep a little BEFORE I do round 2. Maybe its my age, but I'm not sure I could do another year plus of sleep deprivation without a break.  I am thinking of night weaning, both to encourage my fertility to return and to get some sleep before TTC #2. But maybe sleep is just a dream at this point.  My SIL had 3 babies in 4 years. . .I am both a little jealous and terrified of that (not that it's going to happen for us).  I mean 3 car seats, 2 in diapers, and talk about no sleep. Yikes.

[Silverbird]

Hi all I'd love to join we're trying for October 2011! This will be when we get to the top of the NSH waiting list for IVF! we can't convie without it due to dh's treatment for a tumor.  But I've been wanting a baby like forever!

[veroxara]

Hi all!

Well, AF turned up, so I am definitely WW. At least until june 2011. I hope DH comes to his senses and will be ready to start again. We have to wait due to financial reasons.

Button! This place is great for your problem. You can vent, you can feel sorry for yourself, and you can be totally anything you want (even sometimes unreasonable) and you still find someone to have a shoulder to cry on. It's great. Welcome!

[kismetbaby]

I got my first ever + OPK today! Fun!  I never did use them to get pg before and this is likely only my second PP ovulation. I've been so anxious about Oing again, that I started using them, but I am temping too.  Anyway, now I just have to resist the urge to try and get pg!  Of course I don't think I could yet anyway. . .my LP is probably too short with the BFing and all. . .but the thought of living a little dangerously is soooooo tempting.  DH isn't helping b/c I'm the one who wants to wait.  Clearly though I don't want to wait 100%.  Sigh. If I wasn't worried about loosing my milk while pg, I'd be TTC now, but I'm too worried about this. Gotta remember that.

Anyway, it is nice to know that my body is coming back to life. I've got sore nips and lots of EWCM to back-up that positive OPK too.  I suppose I could actually not O after all this, I'll be waiting to see if my temps shift.  I've also never charted a complete cycle, so this is new and exciting for me (total fertility geek here!). :)

[EllyMayMomma]

I need to join here!  My story sounds simular to a couple others here.  DH and I have 3 kids - 16, 11 and 7.  I had been wanting another baby for years and in October got a BFP!  Was so excited but so worried I would miscarry.  I think, somehow, I just knew something was wrong.  Anyway, baby stopped growing at 8 weeks, we found out at 10+4 and I miscarried at 12 weeks, a bit over a week ago.  DH had been shocked with the BFP to begin with, it had just never occured to him that it would actually happen after so many years.  So now we want to try again but know I need to wait a month or two to allow my body to heal - this has been hard physically as well as emotionally.  DH has agreed to try one more time.  3 losses would be all he is willing to chance and honestly, if I had another 10-12 week loss, I think it will be all that I want to chance as well.  When we do start TTC again, probably March, I am going to try to hold out on early testing.  I know I will be able to handle a "I think I was pregnant" loss better than a for sure BFP loss, not to mention how DH would handle it.  Not to knock how hard any loss is.  Heartbreaking.

[kismetbaby]

Welcome EllyMayMomma!  So sorry for your recent loss. How devastating. Hope you find the support you need here.

[BeanSprout Mama]

EllyMayMama, I'm sorry for your loss. :(

I am having such a rough time waiting.  It really is the sensible thing to do but I'm fertile right now and all I can think is how wonderful it would be to just be pregnant now!  I think I'm having a harder time waiting this time around because it's my great idea to wait until June. DH would be on board with starting to try right now. Darn it, why does the sensible thing have to be so hard?

[treeoflife3]

Does anyone else have a kid who is making the whole waiting thing hard?  My kiddo is only 22 months old but in her own way she asks for a baby on the daily.  I just know she is going to be an awesome big sister but she definitely isn't helping me with my baby fever!

[JMJ]

Oh yes, my daughter has been asking for a baby for months.  At the same time, I guess she's not quite ready.  I'm also concerned about breastfeeding.  When I ovulated the first time, I'm guessing there was a drop in supply, and DD wanted to nurse all the time (like every 10 minutes, no joke!), and I hated to nurse her and was really uncomfortable.  She also used every bad nursing habit she could, which makes me think she was having a hard time getting milk out.  I'm a little afraid of the whole pregnancy being like that.  Anybody else?

[Mulvah]

Originally Posted by veroxara 

Hi all!

Well, AF turned up, so I am definitely WW. At least until june 2011. I hope DH comes to his senses and will be ready to start again. We have to wait due to financial reasons.

Button! This place is great for your problem. You can vent, you can feel sorry for yourself, and you can be totally anything you want (even sometimes unreasonable) and you still find someone to have a shoulder to cry on. It's great. Welcome!

Originally Posted by JMJ 

Oh yes, my daughter has been asking for a baby for months.  At the same time, I guess she's not quite ready.  I'm also concerned about breastfeeding.  When I ovulated the first time, I'm guessing there was a drop in supply, and DD wanted to nurse all the time (like every 10 minutes, no joke!), and I hated to nurse her and was really uncomfortable.  She also used every bad nursing habit she could, which makes me think she was having a hard time getting milk out.  I'm a little afraid of the whole pregnancy being like that.  Anybody else?

I'm concerned about what getting pregnant will do to my supply.  I don't have anything to compare it to, though.  And, admittedly, I'm frustrated with nursing right now because my LO just started to bite.  Ouch.

[michaelnkimberly]

I would like to join as well! My name is Kim. DH and I have 3 little boys- 6, 4 and 18 months. I'm trying to be patient and wait until this summer to TTC, but I find myself getting extremely baby hungry! It seems like there are newborns all around me- I have lots of friends and family that are either expecting or have just recently given birth. It's a good thing when I'm around them and can cuddle with the new little ones, but then I go home and crave a newborn of my own! I'm still nursing my 18 month old, but I got my cycle back when he was 4 months old, so I'm pretty sure we wont have any trouble. DH is pretty much just as excited as I am about having another, and the boys keep asking me when they will get a baby sister. As much as I want a baby, the timing will work out much better if we wait until June to start trying. I homeschool my boys and I would like to get most of the 2011-12 school year done before adding a newborn to the mix. I have an IUD, which makes it a little easier to wait patiently, since BC is basically effortless! I'm enjoying reading your stories in the meantime!