Find Space for Your Heart Here
In the midst of busy lives, uncertainty & so much more, I hope that this blog will be a soft landing space for you. Find some of my heart, stories, and resources below, and please reach-out to me however I can support you. If there are additional topics you’d like to see on the blog, please feel free to email me!
Starting Again... Questions to Ask After IVF Fails
Our follow up (WTF) appointment with the RE was about a week after our negative test, and that timing gave me some space to feel, and then to strategize. I was torn between taking a break and jumping back into another cycle, and I wanted her advice. I needed a plan. To walk out of that meeting knowing what my next plan was.
One common question I get asked by clients is “What questions should we ask after a failed cycle/failed transfer/cancelled cycle/miscarriage/loss?” and I wanted to talk today about what I asked, and why, and how that impacted my next steps.
Around The Beanstalk
Guest Post: I clearly know the overwhelm of the IVF world. It was a long, hard road for us. I didn’t want other women to feel as overwhelmed as me, so I decided to do something about it. I started up a brand new business called Around the Beanstalk, as a nod to the son we lost, Jack. I wanted to create a legacy for him.
With Around the Beanstalk, I’m creating products to help support anyone going through IVF. I’m providing tools for people to navigate the IVF world – partially in physical products, partially through the development of a community and support system. It's my goal to build a large community of IVF warriors….a place where we can all feel safe to chat, vent and ask questions. A space to lift each other up and get through the crazy IVF world together.
You Will Be Okay
When the nerves 3dp5dt makes you feel like your heart is going to pound out of your chest, you will be okay.
When you can’t sleep at night, wondering if your embaby is snuggled in tight, you will be okay.
When you convince yourself over and over not to POAS, you will be okay.
When you do finally POAS, in the middle of the night eight hours before your beta, you will be okay.
“How do we make a family?”
The answer to this question is no longer as cookie cutter as it might have seemed
once before.
And yet, there are women and men who dread having to explain the answers.
That’s right…I said answers.
But, then again, why?
Infertility, Fertility Treatment & your Career
If you are anything like me, the journey to parenthood isn’t what you expected. I thought the hardest part of balancing my career with growing my family would be negotiating my maternity leave. Little did I know that the journey would start years before I had a baby, and present countless obstacles between getting (and staying) pregnant, and being successful in my career.
Shots shots shots shots shots - [LMFAO]
When my daughter and her hopeful siblings are older, I know telling them these stories of their creation will mean so much to them, including the way that our lives changed each time. I know that I’m really proud of and grateful for the ways that we as a family have made room for Infertility, whether or not we thought it was fair or frustrating, and the ways that we fought tooth and nail to get to this moment in time. Building our family is much harder than we ever imagined, but we’re also not people who’ve ever said no to chasing our dreams.
Infertility & Intimacy
How TTC and Fertility Treatments can Change Everything (& what you can do about it!)
Before I started TTC…
I didn’t know that trying to have a baby, really really trying - it wasn’t all fun and games.
It didn’t necessarily mean better or more frequent sex with my partner. I didn’t know that struggling to conceive would impact our intimacy significantly. That failing to get pregnant would challenge the way we connected physically.
Infertility Treatments: A Choice & Also A Challenge
You see, infertility is not a choice. If I am any indication, it seems that those who struggle to conceive want a baby so desperately that the medical diagnosis of Infertility seems cruel and ironic.
What happens next, after that diagnosis, it’s a choice.
A really really hard, really really complicated, really really sh*tty, really really hopeful choice that individuals and couples make every single day on whether to pursue fertility treatments.
Infertility in a Pandemic
Infertility is already unpredictable
Infertility comes with so much unpredictability to start. Then you’re forced to add in these “wildly unprecedented” times, and you’re left with a literal storm of questions. Of unknowns. Of silence.
When and why and how and where become whether and if and what if and even oh no.
It’s exhausting and emotional and so much to process.
Let’s Talk About Sex, {for a} Baby!
I think intimacy is a beautiful thing, much like everyone else, I’d assume.
I also have genuinely enjoyed being intimate with my husband since the start of our relationship. But our sex lives, and our attitudes toward having sex changed drastically over 2+ years of trying to conceive, and it’s not something I ever could’ve predicted.
Why, you ask?
Because NOBODY TALKS ABOUT THAT!
Being Left Behind or Finding Your Tribe: Infertility in the age of Social Media
Two. Pink. Lines.
I’ve never wanted to see anything more in my life than two pink lines.
Two pink lines would mean that I’d succeeded, that I’d been triumphant, that my body did the thing I so desperately hoped, wished and worked for. Two pink lines would mean that I was pregnant. That my dream of motherhood was on its way to becoming a reality.