Apparently I Write Like a Man

I was playing with The Gender Genie. You submit text and it predicts whether it was written by a male or a female. It predicted that most (75%) of the passages I entered were written my a man.
Thanks to Alex from The Bilerico Project for the time waster!

To my beautiful wife…

This made me think of you. I can only hope that someday you will be as accomplished. You always say you were born during the wrong era. If you had been born in her era these are the sort of things I could see you doing.
 
I know you’re going to make a huge impact on the world and I’m glad I’ll be there to witness it.
 
I love you.

1 Year Anniversary

Warning: serious bitching ahead.

I really don’t know how much more of my job I can take. I rarely have any work. I could complete all the work I’ve don’t this week in about 20 min. Unfortunately, the higher ups have realized that we’re very very slow. There are 3 FT che.mists in the lab that do the work that 1 very PT employee could do. They have already laid off 5 people in other departments. There have been threats of “head.count red.uctions” in our department over the past few weeks that would take is from 3 to 1. This is bad for me because 1. My boss’ boss is a douche (the one that would be making the decision of who to keep) and is incredibly se.xist. Females aren’t provided training, taken on business trips, etc. We were told that females don’t get invited because the guys enjoy s trip clubs and it’s cheaper to pay out for discrimination than it is for harassment. Nice, eh.
2. I was the last one of us hired.
3. My skill set is almost identical to one of the other che.mists. He has a pe.nis and has been there the longest of the 3 of us.
4. I don’t have a P h D and the other guy does. This may initially sound like a plus for me since they have to pay the P h D more but it’s really a negative because they like to brag to customers that we have a P h D in our dept.

Of course this couldn’t come at a worse time for us. They are offering severence packages but they depend on your length of employment. I started my job 1 year ago today so I don’t expect I’d get much. I’m also having surgery on the 18th of Sept (assuming I still have a job then). We are planning to start trying with my uterus in Nov assuming I still have a job and health insurance. If I don’t have insurance and a job in Nov but R does we will go back to her body around the same time.

New Page

I added a new page to post our insem plans. When we actually start trying they will be more detailed. I just wanted it all in one place so we didn’t have to go through posts looking for each cycle. Not very positive of me is it? I plan on having so many cycles that it would ne a pain to keep track of them. Ever the realist…

Chugging Right Along

We’re registered with a sp e rm bank and selected several donors, 6 to be exact. We have ranked them 1-6. That was so hard to do! We knew we wanted dark hair and an ethnic background similar to R’s. We didn’t want anyone with fair skin or fine hair. Since we want to eventually use the same donor for R when we try with her uterus again we didn’t want anyone with a family history of heart problems. (R was born with mitral valve and tricuspid valve prolapse with an atrial septal defect). I have a family history of breast and colon cancer so we didn’t want that in his background wither. We didn’t feel like we were very picky. Is that bad? Should we have been much more concerned about things? The guys all have healthy backgrounds. Some are of mixed race. Race wasn’t a real priority for us. We were much more concerned with health. We felt like if we had selected someone with family history of the cancers that are in my family or the heart problems in R’s family (her brothers, mom, and niece also have heart murmurs but none as serious as hers was) we were setting them up for health problems. All we want is a healthy child. I know how terrible I felt watching R go through her heart surgery. I can’t imagine going through that again with our child.

What’s in a name?

It wasn’t that I thought that I’d never carry a child when I started this blog, I just didn’t think I’d be carrying a child in the near future. I wanted this to be a chronicle of our quest to get R pregnant. I thought I’d be talking about our quest for motherhood as sort of an outsider, an observer. Now that we’re switching to my body I don’t know if I should change the name. It’s weird. I never felt like I was an observer as we did R’s insems. I planned everything. I tracked her temps, dealt with our donor, made the appointments, made sure she was eating well and taking her vitamins to prepare her body for pregnancy. The downside of this was that I was the one that felt like a failure each cycle she didn’t get pregnant. It was the same way with our wedding. I contacted all the vendors, made the appointments, and knew everyone’s flight plans and hotel arrangements. R jokes that all she had to do was show up. She likes it that way. One of my personal mottos is “B gets shit done.” I’m the planner. I live by the list. It brings me much joy to have a long to do list and check things off one by one. If I need Ex.cel it makes me even happier. I live my life by spreadsheets and lists. I have even designed a spreadsheet to track my temps, meds, etc.

Since I’m the planner and now the one that hopes to get knocked up I worry that R will feel left out of the process. I thought about surrendering this blog to R, but she’s not really a blogger (not that I have been that great). It’s really your loss. She’s a wonderful writer and is extremely hilarious. Instead, I’m trying to think of another name. I am no longer in a quest to me the other mother. I hope to be the birth mother. Now I have to come up with another name…

Everyone else is doing it

You can make one too. Just click here.

Hello again

I’m back. I’ve been gone so long that I contemplated not returning. I figured no one was still checking on me; that everyone had assumed I’d never return. I decided that, with all the changes that have happened and will continue to happen,  I needed a place to write even if no one was still reading. I can now access word.press from work. That was the real problem. R is working on her Master’s (only 12 more weeks until she finishes) and I couldn’t ever get my hands on the laptop after work. We’ve had some pretty major changes since I fell off of the face of the earth.

 

1. On July 10th we celebrated our 10 year anniversary by flying to San Francisco and getting married! We were going to elope but then our families found out about it. I was so surprised that they all flew out to CA to be with us. My brother lives in Daly City and R’s dad lives in Pioneer so they were already out there. All of our parents and siblings were in CA to celebrate with us. We were married by the Bay in Tiburon on Thursday and spent the rest of the weekend together. Most of our family members had met, but it was the first time we were all together at once. Our Dad’s got along perfectly! They had so much fun together. We did learn that they should not be left alone though. They’re both pranksters and would get into way too much trouble if left unsupervised. There is already talk of R’s Dad coming to stay at my Dad’s farm for a week. Who knows if they’ll invite us. I’m so glad that everything went well. Our families weren’t awkward with each other. We even took my Dad to a few ga.y bars in the Cas.tro. That’s huge! He drives a muddy pickup truck, flies the Confe.derate flag, has a gun safe that’s larger than most people’s bathrooms, and once told me that the US went downhill when they gave women the right to vote. I never thought I’d see my Dad in a Ga.y bar. He was so happy at the wedding too. He cried. Actually, the only people that didn’t cry were my siblings and the officiant.

2. R still doesn’t have a full time job. She’s focusing on finishing her degree and preparing to take the L S A T. She’s narrowing down the list of law schools she will be applying to. We will most likely be moving again next summer.

 

3. I’m still at the job I hate. It’s still slow and I rarely have any actual work to do. I have half-heartedly been looking for another job but I’m torn. I know we will probably be moving in 8-10 months and don’t want to have to start another job and leave so soon. There is 1 law school that R is applying to in the area so there is the chance that we’ll be here for at least 3 years. I’ll look more seriously if we’re staying in the area.

 

4. I will be getting some time off of work in October. The ankle that I hurt when I broke my foot in December is still f’ed up. I’m having surgery October 2nd. I’m not looking forward to the 6 weeks in a cast or the 6 weeks of crutches. I talked to a trainer at the gym. I’m going to try to improve my upper body strength. That’s what killed me last time I was on crutches. I resorted to rolling around the house in my desk chair. I don’t want to have to do that again.

 

5. TTC – Before we flew to CA for our wedding I checked with my employer about adding R to my insurance. HR assured me that I could add R to my insurance as long as we were legally married (even though we weren’t going to be legally married in our state of residence). They were wrong. We were counting on that to start TTC again. We have decided to switch uteri. I will have my first insem in November. We’ve selected a donor from a bank. I registered and placed our first order (thanks to wedding $). On a side note: How exactly do you put that in a thank you note? Dear Auntie, Thanks for the cash. We bought spe.rm! Love, R & B

I’ve started acupuncture. I didn’t start it just because I wanted to TTC with my body. I felt like every time I went to my doctor with a complaint she would just throw another pill at me. I originally went to try to regulate my cycles without medication. It just so happens that my acupuncturist has done lots of fertility work. After one month of sessions I had my first unmedicated cycle in 5 years! I am hooked. He also has me on an herbal regimen and I have ovulated for the past 3 months. I also went for a physical in preparation to start TTC with my body. Blood.work showed that I have hypoth.yroidism. I got that under control with medication. Weight loss has been much easier since I’ve started the meds. I haven’t lost all I want to lose, but I think I’m in a good place to start TTC. I also found a doctor that is willing to do insems for me. We originally were having trouble finding a doctor that accepted my insurance and was also willing to perform an IUI on a woman that wasn’t married to a man. When I called his office the nurse that I spoke to seemed astonished that we had been turned away so many times. I am not crazy about having a male doctor and will probably return to my midwife for prenatal care if I ever get pregnant.

 

This post is already way too long so I’ll leave it at that. I promise it won’t be another 6 months before I post again.