Happy; or, Hopeful (UPDATED)

Thanks to Floss Baby for giving me the Happy/Hopeful award. I'm supposed to fill you in on things that make me, you know, happy and hopeful. And fortunately right now they are the same thing: my Lawyer Guy!

He had his SA yesterday, and while we don't know the results yet, I'm so proud of him for sacking up (literally) and getting through it. It's only the first of potentially many romantic encounters between him and the sterile collection cup and not even one that give us a chance at a pregnancy. But he has been really dreading it and yet managed to do fine. I'm proud of him and grateful that he did something so humiliating for the sake of our life together.

And because that makes me happy, I will share something else that always makes me happy, even on my darkest days. This is the song that LG and I chose as our first dance at our wedding. We both love music (I sing, he played guitar for me the night we met) and picking the "perfect" first dance song was really important to us. We talked about it over and over and seemed to be getting nowhere--I wanted Cole Porter or Gershwin, he wanted something written since the dawn of the atomic age. But then! We remembered how much we both love Van Morrison! We remembered how much we love dancing around our apartment together to this song!



Some people in our families thought this song was too fast-paced and not sweet and romantic enough, but it is exactly how we both felt on our wedding day: just filled with joyfulness and excitement and love. Now every time I hear it, I'm sent right back to our wedding day and I think about how much I love smiling and dancing with Lawyer Guy and I know that everything is going to be okay, no matter what further challenges lie ahead.

As for what makes me hopeful? I'll be honest, I have to dig pretty deep to hit hope these days. It's buried far down beneath a lot of other unpleasant emotions. But it is there and I can reach it, even if I have to manufacture it out of thin air.

Case in point, the following:


This is our new car, which we picked up from the dealer's yesterday! The lease on our Volvo was up this month, and while we loved driving it over the past three years, we decided we want something bigger and a bit cheaper (given than we have possible future fertility treatments to start planning for).

Last night as we drove home, I turned and looked behind me and I pictured two infant carseats side-by-side. I scared myself a little--I can remember too vividly signing the lease on our first car three years ago and wondering to myself if the back seat would accommodate the children I was sure would come before we moved on to a new set of wheels.

But I decided not to think that way. We stood at the dealership ready to take the keys and I said to Lawyer Guy, "Now we can have a baby since the car has enough room." He laughed at the thought that the baby was just waiting for us to get the right car, but I'm going to take my optimism where I can get it.

I loved our old car, but I could never picture a baby in it. And in this car, I can.

Which means we're going to get pregnant soon, right?

Updated: I forgot the most important part of these little awards, nominating other bloggers! I would like to send happiness and hope to some ladies who have been stuck here with me for a while and getting bluer and bluer as I do:

Gidget of Mission: Gidgelet
B at My So-Called (TTC) Life
Katie of From IF to When
Allison at Allison's Wonderland
~C~ at The Port of Indecision

And some very special hope and happiness to the newly pregnant Sienna at It's Baby Time

Thanks SlackieO; or, I'm a Prize-Winning Hog!

Slackie O gave me a prize! Thank you, Slackie! In the muck of feeling pretty depressed about AF's most recent visit (and trying very hard to be optimistic about it), I neglected to pass the award on to others. But since I'm looking for distractions from my depressing reproductive track record here, I thought now the perfect time to comply with this award's stipulations.

The rules are:
1. Thank the person who gave you the award. (Thanks Slackie!)
2. Tell 7 things about yourself that readers may not know.
3. Pay it forward by nominating 8 bloggers you’ve recently discovered.

And here are some surprising (or maybe not so surprising) details about me:

1. My dream is to become a published novelist. I finished one complete novel before I went back to grad school four years ago and have several other incomplete starts and stops on my computer (as well as countless scenes and plot ideas in my head). It's hard to write fiction regularly while also working toward the PhD, but I haven't abandoned my first love.

2. I'm the oldest of four sisters, and I've always loved how many 4-girl families there are in literature. The Little House on the Prairie series and Little Women were some of my favorites as a child, partially because I loved to imagine my own family as the characters. But I was annoyed that the second daughter was always the writer while the eldest either got married really young and wound up a widow or was way too perfect and then went blind (umm, spoiler alert?).

3. I can't parallel park. I fortunately did not have to attempt it to get my license, because Pennsylvania didn't require it for a few years (I barely passed the exam as it was, so that was lucky). My husband tried to teach me when we moved to Brooklyn and started street parking, but gave it up as a hopeless cause. And now we park in a garage, so I have once again evaded having to learn.

4. One of the things I love most to do in Manhattan is take long walks by myself in nice weather. Years ago, I used to walk walk home from my first job on 34th street to my apartment on East 89th almost every day (that's roughly two miles). I'll walk from Midtown East to the Upper West Side, from SoHo to the LES. I love to walk through Irving Place and Grammercy on late summer evenings. I feel like I have time to think and be truly alone and to notice how the city changes around me.

5. I like to cook, but I'm not very good at it. Most of my fights with Lawyer Guy happen when I'm in the kitchen, because I invariably screw something up and get really mad about it and start yelling (which I almost never do any other time). We routinely eat at 10 or 10:30 pm because I'm too ambitious for my own good and insist on trying a new recipe and don't start it until 7 and then take a really long time to do everything. But I love it when something turns out well!

6. My favorite museum is the Frick, which contains my favorite painting, Whistler's Symphony in Flesh Color and Pink: Portrait of Mrs. Leyland Howard. (You can see the painting--and hear a brief curator's lecture on it--here). I love 19th-century painting generally and Whistler most of all. The Fragonard Room at the Frick is also amazing.



7. I love to sing. My whole family sings all the time, my dad especially. When I was a kid, I was so embarrassed that he would sing country songs in line at the bank or the grocery store, but now I walk around singing to myself, too (and always bust out a descant during "Happy Birthday"). I've sung in choirs nearly all my life. I've got special songs picked out for our babies: lullabies for boys and lullabies for girls. I sang to the m&m everyday that I was pregnant, and after the miscarriage, I couldn't get through the song I had picked out for him or her without choking on my tears. I really, really want a baby to sing to (I know that's not something new or surprising, but that's just how this blog is sometimes, I guess).

Most blogs I read and list in my Blogroll are ones I've been following for a while, so I'm going to have to define "recently" rather loosely. That said, here are the prizes I'm passing on to some wonderful bloggers who deserve every happiness in life:

1. Overcoming Obstickles
2. Katie at From If to When
3. Kelly at The Rabbit Test
4. Rebecca at Trying Not To Scream
5. Adele at Delinquent Eggs
6. Sienna at It's Baby Time~!!
7. The Port of Indecision
8. Only Time Will Tell

Award Season; or, Many Thanks

Thank you! to Type A for the Happy 101 Blog Award- my first one! I have to list 10 things that make me happy and 10 bloggers I want to award. This is a great exercise for a crappy day when things just seem all wrong. I have to remind myself that even in the midst of my deepest sadness, my life is beautiful and grand.

1. Watching Lawyer Guy work on his "kitchen projects." He loves to play around with gadgets-- our new popcorn air popper, our pressure cooker. He gets so intense about making his little dishes and he's just so cute.

2. My puppy, Bella-belle. We call her the anxiety sponge. I love when she curls up against my hip when we're taking a midday nap in bed.

3. Getting an unexpected treat in the mail. My good friend Z just sent us a doggy lifevest for Bella to wear at the beach this summer!

4. Yoga. Seriously, I walk out of class feeling so refreshed and centered. It is beyond what I needed.

5. Lunch dates with friends. Enough of them are in grad school and have flexible schedules like me that I have at least one a week. They're so much more relaxed than dinner, but feel slightly naughty, too, especially when there's wine involved.

6. Jane Austen and Lord Byron. I love reading their work, talking about them in seminars, and writing about and researching them.

7. Red Velvet cake. How did I live without it until I was 25? Even better, the patisserie near my house makes Red Velvet Whoopie Pie. Awesome.

8. Having all three of my sisters live within easy traveling distance. This hasn't happened in years and it's so wonderful to see them every few weeks.

9. NY Times Saturday and Sunday crosswords. We do them in pen. In under an hour. We're hardcore.

10. Getting comments on my blog. They always give me a lift.

I give this award to:

Baby Blakely
Mission: Gidgelet
Mission: Motherhood
Such a Good Egg
The Impatient Optimist
In Our Own Weird Way
Evolutionary Dead End?
Mrs. Lemon Cake
Three Is a Magic Number
Little Bluebirds Fly

Thanks for helping keep me happy :)