Looking Forward

Ahh, just got back from a weekend at the in-law’s lakehouse… so nice! Despite a few pop-up thunderstorms, it was mostly a sunny and perfect weekend. Definitely worked on blotting out my pasty whiteness with some color---and thankfully, that color is only partially tinged with pink!

My baby brother gets married next week, which seems just crazy to me. He’s 6 ½ years younger than me, and still seems so young. …And then I remember that I was younger than him when DH and I got married, which seems absurd. I mean, what were my parents thinking? We were mere babes! Kids! We knew nothing! Had no money---only one job between us, when we actually got married—and that didn’t pay us a lick the first 3 months.

Thankfully, my brother and his future wife are in a much better situation. He has a job—a good one. Which he loves, and that has some pretty incredible perks, working in the music industry in Nashvegas. The future SIL also has a good job, which she seems to like (her first one after graduating this spring), and it pays pretty well for a first job, too. Plus, my brother bought a small house about a year and a half ago (again, as a mere babe), and he’s spent much of his free time fixing up the place for his future bride.

In other words, they are pretty much set.

Comparatively, the DH and I were flat broke when we married – the DH even borrowed eight grand from his padre when we got married, to help us with the first few months’ expenses. He had a job, as I alluded to previously---but one of those where you have to spend the first 60-90 days getting all these licenses with which you will be allowed to do said future job—which leaves you forking out lots of dough in the beginning, with absolutely bubkiss coming in the door. Combine this with the fact that I had no job when we married, and took on a job as a hostess at a local restaurant just to pass the time while I job-searched…and we were definitely “married-broke.” For a looong time. I’d say the first six months we were married, we went out to eat (as in, fast-food dining) maybe 4 times. In retrospect, I guess it’s good that we had little to no friends in the city at the time—we wouldn’t have been able to handle it. Needless to say, the loan from Daddio really paid off for us!

This September marks our 8th anniversary… crazy that it’s already been 8 years already. We dated for 3 ½ before that, so in some ways it feels like we’ve been together forever anyways. Over a third of my life—how weird does that sound?

Praise God from whom all blessings flow, we are no longer in the financial straits we were when we first got hitched. I got a job, then a better job, and then a muchmuch better job (my current one—excluding the PFH--see post here), and the hubby too has moved on to a better company with his job as well. We live within 10-12 minutes of our respective offices—down from an hour and a half for the DH, each way. And the paygrade has probably tripled from where we started out. (That’s not to sound impressive---oh no. That’s to highlight how very LIT-TLE we actually made... think poverty line, peeps)

Praise God that we’ve been able to afford a house closer to work & church. Praise God that we’ve paid off one car, and only have 6-8 payments left on the other. Praise God that we’ve been able to cover the close to twenty grand (thus far) for IF-related treatments this year. And biggest praise and shocker-moment-of-the-weekend, we’ll be able to afford to go on vacation this year. A vacation that I am in desparate need of. And not just any ‘ole vacation people… Europe.

The DH threw that out there while we were chatting in the car, on the way up to the lakehouse on Friday, and I about lost it. Had I been driving, I might have run off the road from the shock.

I have been coaxing and wheedling and begging and nagging about going to Europe for.ev.er. I’ve never been anywhere there except Spain (studied Spanish for 4 months there in 2001) and he’s been all over western Europe (albeit as a kid—went on 2 different soccer tours as a 13 and 15 yrd old). As such, he kinda feels like he’s ‘been there, done that.’ I keep trying to point out that he hasn’t really done any of it—not as an adult.

The cost has really been the prohibitive factor thus far. Years and years of “it’s too expensive” and “I can’t take that much time off work” were the only response my persuasive wheedling would get me.

But thanks in large part to the recent decline in the Europian world markets (sorry Greece—wait, I mean, thanks!!), it’s now suddenly an option. Now---to figure out where to go.

Oh boy. That’s going to be a doozy for me—I’m not good with decisions. And there are so many places to see… all in 9 or 10 days. I don’t like feeling rushed through a city so fast I don’t remember it—during my time in Spain, I had between 1 and 5 weeks in every city we hit… and I only have 9-10 days for the entire trip.

So… Anyone got any good suggestions for where we should go, with a cap of 3 or 4 places?

In other news-- today is day 5 of Lu.pron shots… and other than a major headache 12 hours after the first shot (almost down to the minute, so bizarre!), I don’t have any bad symptoms from the shots, except for feeling sleepier than usual at night and in the mornings… and that’s not a bad one! Just means I’m more likely to go to bed on-time when I’m taking my shots, than not.

I haven’t really said much about Round #2, so I guess I should share the tentative schedule:

June 3 – start Lu.pron shots
June 10th – stop BCPs
@ June 17th – start stim shots of Gon.al-F
@ July 1st weekend - trigger shot
@ July 4-6th (assuming trigger above) – ER
@ July 9-11th (yadayadayada, same as above) – ET

Fun way to spend a holiday weekend, right? (sigh)

I’m just praying that everything goes smoothly this time. No out-of-whack hormones. No failed trigger shots. Come’on, good embies!

At least there’s a vacation to look forward to in the fall, no matter what the outcome…