Names

I had some free time today (I don't teach on Thursdays); so I tried to come up with some additional possible girl's names. I created a list of 10 names - 5 of which I knew he hadn't rejected in the past and 5 I didn't think I'd ever run by him before. Well wouldn't you know the 5 we had already discussed he still didn't strike from the list, but he rejected all 5 new ones. I thought for sure I could come up with at least ONE new name that he'd like. The one that surprised me most was Sophie. I thought he'd like that one because he likes Sophia. Well he doesn't like Sophie. One reason he gave was that it's a dog's name. I was very perplexed. Then he reminded me of a picture book that my niece, Jenna, loves for me to read titled Sophie's Window and the two main characters are a dog named Sophie and a bird named Caruso. I assured him that most people will not think Sophie is a dog's name, LOL!!! Oh well if the 10/11 people who voted are correct, we don't need to pick a girl's name, and if baby is a girl then we have a few months to come up with a name we both like.

I told Paul about the whole tax credit thing. He said that he would still prefer ivf for #2 (that's been his preference since 2004). We started pursuing adoption instead in 2004 as I was opposed to ivf at that point. My only concern aside from the "we might pay $10K for ivf and it not work" issue is that he still has a concern about not having "too many" kids (he grew up with only 1 sibling). Aside from the fact I have no issues with having several children, I am not too concerned about this since they had to retrieve 26 eggs in order for us to end up with 1 baby or you could say we had to transfer 4 embies to result in 1 baby. My egg quality is going to decline in the next 2 years so the odds will decrease that we'd end up with several children from another round of ivf. I'd consider it amazing if we do ivf when I am 37 and he is 39 and we are able to have even just one more baby. He said he'd rather us give any extra embies up for adoption (if for example I was pg with twins from ivf #2 and we still had frozen embies). I wasn't crazy about that idea before (although that's FAR better than destroying them!), but after going through ivf I can tell you I felt very attached to all 7 embies. It's very, very hard for me to imagine placing any of our embies up for adoption. I'd want to keep transferring them until all had been transferred. But again considering it took 26 eggs to have 4 embies transferred at the age of 35, I think it's highly unlikely that we'd get a bfp and also have frozen embies when I am 37. I know our thinking might change in the future, but I am going to put this to rest for the moment and just assume for the time being that in the summer of 2009 we likely will give ivf one more whirl. It's impossible to say now what we will do if the ivf doesn't work. I am not going to think about that now either as it will depend on finances which are a complete unknown at the moment as we don't know where we'll be living or whether I'll be working at that point. My guess at the moment is that we'll pursue foster care adoption if the ivf doesn't work, but who knows. As Lynn said, for now we'll just focus on this baby which is a miracle from the Lord. This time last year I had zero hope of ever giving birth to a baby; so you just never know what twists and turns the path of life will take!