"You can't always get what you want"

I of course do not want this to be a sad, "poor me" post, but if we're going to have a blog about Baby Steinhoff, I should probably say a little something about our year-and-a-half journey to get to this point.

When we got married, we had a couple friends that said, "Don't have kids right away, travel and enjoy each other for awhile." We agreed that we weren't ready for kids right away, but we knew that we wanted them eventually. After a two-and-a-half years, we started to discuss the possibility of expanding our family. I was training for a half-marathon at the time, so after the race seemed like a good time to schedule a doctor appointment and start the process.

I went off birth control and knew that it might take a few months for my system to regulate itself after being on medication for a long time, so when nothing really happened for a few months, I wasn't concerned. I read online that if three months passes, you aren't pregnant and your system isn't doing what it's supposed to, you should call your doctor. I did and he wasn't too concerned either and put me on some medication to kind of "kick-start" my system. That didn't work, so we started the conversation that I might not be ovulating, which means that I might have trouble getting pregnant. My doctor told me that this happens to a lot of people (and in the following months, I started hearing about a lot of people in similar situations) and that there was nothing in my medical history that would be causing this, so he felt pretty sure that we could find a solution.

I started a regimen of pills and would go in each month for a blood test to see if they got my hormone levels to a point where I ovulated. It was usually a "no," but we had one month where I was pretty close to the correct level, so I felt like I was making progress. After a few more months of pills and tests and no baby, the doctor felt he needed to look into things a little more. I had a procedure done where he checked my tubes for blockages (there were none) and did an ultrasound to make sure everything looked ok (it did). I took a different medication that month and still nothing, so at that point, my doctor decided it was best to pass me on to a reproductive specialist.

Chris and I met with the specialist, who went over both of our medical histories, family histories and talked about what we've been doing up to that point. He looked over everything and said that he saw no apparent reason this should be happening to me, and if my only problem was that I was not ovulating, he could make me ovulate.

The specialist decided to keep me on the same medication I had taken the last month, but changed up the dosage. I went in for a blood test later in the month, and not only had I ovulated, my numbers were above average. I could hardly believe it! He told me that if nothing happened in the next few weeks to take a pregnancy test and call him with the result either way.

I got to the date that he had set as a deadline and nothing had happened. I didn't let myself get my hopes up (I was still just really excited that I had even ovulated at this point), but took the pregnancy test per his instructions. As the two lines appeared, I was extremely shocked. I called the doctor and he had me come in that afternoon to confirm the results. His test came back positive as well, so I guess I could really believe it was true. And now 8 weeks later (we were 5 weeks at that point), we're well on our way to a baby!

I wanted to share the story for two reasons - one, it helps me to talk about it and two, to hopefully help anyone else who is going through the same thing. It can be a little overwhelming and scary, just because so much of it is unknown and out of your control. I found it helpful to hear from others who were going through similar situations.

In the end, we just followed the process, knew that we weren't in a rush (we kept telling ourselves that even if it took us five years, we'd still only be in our early 30s) and the doctors always reassured us that especially since we were both young and healthy, there were plenty of options.

At one point through this whole ordeal, I heard the Rolling Stones song with the lyrics, "You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need." I thought that this summed up our situation quite well. We had to wait a lot longer for a baby than we had originally had planned, but in the end, it was a learning experience, made us more patient (mostly me on this one) and will give us an even greater appreciation for the little baby we'll get in July!