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“The core of the Child Honoring vision is expressed in A Covenant For Honoring Children, which Raffi wrote in 1999, along with nine principles which it gave rise to.”

Raffi covenant

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This poignant essay was written by a client of mine during a clomid IUI cycle.

Baby makers

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The Two-Week Wait Activity List – 14 Things to Do When 14 Days Seem Like Forever (HTML)

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The Two Week Waiting List:
14 Things To Do When 14 Days Seems Like Forever

By Lynn Steen

As any woman who is trying to get pregnant can tell you, the two weeks from ovulation to the date of your next period are pure torture. You promise yourself you’ll wait it out calmly, you’ll distract yourself with other activities and you won’t even THINK about taking a pregnancy test until you’re at least a day overdue. Then something happens — your breasts start hurting in a slightly different way than they did before, you get a little bit nauseous, you have some spotting. Or nothing happens, but you find yourself waking up wishing you could go to sleep again so that it would be another day closer to knowing. You can’t think, you can’t sleep, you can’t work. You start taking HPTs days before they can possibly be meaningful. You are deep in the abyss of THE TWO-WEEK WAIT!

In my opinion, it’s no use advising women to stop obsessing. Instead, here’s a list of productive ways to obsess. Please note, however, that there is a limit that each woman must define for herself, between indulging in some baby daydreaming and going overboard. I’ve included some examples below.

1. Take a walk around your neighborhood and figure out what will be the best route for strolls with the baby. Find areas with nice sidewalks and easy curbs. Go ahead and daydream. But do NOT buy a stroller for the dog.

2. Clean out your closet to make room for the maternity stuff you’ll be buying soon. Try on anything you haven’t worn for six months. Yes, if you wish, you may put a pillow in your undies to see what will work as maternity wear. But taking a picture of yourself like that is going too far.

3. Start a journal. Write down everything you’re feeling. It will be a great opening chapter for your child’s baby book. If you can’t put your feelings into words, draw something, try to create a symbol that expresses the frustration you’re feeling. Don’t get that symbol tattooed on your ankle.

4. Plant a hope garden. Or a hope rosebush. Or a hope citrus tree. You want to grow something inside of you- start by growing something outside of you. Nurture it. Feed it. Give it water. Talk to it. But do not send birth announcements.

5. Get better at photography. Learn how to work all the buttons and settings on your camera. Experiment! If you have a digital camera, get all the downloading and editing stuff worked out. You’ll be prepared once your baby arrives and will be able to get some great shots and get them emailed to your family before the child’s graduation. Do not take photos of your cervical mucous, even if Toni Weschler begs you.

6. Make an appeal to the committee meeting going on inside you. Sperm, egg, uterus, corpus luteum, progesterone are all in there either making a baby or not. Treat them like any other unruly committee you’ve ever addressed. Yes that’s right, go ahead and talk to them. Put your hands on your stomach and tell them how much you respect them. Make your best argument in favor of a baby, and then let them decide, it’s out of your hands. Addressing the commit- tee within earshot of normal people is not recommended.

7. Paint your toenails. Imagine how difficult this will be when you’re pregnant. Go shopping for the perfect pink and blue nail polish in preparation for a celebration pedicure. Alternate colors on the day you find out you’re pregnant, then use a single color when you find out the baby’s sex. Don’t paint a cycle-day countdown on your big toes.

8. Make a cup of herbal tea. It’s a nice ritual: boiling the water, adding the tea leaves, pouring into a nice china cup, adding some milk or sugar, sipping peacefully. Ahhhh. There’s nothing that a nice cup of tea won’t help. Yeah, right. Well, it does kill a little bit of time.

9. Swim laps. Think about the sperm and how they need to swim to your egg. Imagine that you are a sperm, the end of the pool is the egg, then GO, GO, GO! Don’t wear a tail or anything. Just imagine it quietly.

10. Make lists. List who you will tell when you get pregnant and in what order. List all the chores you need to get done. List all the healthy activities you intend to do this week. List all the girl and boy names you like. Lists are helpful for all sorts of things, most of all for passing time.

11. Choreograph a fertility dance. Choose whatever music speaks to your soul and make up a dance routine as a prayer to the universe for the growth of an embryo. Move your hips, rotate your belly, let your arms flow-but close the curtains.

12. Prepare a folic acid feast. Cream of broccoli soup appetizer, followed by spinach lasagna, enriched whole-grain garlic bread, and frozen orange juice sorbet for dessert. Dedicate the meal to your baby-to-be. Just don’t set a high chair at the table.

13. Delegate the burden of the two-week wait. Clearly someone has to worry constantly during this time, but does it have to be you? Divide the days up among your best friends and closest family members. On their assigned day, they are required to think, wonder, and worry all day about whether you are pregnant. At the end of the day they have to call or send you email describing how agonizing it was. Also they have to report if they had any “symptom,” such as, sore breasts, excessive urination, nausea, bleeding, fatigue. You’ll be surprised how many people, male and female, have early pregnancy symptoms if they just look for them.

14. Write a list of 14 things to do during your own Two Week Wait and post it to the Baby Boards! For me, this activity killed nearly 3 hours. Now what? I’ve still got 9 days to go-aaaarrgrhhhh.

Lynn Steen is a busy professional working in the Silicon Valley. When she turned 38, she decided to become a single mother by choice and is now actively trying to conceive via donor insemination. In addition to taking her temperature and checking her cervical mucous, Lynn enjoys writing (sitcom and feature screen plays) and being an aunt to three wonderful nephews.

More reading about fertiliy:

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“They’re Playing Your Song”

By Alan Cohen

When a woman in a certain African tribe knows she is pregnant, she goes out into the wilderness with a few friends and together they pray and meditate until they hear the song of the child. They recognize that every soul has its own vibration that expresses its unique flavor and purpose. When the women attune to the song, they sing it out loud, Then they return to the tribe and teach it to everyone else.

When the child is born, the community gathers and sings the child’s song to him or her. Later, when the child enters education, the village gathers and chants the child’s song. When the child passes through the initiation to adulthood, the people again come together and sing. At the time of marriage, the person hears his or her song.

Finally, when the soul is about to pass from this world, the family and friends gather at the person’s bed, just as they did at their birth, and they sing the person to. the next life. When I have shared this story in my lectures, a fair amount of people in the audience come to tears. There is something inside each of us that knows we have a song, and we wish those we love would recognize it and support us to sing it.

In some of my seminars I ask people to verbalize to a partner the one phrase they wish their parents had said to them as a child. Then the partner lovingly whispers it in their ear. This exercise goes very deep, and many significant insights start to click. How we all long to be loved, acknowledged, and accepted for who we are!

In the African tribe there is one other occasion upon which the villagers sing to the child. If at any time during his or her life, the person commits a crime or aberrant social act, the individual is called to the center of the village and the people in the community form a circle around them. Then they sing their song to them. The tribe recognizes that the correction for antisocial behavior is not punishment; it is love and the remembrance of identity.

When you recognize your own song, you have no desire or need to do anything that would hurt another. A friend is someone who knows your song and sings it to you when you have forgotten it. Those who love you are not fooled by mistakes you have made or dark images you hold about yourself. They remember your beauty when you feel ugly; your wholeness when you are broken; your innocence when you feel guilty; and your purpose when you are confused.

If you do not give your song a voice, you will feel lost, alone, and confused. If you express it, you will come to life. We attract people on a similar wavelength so we can support each other to sing aloud. Sometimes we attract people who challenge us by telling us that we cannot or should not sing our song in public. Yet these people help us too, for they stimulate us to find greater courage to sing it.

You may not have grown up in an African tribe that sings your song to you at crucial life transitions, but life is always reminding you when you are in tune with yourself and when you are not. When you feel good, what you are doing matches your song, and when you feel awful, it doesn’t. In the end, we shall all recognize our song and sing it well. You may feel a little warbly at the moment, but so have all the great singers. Just keep singing and you’ll find your way home.

 

More reading about fertiliy:

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About The Author
Alan Cohen is the author of the best-selling Why Your Life Sucks and What You Can Do About It, a Book of the Month Club selection, and the award-winning A Deep Breath of Life. If you enjoyed this article, you will love Alan’s newly published collection of his best articles, Looking in for Number One.

For more information about Alan’s books, tapes, seminars, and Mastery Training in Maui, call 1-800-568-3079, visit www.alancohen.com. email admin@alancohen.com, or write P.O. Box 835, Haiku, HI 96708.

 

 

“Babymakers” Essay

This poignant essay was written by a client of mine during a clomid IUI cycle.

I stand outside in the parking lot, looking in.  I’m nervous.  The building is huge, looming.  But it’s beautiful.  I see the waterfall through the glass entry doors.  OK, I think.  Maybe it’s there to ground those who enter.  I walk across the marble floor, over to the receptionist, who is seated behind a granite countertop.  This is not a fancy hotel.  She doesn’t ask to take my bags.  She directs me to the waiting room.  Rows and rows of beautifully upholstered chairs.  I sit and flip through a magazine, unaware of its title or contents. I’m not here on vacation.  I’m here for a medical procedure.  No, not for cosmetic surgery in Beverly Hills, though I’m tempted to check the address.  I’m in Colorado, and I’m here to have an ultrasound of my ovaries.  For five days, I’ve popped a little while pill of hope, a drug called Clomid, which is supposed to improve the quality and quantity of my egg production.  I don’t want a face lift or a boob job.  I want a baby.

I go to the bathroom.  More granite countertops.  A sit-on-top-of-the-counter glass sink like I’ve only seen in Sushi restaurants.  Clear blue glass tiles on the walls.  Walking in the door to this building is guaranteed to cost you $200.  I see where the money goes.

Perhaps the building is supposed to make me feel nurtured.  Held by something.  Because in this place, humans are not doing the holding.  My appointment is at 9:00am on a Sunday.  At 9:01, I’m directed to an exam room by a person who fails to introduce herself or inquire about me.  She puts a pink paper drape on an exam table, says she’ll be back in a minute.  I assume that’s my cue to de-cloth from the waist down.  A few minutes later, she knocks and enters, inserts the ultrasound wand into my vagina and has a look.  At least she tells me about what she sees.  Uterine lining is 8 millimeters.  Whew, that’s good, or good enough.  Then on to the ovaries.  Whoa, that looks big. It’s a follicle.  I have only one, already a disappointment.  One shot.  One chance.  And it’s 26 millimeters.  Too big, and I know it.  I say so.  She says it’s OK, a little big, but OK.  She exits.  I re-dress and go out the door.  She directs me to a small room where I wait for a nurse.  When the nurse enters, she lays out plans.  She doesn’t even mention the size of my follicle.  I resist.  In my mind I know things are not as they should be.  My follicle should be at 20, not 26.  Why is she saying to wait?  We should trigger it now I think.  A trigger shot tells my body to release the egg that waits inside the follicle.  Within 36 hours, my body will do just that, release the egg.  Precisely 36 hours after the shot is given to me, I’m supposed to be lying on another exam table, undressed from the waist down, legs open and ready to receive a vial full of my husband’s sperm.  They just might let him push the syringe.  But if they give me the shot now, that won’t work.  That would mean I’d need to be inseminated at 9:00pm on Monday. Sorry, those aren’t office hours.  I’m asked to wait 12 more hours.  To give myself the shot at 9:00pm this evening, so that I can be at their office at a reasonable 9:00am on Tuesday morning.  I waiver, I’m not sure what to do.  I ask for other options.  Well, I could see if my body has produced the hormones I need to release the egg on its own, but that blood work will cost me.  And I’d still need to wait until tomorrow for the procedure.  I resign.  I schedule the insemination for 11:30 am on Tuesday (9:00 am wasn’t open).  The nurse tells me it’s perfect.  I leave, feeling defeated and deflated.  The little white pill of hope is no longer working – hope is gone.  And it’s 9:14.

Fourteen minutes.  In total, I was in the office for 14 minutes.  Fourteen minutes, with human contact for maybe half of that.  Fourteen minutes for a situation that was less than optimal, where I had questions, I resisted the plan put before me, yet still I left and they had won.  They had me on the books for the time that was just right for them.  I don’t want a face lift or a boob job. I want a baby.  Is this the place I rest my hope?  I figure I might as well go to that bathroom one more time.  The sink is beautiful.

– Kelly Stainback Tracy, 2009

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Kelly is the mother of a beautiful four year old son. Her experience of secondary infertility has brought heartache, but has also brought many blessings, including friendships, personal exploration, and a deeper understanding of herself.

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