I'm back...so look at pictures of my kid!

So wow....It has been a long time.  Not that anyone was too enthralled in my blog to begin with, but I do feel bad that if you were reading a long I just dropped you like a hot potato.  I know when I was stalking every IVF blog out there, I would get a little peeved when someone wrote everyday and then they were pregnant and BAAAAM! you never heard from them again.  Well, I totally became that person and I am sorry.  I miss writing, just for the sheer sanity preserving features.  It is also nice to have a record of A) how type A control freaked I am B) and how I felt at exact moments in time just in case Isaac will ever want to take a gander.

BTW, our little Nubbins was born on Dec 5, 2012.  He was three weeks early after a tough pregnancy with pre-eclampsia, toxemia, and PUPPS Syndrome, and gaining 75 lbs.  All of which I didn't care about because I was just so happy to be pregnant.  He has been the perfect baby, always happy, sleeps well, hardly ever cries.  We think this is for two reasons - God is tricking us into wanting to have another one (which is bound to be much more high maintenance than this one)  and that maybe He thought we went through so much to get him here, He would make the baby years easy on us.

There is no possible way to capture the joy we have felt over the past year, there are no words.  I have written Isaac a few letters to try to tell him, but they don't even come close to expressing what it has been like.  I do feel like we have a different sense of things because we struggled to get here, like how you savor a good cake a little more when you know you made it instead of buying it from Publix.  My husband and I have both turned into joyful sobbing and babbling parents at the drop of a hat, and we believe that everything  he does is completely perfect and precious.  If you don't believe me, you can check out the link to the photoshow I made for his 1st birthday party.  It does a pretty good job of summing up everything I have missed updating on my blog.  But beware, it is 36 literal minutes of photographs of our son.  I could watch it a million times (and I have and cried every SINGLE time)  but I would understand if you closed it after a few minutes.

 http://www.photoshow.com/watch/eR9Tm3qQ

So why, you may ask, am I thinking about picking up the old blog?  The main reason is that I am missing too many moments to save for myself.  I have the absolute worst memory of anyone on the face of the planet.  It isn't that things aren't important to me to remember, but I just can't.  Things like the first time I kissed my husband - I have no recollection but I wish I did...  He doesn't either but he is a lot older than me so he has an excuse.  All we remember is that is must have been good :).  The second largest reason is that I do feel like I need the outlet again, mostly because we are most likely going to go through trying to have another baby and I remember this was one of my many saving graces.  Another important reason to me, not that I have grandiose ideas of impacting someone's life by telling my stories, but I do realize there are very little resources out there for Christians navigating through the very rough moral waters of  IVF.  Believe me when I tell you, I do not in the slightest have any of it figured out, but I would like to see how my opinions change and what I discover about what I believe.  A lot of people going through it turn a blind eye and deaf ear to the ramifications, and in no way whatsoever do I judge those people.  I just know that I need to find what is right for me and that maybe by the time I find that out, it may help someone else.  I mean, I just wish there would have been someone with my beliefs out there talking about this.  There will be major foot in mouth moments, I am sure, because I will speak without taking all circumstances into account, but the people who know me are already used to that, and know that I would never ever say anything to intentionally make someone feel bad or feel judged in any way.

See, I already feel better!  Oh and for any of the people that once followed me forever ago about  my weight loss experience, I probably won't talk about that so much now because I feel like I have other things to obsess about, but I will give you guys a quick update.  For those of you that didn't know before I went through IVF the first time, I did the HCG diet and lost 40 lbs.  In fact, that journey, was initially why I created my blog.  It held me accountable.  Well, it held me accountable until I started to gain all the weight back and then I stopped blogging until I had something else to talk about.  Well, I did gain all of the weight back before and while going through IVF, and then gained a whopping 75 lbs on top of that.  I felt like being pregnant, for some reason, gave me a license to eat all the bean burritos and cheese dip that I could manage to stuff in my face, but it made for a completely miserable third trimester.  Had I not gotten a beautiful baby boy out of the deal, it would have sent me into a major depression.  I also, for some reason, thought that the weight would magically fall off when the baby was born, just like it does for all those celebrities.  Well, when I came home and had only lost 15 lbs (5 of which was the baby and the rest was water from all the swelling I had) I realized it was going to be a long road with all this left over fat.

I never do well unless I am on a program, so I tried a bunch of different things (all while trying to be a good Mommy).  The worst was drinking this tea made by a Chinese herbologist that literally tasted like cold ass.  That didn't work.  I tried weight watchers again too, but trying to spare the time to count points was a joke, and I did the calculation.  If I needed to lose 85 lbs at 2 lbs a week, I was going to be fat forever.  I needed something that would work fast, that would give me results.  So I went to a place called the Weight Shop in our town who suggested doing a round or two of HCG with them (doctor supervised, supplements, and injectable HCG with a strict diet)  Since I had done so well on it before, I bit the bullet and tried it again.  I started in March of this year and have lost nearly 75 lbs of the 85 lbs.  I felt like this time was different (I know all fat people that lose weight say the same thing) but I really don't want Isaac to struggle with this and I don't want him to see my struggle with it like I saw my Mom.  So anyway, I am still trying to take off the last 10 lbs or so, but if being a Mommy has taught me anything, its that you gotta cut yourself some slack every now and then.  So we will see how that goes....