What I made out of what I made last night!

A newborn baby hat!!!

It's so amazing to see that the yarn I spun yesterday turned in to such a cute little hat! I can honestly say that I made this start to finish, including the yarn! :)

What I made tonight!

My first ball of homespun yarn! It's not perfect, but that's just fine! I might make a pair of kids mitts or a hat out of it, not sure yet. It certainly is bright!

I'm Spinning!

I visited a friend this weekend who is very in to fibre arts. I had purchased a drop spindle last month, but found it extremely tedious. While I visited, A showed me how to use a spinning wheel and I loved it so much, I went out and bought my own. I found a cheap one just to start out on, and it works pretty well..

I'm the one that needs work though. So far, what I've spun is not so great, but I've figured out a few things by researching, and I'm hoping to go home and see if I can't fix my problem.

When I have something worthwhile to show, I'll put it up here. :)

2nd dress in one weekend!

I absolutely love the pattern I bought for making this dress. It takes no time at all, and there are so many possible variations. I'm going to buy a cottage license from the woman who made the pattern so that I can sell the items on etsy. :) I may try to make some little boy sweaters starting with this as a base and see what happens. It's nice to have a new project other than socks! And it's really fun to be able to knit baby stuff. :)

Quick knit!!

I was going to post this in stages, but it knit up so fast that I'm done. So here's the little newborn sized dress thingy that I knit. Seeing this little thing all knit up in person, I feel the need to have a baby girl RIGHT NOW... If only it were that easy!!! ;)

Rain rain, go away!

I ran 3 times this week. One 4.5km, and two 5km runs. Not bad for a first week. :) I'm happy with it anyway. The weather is supposed to be rainy this weekend, but if there's a good break in rain, I will get my buns out there again.

If the rain persists, then I will stay in and paint the kitchen. We had a guy come in to finish the mudding since we were doing a terrible job on our own, and I'm sooooo glad we hired him. He did it way better, and way faster. It looks great!

Next weekend, the floors go in! I'm so excited!

Baby clothes!

I've been knitting baby socks, and not really getting anywhere with it. I keep making one sock, then I get bored, so I make another sock but in a different colour, so nothing matches!

I need a new project that will keep my attention, so I think I'm going to try to knit a baby dress, or maybe a cardigan. I have a TON of yarn that I need to make something out of before I buy new yarn... which is a rule that I seemingly keep ignoring.

I can't wait to get pregnant. I think my motivation for knitting will sky rocket in attempting to make clothes for my own baby... Although, my best friend said the same thing the day she was pregnant, and she hasn't knit anything for her son yet.... he just celebrated his 1rst birthday 2 months ago. LOL

I think as I knit whatever I finally decide upon, I'll post the project as I go instead of just the finished result. It's kind of cool to see how a projects starts and progresses before the finished product.

Only 9 more minutes to this workday before I get to go home, dig the yarn out of my stash and run to Wooltyme to pick up the circulars I need. I have two projects I'm thinking of that need circs, I just haven't decided which project to do yet. :)

When the Sun is Shining...

I can't wait to get off work! I didn't run yesterday because my legs were still sore from Sunday and Monday's run. I've got to get this shell back in to shape!

Since it's beautiful, warm and sunny out today, I have no excuse not to get out and pound the pavement when I get home from work.

My mentality right now is that it's only 45 minutes of running.

Though that might seem like a lot, I have to remember that the beginning of the run is hard, but it gets easier, and the accomplishment I feel when I'm done is such a positive thing in so many ways.

Now... if I can just get this work day over with.

A Little Dose of Reality

I'm fat.

I don't like to have to admit this to myself, but this is the reality of my situation.

Before this weekend, I thought I was chunky... and most people would probably still think this, but after my cousin's wedding, and seeing pictures of myself, I can no longer classify myself as chunky.

My arms are big, my legs are big, my waist is big, my ass is big, and in a profile of myself, I'm starting to have a double chin.

I have used every excuse in the book to justify to myself all the reasons for my weight gain, and among the most popular are: TTC, PCOS, not enough time for exercise, too tired to exercise, fear of exercising in 2ww.... This list can go on and on.

THESE ARE NOT VALID EXCUSES FOR WEIGHT GAIN.

So now that I've got that out of the way, it's time to get back in to shape. If I'm going to have a baby, then it's going to happen whenever the heck it does, but in the meantime, I'm done with letting myself go.

On Sunday, I ran 4.5kms. On Monday, I ran 5kms. My legs hurt, my arms hurt, my back hurts and my ass hurts, but you know what? It feels good.

I am going to keep running. I have a 5km loop that I've plotted out around where I live, and there's no excuse as to why I can't do this every day rain or shine. When I'm pregnant, I am not going to stop exercising. Running may be more difficult, but I also have a bike.. there is no excuse for not exercising anymore. The excuses are over.

I have yet to get my eating habits under control, but I'm on it. DH and I are gutting the fridge, and all the shelves to take out all bad food. Then we are buying groceries, choosing only healthy choices. I am going to use sparkpeople to track my eating, because it serves as a good visual and it does help me to stay in range of calories.

I need to get rid of this weight. I need to change my lifestyle once and for all. I'm not 20, I'm 30... and I can't do the same things I did when I was 20. This reality has set in, and I need to kick my bad habits now.

I am not going to "try" to do these things. I am going to do them.

Do, or do not.... there is no try.

And the schedule for this cycle is in...

Since I ovulated late on Clomid last cycle, my RE isn't monitoring until much later this cycle. I think it might be really late, but he disagrees... so to have my way, I'm going to chart, and possibly jump on the OPK bandwagon so that I can up my chances of catching O if he misses it (again).

So, here's the appointment schedule:

CD19 - June 6th, 10:50am - First monitoring
CD27 - June 14th 10:30am - Second monitoring
June 17th - 3:20pm - Results with RE

Day 1

On to Clomid cycle #4.

Will the 4th time be the charm?

Though I can't officially mark today as CD1 just yet, I know AF is only a couple of hours away. Oh, the cramping, and of course.. the spotting. The third time on Clomid wasn't the charm.

So how about a new saying?

Here's to hoping that "The 4th time is the charm!"

I am armed with the BBT and the antibiotics, the Clomid and prenatals, and I'm even thinking about getting some OPKs! Okay lady bits! Let's get this party started!

House Renovations

So, after much back and forth about what to do with our kitchen now that DH has pulled out the wall, I think we have finally come to a decision about counters, cabinets, floors and backsplashes! :) Since we don't want to spent a ton of money on cabinets, we are just going to go with cheap IKEA cabinets, but I think by the time we're done with everything, the kitchen is going to look pretty sweet! :)

One thing that IKEA has is an online software, where you can plan out your kitchen and even get pricing assuming you use their products. This is what DH and I came up with for the layout of our kitchen:

If you look along the right side of the picture, it is pretty much set up the same way our kitchen was set up before. On the left, our old kitchen only had the fridge, and no counters or cupboards at all on that side. It was left all open for a dinette, but in all honesty,the living room is right next to this room, and the house is pretty small... a dinette is not really needed. So, we're going to finish the kitchen the way we feel it should have been finished, by adding in the counters/cupboards on this side. It will give us A LOT more working space, because before, our only working space was the 2 foot counter between the stove and the sink. Ugh!

This next image is the right side of the kitchen. Using my mad photoshop skills, I started to play around with this side of the kitchen a bit, putting in some appliances and stuff, all in all, I think it's going to look pretty good. We're still deciding on backsplash tiles and stuff, but we have an idea, and if I can find a picture of what we're thinking, I'm going to put it in at the end of this post.

Kitchen - Right side:

And here's the left side of the kitchen, with all the new counters filling in where the dinette used to be. Annnnnd... A LOT more working counter space!!! :)

Kitchen - Left

Okay, so that's the layout. Now, here's the fun part, here's what we're thinking in terms of style. :) I love this part, since I get to be creative, and DH leaves it all to me. Man, I love him!

Floors:

Okay, so for the floors, when DH and I first moved in, we'd already bought a vinyl tile because it was on sale. It was to originally go with the color scheme of our old kitchen, which was this (actual pic of our kitchen before we moved in):

Not a bad kitchen, but too small, and outdated. See there, between the stove and the sink? That is ALL the working space we have!! The other side of the kitchen is just the fridge and one 10 inch little useless counter.

This is the vinyl tile that we bought to go with the old kitchen (or very similar):

We thought about putting new floors in to the new kitchen and maybe using this tile for something else, but the cost of putting in a new floor put us off, especially when we have this tile, brand new, that we haven't used yet. (We bought the stuff and never put it in..)

We were trying to decide between doing a black kitchen (with black cabinets, dark countertop), but after some back and forth, we decided that in terms of resale value of our house, if we put in a black kitchen, a lot of buyers may not like a black kitchen, so we decided to keep it simple, and go with plain white cabinets, with a grey-ish countertop, and we ended up finding an awesome backsplash to merge these two colours together (where you would think they don't go). Grey with beige? Who knew.

And what do I mean by backsplash? See pic below:

What we're going to put in that area is this mosaic tile:

We had other ideas for mosaic tile in mind, but they all would have required us to change the colour of the floor, and since a new floor would have put us over our budget, we needed to find something that would tie in the grays we love with the beige tiles we already had. This mosaic has both, and though it may not be much to look at there, I assure you, with the right grout, it is fantastic!!! We found this one completely by accident, and couldn't have been more thrilled about it!!

So, if you can picture it, our kitchen will have the beige floors, white cabinets/cupboards, greyish countertop, and this awesome mosaic tile as the backsplash!!

Eventually, we will also have all black appliances. But we'll have to save up for that. :)

So for now, that's where we're at with the kitchen. We just have to finish up some mudding and put on a fresh coat of paint, and we'll be ready to order the cabinets and other stuff to get the kitchen done!! It's the only room in the house that we ever really had problems with, so I can't truly express how excited I will be when it's finished.

Before we finish the kitchen though, we are so close to laying down our new floors!! We are putting in a laminate all throughout the house. It's a nice dark 13mm laminate floor in "Volcanic Ash" colour. It's a dark brown/black floor. :) In case you were curious as to what we had as flooring before, here is a pic:

Ugh, the cheapest homebuilder el cheapo carpeting ever. It is EVERYWHERE in our house, and we're taking it all out. It may not look bad in this pic (because this pic is before we moved in), but I'll tell you that 3 years of dogs and cats have not been kind to this carpet. I can't wait until the new floors are in!!!!

Our house is going to look awesome by the time we're done with it. We're doing the renos because we don't want to move right away, so we're making the house more our style in the meantime. We see ourselves living here another five years, but who knows, we may end up loving it so much, we may never want to leave. It's not a big house, it's only 1300 sq. ft., but it has 3 big bedrooms and 1.5 baths, and if things don't work out baby-wise for us, then why move? :)

Do second lines really exist?

Okay, so I was going to rant, but you know what? That is so me, and I'm so tired of whining about each failed cycle, so I'm not going to. I'm just going to say that I believe that this cycle is a fail, and I'm moving on.

So on that note, next cycle (Clomid cycle #4) is going to be a no-fail cycle. I don't mean that it will result in a BFP, because obviously I can't predict that, but by no-fail I mean that I won't miss my O date, and I won't be getting a UTI.

How will I do this you might ask?

Well, the first is that I will be charting/temping. I am determined not to miss O. My RE missed O with monitoring, which I had been relying on, and I won't make that mistake again since PCOS makes O very unpredictable (could happen early, could happen late, or not at all!) I think charting will be the best way for DH and I to make sure we're having sex at the right time.

Also, charting might make things a little less stressful for DH and I. When I have long cycles, as much as I love having sex with DH, after a couple weeks of constant EOD sex, we do get tired, whether we want to admit it or not! At least this way, we know when we can ease up on things!

And how will I ward of the UTIs you ask staring blankly?

With drugs. After last cycle, I demanded that something more concrete be done about these UTIs. I explained to my doctor that I'm on Clomid, and the cycles are getting wasted if I can't have sex when I need to because of a UTI (which is what happened this cycle). The more I have sex, the more UTIs I get, and having to run to the doctor every month to get prescriptions for UTIs is a pain in the ass, especially when I have to get out of work to do it. (RE appointments take up enough time already!). Anyway, my doctor finally gave me preventative antibiotics that I take after sex to prevent another infection. I have faith that this will work.

So there you have it... Back to charting, UTIs under control, 4th round of Clomid. And now I just wait for AF to get here so that I can get this show on the road!

2 ww

If there is anything in life that can teach you patience, it is infertility. I would never wish it on anyone, but since I'm dealing with it, I have to believe that there is some reason why this is happening to me. I've always been an extremely impatient person, and sometimes I feel like this is my karmic retribution.

As much patience as I have learned though, there is nothing that ever prepares me for the two week wait. As much as you try not to think about every single twinge in your body hoping for it to be some advanced tell-tale early sign that you are pregnant, the thoughts still seep in.

I tend to be a lot more relaxed in cycles where I am taking fertility medications. I think that's just because for the most part they've been effective and they've kept me from having 50+ day cycles. I'm really only relaxed until I find out if I've ovulated though, and once I have that little tidbit of information then my mind is focused on waiting for the day that I can test and find out the result of the cycle.

Today, I am around the 8-9 dpo mark. It's hard to say since my doctor wasn't able to confirm when O happened, just that it did, and that it looked like it had happened a couple of days before my last ultrasound. I'm only a few days away from testing, and I'm going through a lot of emotions.

For the most part, I feel hopeful for this cycle, but at the same time, I also feel worried, and it's the worry that stands out the most.

Of all the waiting that we do in life, it seems so strange to think that the waiting that can really hurt the most is the waiting that happens for two pink lines on a stick that you pee on.

Results

Saw my RE today for the results of this cycle. Though he couldn't confirm it 100% he was fairly certain that I did O this cycle somewhere around CD20. That is good news since we were able to have sex up until CD19. I am now in the 2 ww, and he thinks I should be able to test in a week. I hope this is it!!!!!!

Mother's Day

For mother's day, I bought my mom two Pandora charms for her Pandora bracelet. Those little charms are crazy expensive, but she's worth it. :)

I also bought my best friend a candle and a little bottle of hand lotion that's called "Hot Mama" from bath and body works. She was awesome to email me and wish me a happy mother's day because she said I will be a mommy someday too.

I can't wait until it's my turn. DH says that he's going to go all out when we get our first "holiday" as parents.. especially the first one. I love that he thinks that like.

To all the mommies out there, HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY!!!

Inconclusive CD23 monitoring

At today's monitoring, it looked like maybe I'd ovulated, but the tech said that it was hard to tell. She also said the last tech's u/s pics on CD14 weren't very clear, and that she may have missed a follicle.

I go back in to see my RE and get bloodwork results on Tuesday, so I'll know for sure then. In the meantime, to be on the safe side, I'm going to assume that I haven't ovulated, and DH and I will get busy just in case, now that my bladder infection seems to have let up!

She did say that my lining looked good though.

Fingers crossed!

On another note :)

We're still working on endless renovations. My husband decided to make the kitchen a little bigger, but in doing so, the layout of the main floor of our home became.. in my opinion.. a complete disaster. Being the hormonal clomid crazy person that I was when this all happened, I came home and after DH's dad left, I bawled my eyes out at the monster that had been created. :(

Here's what happened.
This floorplan is what the original area looked like before we made any renovations:

When we moved in, this was the layout. We had barely any working counter space in the kitchen, because instead of finishing the other side, they put a dinette in instead. Our kitchen was small, and very dysfunctional.

The furniture we bought for the dining room was too big, unfortunately we didn't see that as a the problem

in the beginning, until we got it in there and realized that with the table even open at a regular size, it was hard to get in to the kitchen...

The living

room wasn't bad, but because of the way the wall was shaped in the kitchen, it made the kitchen smaller, and created a space in the living room that we had no use for. Our TV room etc.. is in the basement, so it is/was literally just dead space.

This was DH's idea:

And, this is also what I came home to. They straightened the wall in the kitchen/living room, BUT.. they also moved the door from the dining room over to the

other side, in the living room......

DH's idea was to swap the dining room and the living room (not shown here), but he didn't realize that in doing so, the dining room area was too small and awkward to house the couches, and the living room area was too big and strange (with huge picture window) to house the dining room furniture.

I absolutely HATED where the kitchen door now was as well, because it completely cut the kitchen off from the rest of the main floor. You walk in the house, and it just looks like a GIGANTIC strange box in the middle of the room.

We were going to try and leave it and just find furniture that fit, but after some discussion, DH and I both agreed that it looks awful, and it's way too awkward to work, even though the kitchen was now much bigger.

We sat down, and we finally came up with something that we think will work:

So, this is what's going to happen so we can fix what had been done. We're going to move the kitchen door back to

where it was, but we're going to leave the wall straight between kitchen/living room. That will allow us to finish the counter easily on the other side, and make for a nice sized, completely functional kitchen. We had sliding doors in the kitchen that led out to the patio, but we are going to reduce that door to a single door so that we can have that extra corner of counter space.

Though the dining room will remain the same size, we are going to fix that by buying a dining room table that will better fit the area. (The dining room table we're thinking of is shown below).

On the living room side, instead of having two couches, we're going to get one 3-person sofa, and two chairs to put at either side of the room and possibly a coffee table in the middle. (This furniture also shown below).

We both agree that this will work, and that it will make the house look more modern. With smaller furniture, it should also open up a lot of space. We'll also add accent shelving in the dining room at some point as well.

Now, on to the furniture!

This is the dining room table we're looking at:

I've posted multiple pictures of the same table because this is the different ways in which the table can be shaped/expanded/reduced. We really like it because it's the only table we've found that offers us complete flexibility of how we want it to be in the room.

Next, is the chairs that we will have to go with the dining table. They are green as an accent color. The walls in the living/dining are all gray, with white as the contrast. The floors will be a very dark/almost black cherry. We're throwing the green in there just to spruce things up, and when we add shelves, they will be white, with green items on them to accent. :)

For the living room chairs, we're thinking:

And last but not least, for the sofa, though we're still not totally sure of this yet:

And there you have it. We're going for a very modern feel as what we have now is just that crappy stuff you get when you first buy a house. Can't wait to get rid of all that, and get the new stuff in!

Anyway, I'm glad we were able to come up with something we'll both be happy with. My first thought to the "new" kitchen the other day was.... OMG.. WE HAVE TO MOVE.. lol, but now I think we'll stay! ;)

What will Friday bring?

Tomorrow, I should be able to find out if I have ovulated this cycle or not. Last ultrasound at CD14, the only follicle that I had was a 10mm, and the rest were all small follicles.

I'm worried that this cycle is a bust because of the unfortunate bladder infection I had right around my possible ovulation date. If I look at the last two cycles of Clomid, I ovulated on CD 23 (or around there), and one was possibly much earlier around CD16. We were supposed to do EOD sex, but right before my bladder infection I knew something was up, so we had to slow it down to every two days.

I don't know what tomorrow's ultrasound will reveal. I don't know whether to root for having already ovulated because that means that I can stop having sex and give this bladder infection time to really be completely gone, or to pray that I haven't ovulated because that may mean that we still have time.

I guess I'll just have to wait and see *sigh*

Maybe it's a sign

Nothing seems to be going right these days. I'm on a Clomid cycle, I'm supposed to be having sex, and bam.... bladder infection.

How does someone get pregnant with so many obstacles in front of them?

To top it off, now that the conservatives have been elected in to a majority government, it's only a matter of time before the layoffs start. People may tell me not to worry, but a graphic designer in the government isn't worth much, and we're usually always one of the first ones to go.

I know the cart is way before the horse on that one, but I'm just not feeling optimistic today, and it's hard to even begin to try and feel that way when all your co-workers are just as worried about their futures as you are.

I need a vacation from life and all it's negativity. It also doesn't help that it's back to rain and gloom outside.