Last week I spent some time with a friend of mine who has several children. We were talking about sleep – or the lack thereof – and commiserating about the frequent trips into the nursery to calm the crying baby back to sleep. Being that this is the third child she has raised she was very zen about it. The topic of sleep training and CIO came up and in our short discussion she said very simply with a smile, “The thing about sleep training is that it works.”

That one thought and her whole attitude has really stuck with me. Almost everyone I have talked to has had one of two opinions: either that crying it out and sleep training works and is the only efficient, successful method at raising a good sleeper; or, on the flip side, that letting a child cry is harmful, dangerous, and unnecessary. Not everyone is judgmental or condescending about it, of course. But people can get very passionate about this subject and tend to fall in one camp or the other.

Then here was this experienced mother who was neither. She’d done it before, and clearly her child was just fine. It worked great. At the same time, for whatever reasons, she is choosing to not do it for this child. Maybe she felt it didn’t mesh with the child’s personality, maybe her parenting style has changed, maybe a lot of things. She didn’t seem to have any mixed feelings or regret or conflicted perspective about it. She gets up often, but that’s okay.

She is one of those mothers that look up to, about whom I say to myself, Yes, that. That’s how I want to be. And it’s things like this that I am clearly a first time mother, when everything feels just so damn important.

I’ve been keeping her words and attitude in mind and I’ve been feeling a lot less stressed over the situation. Bad nights can be really overwhelming – the lack of sleep crankies make the immediate present feel far more important than anything else. But really there are going to be hard nights and hard days. There is sickness, there is teething, there are parties that mess up naps and travel that doesn’t work out as planned. But there are also good days. There is progress. Every day that Kate falls asleep peacefully in her crib I remind myself how amazing it is to even be at this point, just having her sleep in her crib felt like such a pipe dream a month ago. Even if sleeping through the night is still a long ways away, even if I’m still spending half the night on the mattress on her floor. One day this will all be past and it really won’t matter how we got there.

::

Kate is 11 months old. She’s walking – almost running, at times. She’s climbing, she’s figuring things out, she’s eating finger food and doing nursing gymnastics. She has an opinion, she has a personality, she is this whole person emerging from within. It’s amazing and wonderful and yet, yes, a little sad too. She’s still the same person who slept on my chest, small and squished and sighing contentedly. It’s so strange seeing her change day by day, without you really being aware of it until suddenly you realize you’re a long way from where you started.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this idea of a future sibling. That’s always been the plan. Not three months ago I was panicking at the thought of having another child and was telling Den that maybe we should push the idea back another year. Now suddenly my baby is in her own room, my baby isn’t so much a baby anymore. I’ve been looking at newborns feeling that twinge of “I want.” Not right now, mind you, but… someday. Someday sooner rather than later.

My cycle still hasn’t returned yet – for which I am thankful. Others online in Kate’s playgroup are actively trying and getting pregnant and I feel that familiar wistfulness. Wouldn’t be nice if we could just do it like that? It be so much simpler. It would be so normal. I am thankful I don’t have my cycle back for two reasons. I know that even though I know by all the logic and statistics in this world that my chance of getting pregnant naturally is .00001% it’s still not zero. I know that no matter how much I try to ignore timing and cycles and expected periods that I cannot let it go. I will once again be watching, wondering what if. If I were actually cycling that would be different. But the waiting to do IVF, the natural cycles when I will not get pregnant, I will still feel the sting of disappointment every month. It’s been so very lovely to not have to deal with that for the past 20 months. And the other reason? Because everyone else will be hoping for a surprize. Right now whenever anyone says the dreaded, “You never know!” I can quickly point out that my cycles have not returned so there is zero chance, and the topic is over. It’s nice not feeling the need to go into the explanation about one tube, immature eggs, and many, many cycles when nature has been very clear that I do not get pregnant easily – even with IVF.

It’s not that I don’t believe I will get pregnant again – I actually am very sure that I will. I just am very sure it will require IVF, and I don’t know how many transfers it will take.

Our plan right now is to do a transfer around January – we have one frozen embryo left. But there’s a lot of ducks we need to get in a row in order to accomplish that, namely getting insurance coverage (Den’s insurance no longer covers IVF at all). If I were convinced the FET would work I’d just pay out of pocket for it… but I’m not. Here in MA I think most insurance companies will cover 6 retrieval cycles, lifetime… at least, that is what my last insurance policy said. I’ve done 5 to date. It will cost us several thousand dollars to get the insurance, and then another 2 or 3 thousand deductable, but then if the FET doesn’t work we’ll have a retrieval covered, along with any subsequent FETs. It’s a bit of a gamble. I need to go over the numbers and figure out what my options are for insurance and confirm what they really do cover, then figure out if they have specific open season and when coverage would start. We’d only be doing this for one year, so we’d have to make it all count.

Give me another year, then I think I’ll be ready to have another to care for.