This month of February, I jumped head first into the romance genre and it was so much fun! This is not a genre of books that I have ever intentionally spent a lot of time reading, so to make that my primary focus for the month of February was a mental shift. But I participated in a couple of February reading bingo’s and read-a-thon’s on Instagram which helped me in knowing what authors and titles to try! It was a refreshing break from my normal thriller and fantasy reads, and now I have a couple of new favorite authors that I plan to follow for future releases.

If you’ve been around here for a while, you might remember years ago when I was more diligent in writing yearly goals I often would include the number of books, or specific book titles, that I wanted to read within the year. As time went on in our infertility treatments, I stopped using the same process to set my yearly goals, and I started focusing more on knitting as my preferred hobby, I also stopped reading as much as I had been. I’d still read a book here or there, but not with the same focus that I once had.

While it wasn’t always something that brought me joy during our experiences with infertility, one of the best things about having Maisie a couple of years after my closest friends started having babies is that I had a core group of momma’s to talk to all throughout this first year when I had questions - how to approach feeding, how to get everyone more sleep, favorite clothing and baby gear brands to try. So when it was time to start thinking about Maisie’s first birthday party, it was a natural topic of conversation as well!

Looking at the headline for this post I’m sure there are some of you thinking, “But Mary… didn’t you just celebrate Maisie’s first birthday?!” I know, I know. But better late than never to share how she joined us in this world!

I shared my overall inspiration for Baby Girl’s nursery a couple of weeks ago, and since then we’ve made some big decisions! I am 36 weeks pregnant this week and the urge to “nest” is starting to come on strong. I’ve got plans to wash baby clothes and start organizing her little closet this upcoming weekend, and I hope to make some big strides in the rest of the nursery as well! Let me catch you up…

Early on in our infertility treatments, I used to spend a lot of time dreaming about the nursery space we would create for a baby. When we were living in Florida I thought about how to do that in our two-bedroom apartment, and then when we moved to Pennsylvania I thought about which of the three bedrooms would be best suited for that purpose. Some time in between years two and three of treatments though, thinking about a nursery that seemed out of reach just lost its appeal. It wasn’t fun to dream about what the space could be like, instead it just hurt too much. So I put those thoughts aside and waited for a time that felt right again.

Well, I had every intention of sharing this post with you all back in March during Pregnancy After Loss Awareness Month. But here we are, almost in the middle of July, and I’m just now feeling like I am able to gather my thoughts! If that doesn’t tell you something about what pregnancy after loss actually is like, I don’t know what will :)

If you follow me on Instagram or we’re friends on Facebook then you likely saw our big news that I shared earlier this week… Kurt and I are pregnant with a little girl! I am 9 weeks today, and we are so grateful for things to be going pretty well after our FET in the end of January. Let me catch you all up to speed!

As I have shared more openly about our infertility journey and the treatments that we’ve tried over the years, I’ve become a bit desensitized to how often people ask me what everything costs or how we’re paying for all of this.

In our situation, these treatments have been something we’ve paid for almost entirely out of pocket. While infertility testing is covered under our health insurance, the actual infertility treatments are not covered (I’ll let you guess which costs more). Because we had such generous help from our families once we began the IVF process in 2020, and we were able to creatively stretch our budget when we needed to, we also chose not to finance our treatments. But while there are very real financial costs to infertility, it’s the physical and mental costs that I anticipated even less when we began our treatments five years ago!