Lately, I'm Obsessed With

Perfectly round, puffy boxwood in pots. Love them. 

I have my 40% off coupons for JoAnne Fabrics all stacked and ready.

(They have lots of great clay pots there all the time!)

This is our next weekend patio project, definitely.

Wordless Wednesday

Back to Life

I ran today for the first time since two days after ET. I feel alive again. I mean really alive. It doesn't hurt that I was able to keep up an 8:30 pace for most of the run either :)

I am just past 10% of my running goal for the year, which is truly sad. But with the IVFs, the miscarriage and the fear of being pregnant, I *think* I have a good excuse. I would really like to run through this entire pregnancy. We'll see how that goes. If anything my goal will just have to be tweaked a bit.

For now, I am feeling very happy and very ready to lace up again tomorrow.

Girls Night In BBQ

If you read this blog and you are coming to the BBQ this Thursday, please, please don't mention me being knocked up! I've come out on my blog and on thebump, but we haven't told anyone and don't plan on letting the cat out of the bag until we are through the first trimester (especially after what happened last time).

Thanks for your understanding!

If you don't subscribe to Cooking Light

You can get all of the magazine's recipes each month here. 

I wish I would have known this before I paid $24 for a subscription!

Weeks 14-17 Resolution Recipes & Review

Oh man, I've been a slacker. We cooked weeks 14 and 16, but I forgot to log it and I don't even remember what we made. I know it was a lot of repeater recipes. Week 15 was IVF week and we ate takeout a lot.

So on to week 17 where we cooked a TON of amazing food. I love trying new recipes and and actually loving them.

Grilled Steak with Baby Arugula and Parmesan Salad

Amazeballs. So good we made it TWICE last week. The key to this is going to a butcher (not the grocery store, a real butcher) and buying skirt steak. And don't skip the grilled lemon halves. Oh my god. You'll thank me, I promise.

Lemon and Sage Chicken

with

Orecchiette with Roasted Peppers, Arugula, and Tomatoes

The chicken was just a basic grilled chicken, but the marinade was super yummy and very versatile. I'll be using it all summer, definitely. Buy skin on bone in chicken, as it grills better.

The pasta salad was hands on for about 30 minutes. But worth the effort. Super hearty and so fresh. We've been shopping only local ingredients lately so this salad really let the veggies shine. Good, good, good.

Swordfish Kebabs with Orange Basil Sauce

with 

Risotto Primavera

This is basically just grilled swordfish, but the dipping sauce is amazing. Don't taste it on it's own, it's kind of weird as a standalone sauce. But on the fish it's superb. We'll be using this sauce all summer, definitely.

The risotto was another chance to use up some local veggies and it was REALLY good. I'm not normally a risotto fan, but the veggies got me.

Veggie Grilled Pizza

Another fabulous excuse to use up veggies from our local farmer's market. I used store bought whole wheat pizza dough. Instead of grilling the dough, I greased a cookie sheet with EVOO and baked the crust in the oven. Then we put the finished pizza on the grill to melt the cheese. Bad idea because I had oiled the dough, it burned on the bottom. Next time I will just melt the cheese in the oven.

The key to this is good fontina cheese. We went to our local COOP and bought amazing cheese and it made this dish. Otherwise it would have been just a burnt pizza with veggies.

Pan-Seared Scallops with Bacon and Spinach

Meh. This was just okay. I am not a big fan of bacon. And I have about 1000 seared scallop recipes that I like much better than this one. Of note, if you are in the Capital Region, Two Cousins has the most amazing scallops in store right now. They were delish. I will make scallops again this week just to buy those again. HUGE and sweet. Yum.

Garage Sale

Husband and I are having our first garage sale this summer. I have two computers that we'd like to sell - a desktop and a laptop. 

Both are loaded with either spyware or a virus, plus all of our personal info. Anyone know how to wipe a computer's hard drive to clean out the viruses and to erase our data?

Beta #2

764

More than doubled since Monday!!!

First ultrasound is June 5. My whole life is two week waits. 

But this one I'm willing to be patient for!

Wordless Wednesday

Beta #1

Quant hCG = 311! 

P4 = >40 

e2 = 2000

I am keeping my fingers crossed that this lucky cycle stays, well, lucky.

Next beta is Wednesday.

A little IVF #2 Update

I Spy

with my little eye Schumacher's High Voltage (in sand). 

I've loved this fabric as curtains against bamboo shades in Southern Living.

But I think I love it even more on this settee from Atlanta Homes and Lifestyles Magazine

Found it for $60/yard HERE. 

I think it could make a cute pair of oversized pillows for the living room…

Although my living room needs a little bit of color at this point. 

I am such a color-phobe. 

Wordless Wednesday

Before and After: Bannister

This front hallway has been the object of my experimentation for quite sometime now. About two years after we moved in I ripped the carpet off the stairs which was quite a debacle. 

But I still wasn't happy with the way the hall looked. A few weekends ago, while Joe was studying I took to refinishing the bannister. I had finally collected enough inspiration pictures to show him it could look good. (Or maybe he just got tired of me bugging him about it?)

Three ingredients were essential to this project. 

1. Liquid Sander and Deglosser

2. Killz Primer


3.  Foam Rollers

I started by applying the Liquid Sander and Deglosser to the bannister with an old t-shirt. It's really runny and you need to apply a nice thick coat of it (rubbing in circles). If your stairs are already refinished, be careful as this stuff will take the gloss off of your stairs too (yes, this happened to us).



The deglosser takes about 10 minutes to dry and it's awesome. No sanding, no mess. My fingertips were thanking me already.

Next I applied two coats of Killz Primer to the bannister. Why two coats? because I did one coat and the nooks and crannies weren't quite filled in and I wanted the bannister to look black and not like painted wood. I applied the primer with a paintbrush and that actually went okay. If I had a foam roller though, I would have used it for this too. I was just too lazy to drive to Home Depot.



Once the primer dried, I painted the railing with black indoor latex paint. Nothing special, just leftover paint we had from when I painted our front door black. Now here was my first mistake. I used a paint brush to apply both coats of black paint. I figured the primer came out so good, maybe I didn't need a foam roller.

My second mistake was using wipe-on poly to seal the bannister.

Jenny always raves about the wonders of wipe-on poly and we had some in the house already from another project, so I thought, why not? I'll tell you why not. It doesn't create a thick enough coat over the surface. So in between poly coat #1 and poly coat #2 you are supposed to lightly sand the surface. We did using the a 400 grit sandpaper and this is what happened.



See the white? That's not sandpaper dust, it's the primer peeping through. Yuk.

Not the worst problem, because the paint really needed to be redone since the brush had left marks. Lesson learned. I reapplied the deglosser and while it set I drove to Home Depot and bought foam rollers and little foam brushes. By the time I got back the bannister was ready to be painted…for the second time.



This time I let the paint dry overnight (since we had applied so many coats of so many things in a day. The foam rollers did a great job.

Lucky for me I had a can of Minwax Satin Poly leftover from when I redid the stairs. I decided to try that out (it needs to be applied with a brush or a foam roller as opposed to the wipe on stuff).

We had absolutely no problems with sanding between coats this time. (Yes, I said we. By the time I was at this step I was at my wits end and had recruited the husband's help). We applied the second coat, let it dry overnight and voila! The stairs were finally done.

Had we, and by we I mean me, not cut corners (hello? paintbrush!) and not used wipe-on poly, this project would have taken a weekend. Because I had to redo the last two steps, it actually took us two weekends. Boo. But I love the way it turned out.

Before:


After:

Snowbabies!

We found out that of the 7 remaining embryos under observation TWO of them were graded high enough to be frozen. They were rated 2AB and 2BB. We're overjoyed. To think that I may never have to do another fresh IVF cycle, well there are no words to express how that makes me feel.

All 7 of our embryos continued to develop -- even the two morulas that they thought would arrest, in fact one of the morulas turned into the 2AB that was frozen! This is fantastic news. We are thrilled that our embryos were so robust this cycle.

Of course we are sad that not all of them were candidates for cryo (and clearly I can't house more than three at a time). I'm trying not to focus on the fact that they were weak and instead focus on the wonder of this cycle. Hopefully the good news keeps on coming.

Inspiration: Bannister

Happy Mother's Day

IVF #2 Embryo Transfer

Last time we cycled the embryologist wrote down our embryological grades on the paper for us, yesterday was a different embryologist. I asked her to mark the embryos for us and she just wrote which ones we transferred. Oh well.

So what do I know about the twelve smudges above?

I know that two of them had already arrested, and two were at the morula stage which means they were about 12-18 hours behind in development and on their way to arresting.

Four of them are early blastocysts which means that their cells are too cloistered to be graded. They are under observation today to see if they will be candidates for cryopreservation.

The blastocyst grading system assigns 3 separate quality scores to each blastocyst embryo: a number and two letters. The number indicates its blastocyst development stage (expansion and hatching status). The first letter indicates its inner cell mass (ICM) score, or quality. And the second letter indicates its trophectoderm (TE) score, or quality. 

If that makes no sense to you, don't worry, I didn't understand it either. Here are a few tables that will help:

Okay, so back to my embabies. I had four that were graded on this scale. The big round embryo at the very top right is graded at a 3AC. Originally we thought he was going to be one of the ones transferred but the embryologist elected to use the one labeled Me! in the top frame (he's on the left and is the first Me! in the image). 

That little guy is graded at a 1AB. The other two in the middle also labeled Me! are both 2AA and they were our highest quality embryos. I know nothing about embryos but I was really proud of how these guys looked. 

We're still waiting to find out if the 3AC was good enough to freeze. I hope he was. I just hate the idea of them making it so far and then not having the chance to become a baby. It tears me up.

So as of today, we have 5 embryos under observation for cryo, that in and of itself is amazing. We should know later today or tomorrow if they made it to freeze. Our beta is Monday May 17. Of course, I will be testing every day from now until then. Wish me luck!

3DT vs. 5DT

One of my readers asked me to do a post on day three transfers versus day five transfers, and I'm more than happy to oblige. I've talked a bit about my own struggle to understand this topic and make a decision on when to transfer before.

My basic understanding of the difference between a 3DT and a 5DT is this: 3DT's are usually used when there are fewer embryos to choose from and their development is clear cut (i.e. variations in grades and quality). 5DT's are used when there are either many embryos that have fertilized or where there are several embryos all about the same grade and quality on day 3.

My embryologist told me last cycle that the battle for an embryo to become a blastocyst (or the transition from day 3 to day 5) is the hardest journey that the cells make. Between day 3 and 5 the embryo has to become it's own life form and survive as its own self-sufficient organism. She described the transition from day 3 to day 5 as a cellular civil war. On average, only about 30% of embryos make it to the blastocyst stage; that means more than half of your fertilized embies will arrest by day 5. Scary, right?

The popular debate between day 3 transfers and day 5 transfers is the argument that perhaps an embryo would have survived if it was transferred earlier. Some RE's prefer day three transfers because they believe an embryo has a better chance of survival in utero than in a lab.

I don't necessarily believe this and here's why - in a normal pregnancy (non-ART conception) the embryo would not be released into the uterus (which is where an embryo is placed at transfer) by the fallopian tubes until day 5. So really, in my opinion, there's no difference between the uterus and the lab, per se. And a lab could probably mimic the conditions of the fallopian tubes better than a uterus could.

This interesting article that I found goes so far to say delayed transfers (i.e. day 5 or 6) deliver "embryos to the uterus at the time they would normally arrive, avoiding exposure to potentially harmful amino acids and carbohydrates."

Also, by waiting till day 5 you have an embryological version of Darwinism (you know, survival of the fittest?). By extending your transfer out to day 5, it becomes clear which embryos (or at that time blastocysts) are the strongest and most resilient, making an obvious case for transfer.

My dear friend Linsday shared this article with me regarding the reasoning behind day three (over day 5 transfers), and I found the content to be really eye opening. Here's a little snippet:

There are numerous reasons for continuing to perform day three transfers: its cheaper, its less work for the lab, lower liability because the lab has the embryos for a shorter period of time, everybody makes it to transfer, if the cycle doesn't result in a pregnancy, the program can still look good, etc. You'll notice I didn't say anything about a day 3 transfer improving your chances of getting pregnant - it doesn't. The reason programs continue to transfer day 3 embryos is because its more convenient for the lab and the docs. …

The rationale for a day 3 transfer is to get out from under the "blame" for the failing embryos. By transferring failing embryos on day 3, the program also transfers the responsibility for the subsequent failed cycle to the patient. It is a subtle manipulation of the patient's emotions. Here's the scenario: "We're so sorry the cycle didn't work, but you know the embryos were still growing when we transferred them. We don't know what you did to them afterwards. Wanna try again?" Using this pyschological manipulation, it becomes the patient's fault the cycle didn't work, not the program's. See how it works?

Crazy and interesting, right? Now clearly this is just one doctor's opinion and there are many others out there, but this one struck a chord with me, well, cause it just made sense.

With IVF #2 we had 12 eggs fertilize. On day three they were all doing stellar, and we were pushed out to day 5 so that the embryos could weed themselves out. For personal reasons regarding the disposal of one of our blast stage embryos during IVF #1, we had requested to do a day 5 transfer regardless of the number of embryos we had.

Now, having said all of this, I should also say that with IVF #1 (only 5 fertilized embryos that cycle) we did a 3DT and got knocked up. Was that because the embryo had a better chance of survival inside me? Because the embryologist had observed our embryos long enough to knowingly select one of the strongest for transfer? Or was it just luck of the draw?

Truly, I have no idea. People get pregnant all the time from 3DTs and from 5DTs. For me, personally, as a multiple IVFer, I'm just more comfortable with things at the day 5 stage for all of the reasons I've just shared. Best of luck in your cycle!