A Dog Named Nella

Meet Nella aka Snooters. She belongs to Steve and Christa. My BIL and SIL. Nella and her owner Steve came to visit Shawn and Hershey Tuesday afternoon

A Girl and Her Purses

The girls at work are always amazed at all of the purses that I buy. Seems like once a month I get a new one. I guess one could say I have a purse fetish. I was cleaning out my closets for the yard sale and was going through my purses and thought I would take some pictures of them to show the girls.

So this first picture if a picture of all the purses I am keeping. There are 21 of them.



This picture is a picture of the ones I am selling in the yard sale. There are 11 of them. Hee! It's also a picture of all the wallets I have.



I have purses of all sizes, styles, colors and textures. There is leather, faux croc, quilted, canvas, even seatbelt material.

The Poor Little Tree

I was outside in the backyard the other night and noticed that Hershey Bell has been eating the bottom limb of this little ugly tree in our backyard. I saw him gnawing on it earlier today and it was too cute, but I couldn't get my camera out fast enough. It was almost like he was playing tug-of-war with the tree and the tree was winning. LOL!!!

It's nice outside today, so HB and I were sitting in the swing just chillin and I snapped a few pictures of him, the poor little tree, and his girlfriend Maggie who was walking her owner. They just live two houses down from us, so HB see her quite frequently.

Smitten

Last Saturday, I went over to Bowen and Heather's for a pie party. Bowen's Aunt Terry was in from Texas and they made 7 different kinds of pies and they were all yummy. I've been getting Gavin on Saturdays so I had him with me. Zoe was so excited and when I pulled up, she came running out to the car and said "Thanks for bringing him to see me!". She just loves Gavi - that's her name for him and no one else is allowed to call him that. She also calls him Gavster. She loves holding him and playing with him and helping me change him and make his bottles. When we first got there, I had Gavin in his boppy on the couch and Zoe was talking to him and pretending to tickle him and giving him lovings. He was so excited to see her that he let out a few little giggles. Well that in turn caused us both to giggle.

You can see in these pictures that they are smitten with each other :)

(Yeah, his bib says Pooper! LOL!!)

Another Taggie Blanket

A good friend from church and our neighbor Rachel is having a little boy next week. The ladies at chuch had a shower for her last Sunday and I decided to make her a taggie blanket too. I actually went to one of her other showers and got her a basket full of goodies for her and the baby and thought the taggie blanket would be a cute, personal touch. Of course it's a monkey pattern too. It's not what I went into the store for, but it was the cutest material I could find without it being too babyish and too girly. And of course there was enough material to make two blankets so Baby Gavin has another taggie too :)

TTC: No Follicles :(

I had a doctor appointment on Monday, May 4 to go in for a follicle ultrasound to see how many, if any, follicles I produced from taking the Clomid. Before the u/s, I told the nurse that for the last few days, I've had some light cramping/movement around my right ovary area and she said that it sounded like the medicine must be working and that my eggs were probably having a party. Then she proceeded with the u/s and there was nothing there. No follicles, no eggs, no nothing. I was heart-broken and immediately started crying. After I got dressed and dried up the tears somewhat, Shawn and I went out to the nurses station and she said that she would need to talk to Dr. Gentry, but that he will probably want to start me on the Femara Pills/Follistim Injections Therapy, which is a combination of pills and injections to stimulate my ovaries to make eggs. Before I start the medicines, I'll go in for a baseline u/s while my ovaries are at rest. The nurse will then instruct me on the dosage of medicine and how to take them and how to give myself the injections. After so many days of taking the medicines, they will do another follicle u/s and an estrogen blood draw to check my response. The goal is to have 2-3 eggs mature. Of course this will raise my chance of having multiples, but I am completely OK with this. When you want children and have trouble having them, I think the more you can have at one time, the better, because you are going to love those children so much more. At least I know I will.

So she gives me the names of the medicine and some mail order drug companies to call to get prices since most insurance companies don't pay for anything related to fertility. At least mine doesn't, or so I thought it didn't. I called two different companies - Freedom Fertility Pharmacies (FFP) and Metro Drugs (MD). FFP quoted me a price of $13.63 per pill for the Femara pills and $807.20 for a 600 unit of the Follistim injections. MD couldn't quote me a per pill price, but it was $410.89 for 30 pills and $503. 20 for a 600 unit of the Follistim injections. Naturally I plan on going with the cheaper company. However I started thinking about things and thought to myself, my insurance paid for my Clomid and for the HCG injection which I didn't get to use because I didn't have an follicles. And then I started remembering that, at either the end of the year last year or the beginning of the year this year, we had a firm-wide insurance meeting and got a new Schedule of Benefits and I think our insurance does pay for some infertility things. So I dug out the SOB (that stands for schedule of benefits and not what some might be thinking….LOL!) and sure enough, my insurance does pay for a minimal amount of infertility treatment/prescription drugs once I meet my deductible. Granted it's minimal, every penny is going to count now.

So that's my visit in a nutshell. Now I'm just waiting on Dr. Gentry's office to call me back so we can focus on what we can do next.