And so it is

It's been a while since I've written in this space.

There's lots of reasons for that.  The clearest and easiest to say is that the journey is over.

It's not really. It's more complicated than that. It always is. But suffice to say that there are no plans for anymore needles or surgeries or "procedures" or anything else.  We are done.

And for the last 2 years there has been a whole slew of emotions over that.

You know that I went and saw an IVF doctor who told us we should try again with a handful of changes to our protocol. And despite the thought of going through it all again ripping my guts apart, we seriously considered it.  Considered it enough to take ourselves to family counselling to talk it out and make sure we were on the same page and decided yep, we'll go again...

And then we didn't...

We sat on the decision. Some of that was family stuff - trips and holidays and things that we couldn't put off so it was worth waiting on the baby stuff for a bit longer.  And then once that was out of the way, we seemed to lose that burning desire...

That's not to say we don't want our little Quinn. We do. We would be ecstatic if we magically wound up pregnant.  But we started having a life that didn't involve hospitals and medicine and an obsessive compulsive control over my period and cervical mucus (tmi, but that's what this here blog is for). And we started to find our way forward. At least a little. Inches by inches.

And while I am still sad - I will always be sad - I'm not broken anymore, and that's a good thing. For me, and for my marriage.

I still wish for it. I still have weird daydreams where I have the big belly and the waddle, or have a little person with my nose and Ashley's eyes who we could teach and yell at and encourage and *parent*... But no matter how much I still toy with the idea of going back to IVF, I think I have come to the place of accepting that that life is not going to be our life.

That doesn't mean that we're walking away from a family.  We are looking seriously into adoption and hopefully our little Quinn will come to us that way.

One of the big issues we have, and have always had, is that in order to go on the Adoption registry in Queensland, you have to have stopped IVF.  So if we did change our mind and decide to give it another whirl just to say we've tried everything, we'd have to wait before we can apply to adopt.  This has meant there has been an urgency on some of our decision making that hasn't been helpful.  We've been very slow and intentional with our decisions along the way, and so going back into IVF, stopping IVF these were not things that we did spontaneously, and we took significant amounts of time over each course change, and even each time we've had to think about keeping on the same course.

I think that we would have had a lot more peace in the process if we could have gone on the adoption wait list while doing IVF. In that scenario, if we were selected for a baby then we could cease IVF knowing that that is the door that has opened, or we could have turned down the offer and continued IVF.  I think the law should mean that you can't be having IVF in your first year of an adoption placement, but to have this time frame in advance of even applying, when you don't know if you'll be accepted, we will still have to wait for who knows how many years to actually get a child placed... It's a bug bear, what can I say.

Anyway.  That's where we're at in this little story a the moment. And so this now turns from an IVF blog to an adoption (fingers crossed) blog. I know you'll all wish us luck as we go through, and I'll be sure to tell you the highs and the lows :-).

E xx

**NB - The law in Qld has just changed to mean that you can go on the expression of interest registrar while continuing IVF. Yay for progress!!! It won't really change anything for our situation, but it may help people in the future and that's always a good thing :-)