I must, I must, I must increase my ... insemination skills

Yesterday was rough.  I've spent many, many months feeling guilty about the regularity and quality of our charting, and in the past couple months have finally begun to feel confident about Heather's patterns of ovulation.  I've spent many, many days feeling guilty about my ability to confidently identify her cervical phases.  And we've spent many, many days together documenting her cervix from moment to moment, checking whether the mucus seems lotiony or watery or sticky, whether the cervix seems hard like a nose or soft like lips.

We had finally gotten to a rah-rah state of confidence, reminding ourselves of the work we'd done to prepare, from the iPhone pictures to the prenatal DHA pills and the dinner-time calls to Mamie and Whitney to review thawing procedures.

But yesterday was all broke apart.
 We came home at lunchtime to check her cervix and decided that this might well be the moment.  We carefully cleaned the syringes, then filled a bowl over and over till the water was 98.6 degrees, thawed the sperm vial... and, in our attempt to load the syringe, spilled a quarter of the sample onto the kitchen counter.  We scrambled to find a new way to load the syringe and tried desperately to save the drops on the counter-top.  Satisfied that we had redeemed the situation to our best ability, we betook ourselves and our syringe to the bedroom to get comfy.  And then spilled more sperm onto the carpet.

Nurse Nina said to make a ritual of the insemination: candles, soft music, gentle love-making (which, I guess, is both in the spirit of creating a new life without porn or activities that might sully the moment, and also to keep things from getting too jarred and shaken about).  Whitney said to have a sense of humor about it.  At no point did anyone suggest that making ourselves miserable and panicky would improve the situation.

But how else can you react?  How else would you feel when if you lost $250?  You can try to be all Zen about it and say, you know, the money will make it back to me, blah blah blah, but nobody really feels that way.  And we didn't either.  That sperm is not going to make it back to us, and it's not going to help anybody else, either, unless our bedroom carpet has been desperately trying to conceive for the past 20 years.  We're replacing the counter-tops soon, so there's no point there.  We'd just replace them faster if they got all swollen and cracked, and then they'd be left on the street like that Elvis song I hate-- "In the Ghetto."

It goes without saying that the suggested orgasm was not high-quality (although I'm saying it anyhow).  Adding tremendous insult to injury, when we got home from work and did our fertility monitor magic, it said Heather wasn't even ovulating.  So we've thrown away the entire $500.  I wish the carpet luck.

Despite running very late for the return to work that my boss suggested, I insisted we go back to the clinic to get the proper syringes, which we now, thanks to Nurse Nina's generosity, we have to a surfeit.  I hope we only need one.