This weekend is just the perfect storm of activity--visit from the inlaws, twin club consignment sale (selling, buying, AND working in it), National Infertility Awareness Week, and I'm certain many Halloween activities thrown in for good measure. The true question is whether there will be time to swing by the salon for an eyebrow appointment...

While next week will obviously be dedicated to all things spooky, this week was sweet: both true sweetness such as Tara's wonderful news and bittersweet as Manuela discusses life after Shoelet. But they say it better than I can...

Tara over at Plan B found out this week that her plan B worked--her surrogate is pregnant with her baby! With a beta of 204 at 11 days post 3-day transfer. Which is amazing, amazing, amazingly fantastic news. And...on the Twilight Zone-y front...her father always predicted that something big would happen for her in October. In October!

Recently, Artificially Sweetened turned me on to the phrase "Google Med School" through her blog. AfriIndie Mum's entry this week about getting blood test results back and spending the day engaged in a round of medical sleuthing drives this idea home. It's not that medical information didn't exist prior to the Internet. We have a huge medical library a few miles away that I use constantly. But now it's so eaaaaaaaaaaaaaasy. I just hit a few buttons and two thousand Web sites pop up with information about antithyroid antibodies. The problem with being a medical student at Google University is that you have just enough information to become worried, but not enough information to actually understand the big picture. It's a great entry, and I hope everything turns out okay when she speaks to her doctor next week.

Sarah Solitare got a big old box of fun this week in the mail: her meds arrived! I always had my meds filled (perhaps like an idiot who didn't know how much less expensive it could be to fill them all at once via the mail) at the pharmacy in the clinic building so I've never had a box like this arrive, but I assume it feels a great deal like Christmas. A big, infertile Christmas. I'm trying to laugh about it because if you don't laugh...you cry. Hope you get it to fit on one shelf--or better yet, hope you're shipping it all off to someone else very soon. And congratulations on the saline sonogram.

Jen and Gretch at Butterbeans and Baby Dreams are experiencing a little thing I like to call ICBFT--an "I Can't Believe the Fucking Timing" (which, for anyone who cares, I pronounce ick-ba-fat). Their next IUI is going to possibly fall during the one day that Jen has her engineering certification. That takes 8 hours to complete. And is one-hour away. What are two chickies to do except pray and keep taking OPKs like crazy women? I think the timing dance of infertility is one of the more annoying factors that no one thinks is a big deal...but is always a big deal. I mean, it doesn't hurt, it's not embarrassing, it doesn't cause complete devastation. But living your life by a calendar and clock is difficult to do and means something always has to give. Hope the surge miraculously holds off until Monday (wouldn't that be cool?).

There's no way to end this week without talking about Manuela at the Thin Pink Line. If you haven't been over there for a bit, please comment and leave your good thoughts. She has an amazing post this week about the birth and her future plans. And I think she just has an incredible point-of-view--of life, of birth, of motherhood, of this process. And I wish it had all turned out differently, but since I lack a magic wand...I wish her strength while her heart grieves and sends love to her Shoelet.