KC Surro Get Together

Went to my 3rd annual KC surro get together and 4th surrogate meet-up overall and had a blast, as usual. The location was the same Olive Garden SO and I had our first date at once upon a time. When compared to all the pregnant ladies we had last year, no one was pregnant or even cycling at the time of the meet up. So we all took advantage of the situation and had wine with dinner :-D

We had one GS, who is now retired, one of my fellow October cycling buddies (who didn't get pregnant that cycle and her last IP's just broke off their match because of financial issues but is hoping to match again soon), myself who is possibly matched with an IP (Shhhhh) a lovely TS who I believe is matched again, and a few new to the game girls who are going through the matching process.

Even having been through this once before, I always feel like I'm learning. Getting everyone together is  so great. We talked and talked and talked. Had a lot of laughs and briefly considered offering condoms to the table of teenagers who were obviously dressed to go to a formal dance. We were a little fearful of being flashed by the girls dresses (or lack thereof ;-) ). As we were walking out, I shrieked that I almost forgot to get a picture (one person managed to escape before the camera came out lol).  Good times. We always say we're going to get together more than once a year but then January rolls around again and I set up the next meet up.  One of the girls just moved out of state but I hear she'll be in town sometime this summer.  Might be a good excuse to get together again.  Here's the picture (forgive the goofy look of the short girl in the gray coat ~ahem~ me. It was the only picture that didn't turn out blurry.

My Surrogacy Picture Montage

I put together a little clipit of still shots ranging from NYC (during the transfer) to my belly shots. I've been wanting to make something grouping all the pictures together for a while now <3

Bills bills bills

Still having issues getting some of my surrogacy bills taken care of ~over exaggerated sigh~.  As soon as that's all squared away, I'd like to start looking into matching with new IP's.  I'd love to start now but know I won't be able to obtain my records to show any possible matches so I'm biding my time doing a whole lot of nothing!  Well, busily doing nothing, but nothing on the surrogacy front.  Still bloggity blogging and doing my group owner thing over at the Bargain Hunters Board on BabyCenter.


Christmas came and went with no card from the IP's :-/  Kind of hoping they were too busy to send them out this year (as I received one last year) and not that it was an intentional snub. SO also started a new job in this new year.  Exciting as he'll no longer have to travel! What's unexciting is since he no longer will be traveling up to 50% of the year (and no longer being able to carpool to work every other week), I need to look into getting myself a car. Boo! I actually liked being a one car family, as strange as that sounds. One thing to worry about at a time is my motto (see only child in my profile).


Do my readers like being able to follow their favorites on Facebook and Twitter?  My Twitter is100% public but my Facebook has been private since the dawn of time. I (stupidly) assigned it my usual Roxy moniker years ago, and now that I have it associated with my blog and youtube channels, am trying to decide if I want to make it public, or just start a "True Life: I'm a Stork" Facebook and keep my Roxy Facebook private. Thoughts thoughts, decisions decisions! I know I love being able to follow and interact with fellow surrogates and those involved in the surrogacy community online so I'm always interested in what the best way to communicate with everyone is!

Blog design

Trying to decide the most user friendly way to set up my blog.  I want readers to easily be able to go back and follow my surrogacy journey.  Anyone out there familiar with the process?

Hang with me as I figure this out! I don't want to post a ton because I don't want people to get frustrated trying to navigate through a bunch of dead ends or cyber weeds just to get what they're looking for.  If there's anything that really gets on my nerves, it's having to spend five, ten or even twenty minutes digging through someone's blog just trying to find what I want.  Any of my Pinterest followers can relate to that!

The plan is to split my blog into a few easy to navigate sections.  Surrogacy, Pinterest and personal.  The personal side will be not be so much about my day to day life, but more about my life as related to others.  Parenting, the current state of surrogacy in the US and countries across the world and other things that inspire me along the road.

The older I get the more difficult this web  stuff gets.  If this had been ten years ago and this were xanga, I would have easily created five different layouts.  Oh xanga, those were the good old days in the world of blogging.  Before facebook, before twitter and even before myspace.  We do all remember myspace, don't we?

Skin:Be kind. Rewind. Please?

I'd like to give a high five to each and every person who's done a juice or detox program.

I'm on day 1 of a 2 day detox and all I can think is "I freaking hate cucumbers".  Yup, that pretty much tops my list right now.  I don't even like pickles, so why should I like their healthier counterpart?  With every bite, I tell myself, "It's just watermelon.  Really, tasteless, white watermelon...Like you're chewing too close to the rind.  Yup, this.is.definitely.watermelon".  Mind over matter people. Mind over matter.

Anyone who's ever seen Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead knows how long those guys did their juicing fasts. Months!  And they took a much more hard core approach than what I'm doing.  I still get 4oz lean protein with lunch and dinner, plus some berries and milk in the morning (I used almond milk though).

I'm doing this with the hopes of getting some better skin quality going on here.  At a little over 2 months postpartum, I'm still waiting for the magic (and free) overnight tummy tuck fairy to come visit me.  Since that's not happening, I've started doing ab exercises specifically aimed at healing abdominal diastasis (which, from my simple measurements, feels like a good 3 finger separation), taking supplements (no magic in a bottle type stuff. Cod Liver Oil, biotin, L-Lystine, and a few other things on top of my daily vitamin and iron).  And to get things started off right, I decided to do the 2 day detox.

I mean, the title says "How to look better naked", how could that ever lead you down the wrong path?  In all reality, I've altered this a tiny bit so far.  The first shake I made, I completely pitched and started over.  Shake #1 had fresh blackberries, 2% milk(because it's what I had on hand), a generous pinch of cocoa powder, the peanut butter and ice. BAD!  So I tried again.  Shake #2 had frozen blueberries, vanilla almond milk (because it's what I had on hand), ice and I also added a TBS of apple cider vinegar to the drink this morning.  I took a tsp sized bite of peanut butter and ate it plain instead of mixing it with the smoothie.  All was well, shake #2 was drinkable.

Lunch was fish over romain lettuce.  Not bad.  I used to 2tsp oil, added a little seasoning and poured over the fish, then cooked for a minute or so in the microwave.  Not bad (but I'm use to this tasteless method for cooking fish.  For years I've eaten polluck from the microwave with nothing more than a little butter on it.

The green tea is Luzianne Green Tea made specially for ice tea brewers.  ~Cheers~  While I am very accustomed to drinking plain, unsweetened iced tea (my grandfather was diabetic), I'm not much of a fan of hot teas.  I've given it the good college try and prefer my tea cold.  That's pretty much where I am so far!  I'll update from the other side.

UPDATE

If you have a strong desire to sit on the toilet for a few days, give this detox a try ;-)  Seriously though.  I tried to think of it as flushing all the gunk out of the system, but really, kind of gross.

Surrogate OCD

Stop looking at those surrogate classified ads woman!  You have no business looking at those right now.  There.  I just thought saying it (well, typing it) would help reinforce it in my mind!  It's a compulsion, I swear.  I even looked at them sometimes while pregnant.  It's usually a pretty even 2:1 ratio of surrogates to IP's.  Way more in need of a surrogate than the other way around.  Have I mentioned my agency has already contacted me about another journey as well?  I told them that we still need to wrap up surrogacy number 1 before thinking of a second (A few unpaid hospital bills still floating around, etc..).

Other than my marathon postpartum bleed (10 weeks with only a sporadic week of non bleeding), things are good.  Totally done with the perinatologists office and Lord help me, if I never have to step foot in that place again, I'll be one happy woman!  My gynecologist was very happy to see me though. Gave me a good once over, beamed looking at my delivery record and sent me on my way with some birth control pills (for the bleeding).  Dang! I was kind of hoping to be done with hormones for a while.  But then I dug out, and threw away some of my old progesterone in oil needles and decided the bcp's weren't so bad ;-)

Fruit Fly Trap

Long time no blog.  I've been in Colorado for 3 weeks (will blog the cool trip soon) and came home early to attend my Pawpa's funeral.  Pair that along side back to school and it's been crazy on the Roxy home front.

Here's a quickie for ya.  I came home to an over abundance of fruit flies.  One of the darling men in my life left a little something for them before we went on vacation >:-(  Although I'm not exactly sure which one.  Anyhow, here it is!

I've heard (and tried) several different methods of gnat traps, but this one works the best and is the least icky!

Balsamic Vingar
Dawn Dishsoap

Put down enough balsamic to more than coat the bottom of a bowl or small custard dish, then add about  a tsp-tbsp (depending on the size of bowl) or dish soap.  Swish the bowl around a little to mix and tada!