Our Decision...

They say the timing is never right to get pregnant. And I agree completely - we've thought about trying for kids over the last year or so, but there was always something stopping us.

Our jobs were probably the most guilty - we've both had to change jobs several times over the last 2 years, and it's always hard to think about starting a family when you just started a new job! Val was at GNF doing an industrial post-doc from January 2004 to July 2004, and then accepted a permanent chemistry position at Sequenom, where he worked for a whopping 1 week before they shut down their chemistry department. He was lucky to find another job quickly, but it was only a temporary position at Vertex. He finally landed a stable, full-time position when he decided to leave the lab and moved to Fish & Richardson as a scientific advisor in January 2005.

Unfortunately, just as Val started at FR, I found out that Merck (where I had been working as a chemist since 2002) was shutting down their San Diego site. Would we ever both have a stable job at the same time? I didn't make any decisions about another job right away, but when an opportunity came up to continue working with several of my co-workers at a start-up company, we decided it would be the best thing. The cost of living in San Diego is just too high to try to make it on one salary, especially if we planned to buy a home here. We could try to manage on one salary once we had kids, with the hopes that we'd have more money saved up and Val would have an increased salary due to more experience.

So I started working for Amira in June 2005. Because of the nature of my job (lab-work with chemicals), and the nature of the company (a start-up the relied heavily on it's 25 employees), it was just not possible to get pregnant early on. We decided to wait at least a year before we would think about getting pregnant again.

Of course, things are always changing. In May 2006, Val switched law firms and began working with Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. At the same time, we jumped into the housing market and bought a 3 bedroom townhouse. That was a huge move for us, because the San Diego housing market was just so out of control, but we also knew that with our two jobs, we would probably be living in San Diego for at least a couple of more years. So, despite the crazy mortgage payments, we decided to jump on a townhouse that we really loved (click here for photos) - it was in a great location (just 10 miles to Val's work), had a beautiful layout, and was big enough to allow us to grow as a family if we wanted to stay longer. We closed on June 9, 2006 and moved in shortly afterwards. At the same time, I had my one-year anniversary with Amira - the time we had set to start thinking about kids again.

In July 2006, I turned 29. I had always thought I would have kids by the time I was 30 - I didn't want to wait until I was in my 30s to start trying. So the clock was ticking! And because of FAM (see my post about FAM), I hoped we would be able to get pregnant relatively easily and thought, why not aim for a month that I'd like to have a child. May always seemed like such a nice month for a birthday, which meant conceiving sometime in August. Well, August was here and we needed to decide what we wanted to do.

Convincing Val was another matter - he had just started a new (albeit stable and very promising) job with another law firm, and was obviously stressed about making a good impression and getting the experience he needed to. Plus, he was planning to write the patent bar exam in the fall of 2006, which meant a lot of studying and preparation. Add to that the fact that we had just bought a new house, and his mind wasn't exactly thinking family. To be honest, neither was mine - but I did hear the clock ticking and also wanted to try for a spring baby. So, despite the timing not being perfect, we decided to give it a go. My cycle 34 started on July 23 (3 days before my 29th birthday), and my anticipated ovulation was on August 5. We planned everything perfectly, and lo and behold, on August 17, just 10dpo, I got my first BFP! (You can see my charts here.) Reality still hasn't sunk in, but we have 8 more months for that!