7 months!

Happy seven months, baby girl!

My, how you've grown.  Your personality, evident from birth, is becoming even more pronounced and nuanced with each passing day.  I have enjoyed getting to know your ins and outs and likes and dislikes and I am so proud to call you mine.  I wouldn't trade this time together for anything in the whole wide world.  You make me laugh and you challenge me in the best possible ways.  I have never known love like this before. 
  

What a ham.  That's my funny hunny.  She never ceases to be effortlessly, wildly entertaining.  I think I took these shots at around 6:30 AM...when she'd been up for over 3 hours.  Her belly was full of milk and she was ready to start her birthday by launching off the glider but mama was a killjoy and kept scooping her up and re-setting the shot. 

The second half of this year is going by much too quickly.   Everyone warned us this would happen but I didn't want to believe them.  In the blink of an eye, a mewling, motionless infant starts crawling and walking and talking.  Growing up takes a lot of work, though.  I've seen these exertions first-hand and I can testify to the ebbs and flows of sleep and teething and everything else she has to explore in the space of a day.  It's a lot of stimulation to process all at once without some bumps in the road.

We have two more swim classes left before we test our skills on the first of two aquatic vacations.  We've started weekly Music Together classes on Monday mornings.  Our group is large, about 14 children of various ages, and their (mostly) mothers.  There's one nanny and one dad.  There's a boy names Ares who lives up to his name in every way.  He wages war on the giant drums hiding in the corner and lets loose his wrath when prevented from running amok.  There's a Hannah, a Vivian, a Margot, an Isabelle, an Isabella, a Ryan, an Abigail, an Anders, and others I can't remember.  It's a nice mix of toddlers and babies and a terrifying preview of what permissive parenting looks like.  Ha!  Not for our daughter...no way.  (Example: Ryan broke free and tried to take down the fire extinguisher while Ares and Isabella, brother and sister, fought over who could climb the stacked mats in the corner before someone noticed what they were doing.)  Tempest doesn't miss a beat.  She's probably storing up ideas for when she can run around during future classes.

It's nice to be out and about in the warming spring weather with her.  She's at such a wonderful age for absorbing new experiences and I don't worry so much about keeping to a strict schedule with her because, let's be honest, if she gets two naps a day of at least 30-45 min, I'm fine with that.  These days, I don't even feel guilty about plopping down next to her and snoozing when I can.  Is it when they're toddlers that they nap for hours at a time?  Yes?  Please?  That would be SO NICE.

Seven months and she's working her way up to scooting.  She likes to grab hold of furniture now and pull herself up.  She can hold it for a few moments before her legs get tired but she knows how it works and that's scary.  Any day now she's going to just start moving and then there's no going back!

She's been in bed for about 20 minutes now which means I have another 20 minutes before she wakes up and realizes I'm gone.  I'll quit while I'm ahead and try to catch up on school work...or DVR.  Who am I kidding?  DVR always wins. 

An Unexpected Merger

So this is news: IVF NJ has merged with RMA NJ effective March 16.  We received a single page typed letter in the mail announcing this news with very little fanfare.

My initial thoughts ranged from "huh?" to "wow, good for RMA" to "oh shit."

So maybe this explains the newly exploding marketing campaign as evidenced by the radio commercial I heard the other day or the two page spread in a glossy print magazine that I saw in the nail salon.  They've made some mad bank off this merger.  It's a little disconcerting to see something that once had word-of-mouth cache now fairly ubiquitous, especially when it is directly correlated to making money and has the potential to affect quality of medical care .  

I know we're not in-cycle now, thank goodness, but this is a huge change and having just seen Anne and Dr. Hock, the fact that neither of them mentioned a word struck me as rather odd.  I was there on February 5.  They definitely knew this was happening.  Perhaps they were legally bound by silence until it was official?  But I do find it strange that the letter we received is nowhere to be found on the RMA patient portal.  There is a press release that was posted on March 18 but that's not what we got in the mail.  Something about the way this was announced to past/current patients rubs me the wrong way.  Am I losing sleep over it? No, but the reality is, this will affect us, should we move forward with another FET in the future. 

When I stop to think about logistics, it is perplexing as to how this is going to work.  Supposedly, IVF NJ patients have been absorbed into the offices of RMA, thus potentialy increasing the volume and the wait time in each RMA clinic.  If you read these FAQs from the website, you'll learn that while all doctors are remaining with their current patients, it's vague about the nurses.  If I were an IVF NJ-er, I'd have so many questions right now.  Heck, as an RMA alum, I have many questions.  I don't envy those women mid-cycle who must feel completely blindsided by this announcement, on top of all the other stresses they are dealing with along their journeys.  In fact, on my infertility support community, this is a very hot topic on the local boards.  IVF NJ folks have been told they have to wait up to 60 days for insurance to cover their upcoming cycles with the new RMA branding.  I'd be furious!  Some of these women don't have two months to spend waiting around.  Granted, there's not much you can do to battle arbitrary insurance policies if that's what they're telling the new Franken-clinic. 

So where does this leave us?  Future uncertain.  Some visceral reaction is repelling me from accepting this merger.  I don't know if it's irrational because I feel some weird possessiveness of the old RMA, or what.  Perhaps I associate our success with pre-merger RMA and my brain can't compute that it no longer exists as we knew it.  Then again, it's not like RMA was ever intimate.  You already feel like cattle at Basking Ridge and now that's simply going to be exacerbated.  Hard to tell what, exactly, I'm feeling.  Maybe it's more to do with taking something that is already impersonal (you know, ART in general), as biologically exacting and individualized as the protocols are, and amplifying the sense of insignificance?  That seems like over-analysis. 

Whatever the real reasons for my hesitation are, I'll give myself some time to absorb and to mull but I won't ignore them if they're still around in September.