Rolling an alt...

After several years of trying, Mary and I are finally pregnant (well, OK, technically she's pregnant, and I'm just a bystander, but you get the idea). We'll have a bouncing baby boy arriving sometime around the new year (per which my grandmother helpfully pointed out that if we can time the arrival before January 1st, we can claim the baby as a tax deduction this year - I guess you don't get to be that old without being pretty damn pragmatic...)

Anyhow, it's been a long road getting here (and this is just to get to the start of an even longer road). Some random thoughts:

• In retrospect, it was probably a mistake to get a vasectomy in my 20s :) I was a smart guy, and I thought it through, and did my research before getting a vasectomy, and I really thought it was the right move for me. But what I didn't realize then was just how much your life situation can change in a few years - you may have a new partner, or you may just change your mind about having kids, or who knows what. I thought my life at 28 was how my life was always going to be, and (thankfully) that turned out not to be the case. A vasectomy is a permanent solution (duh), and as someone who's undergone a couple of painful, expensive, and only moderately successful reversal surgeries, I'd be really leery of making that kind of decision so early in life.
• It really helps to have a sense of humor if you are going to go through infertility treatments, as you are basically letting medical professionals with whom you are only slightly acquainted into the most personal parts of your life. And nothing gives you a new and profound perspective on the relationship between reproduction and sexuality like sitting in a room with a bunch of other men, waiting in line for your turn to masturbate for a lab technician.
  
• Fertility clinics have the worst porn. The discriminating patient brings his own.
• Our friends and family were generally pretty supportive about the whole thing, which we really appreciated. But for some unknown reason, a few people felt compelled to give us unsolicited advice, which I found really frustrating. Look, we're both successful, college educated adults with a healthy supply of disposable income, who are both really motivated to have kids. We've done more research on the subject of infertility than you can possibly imagine - it's great that you have a baby, but this does not make you a goddamned fertility expert. And, for the record, yes, we already tried: wearing boxers, taking vitamins, using ovulation kits, tracking basal temperature, checking mucus consistency, trying different positions, having lots of sex, having very little sex, relaxing, not relaxing, doing yoga, drinking herbal teas, taking zinc supplements, having sex at high altitudes, going on vacation, taking shorter showers, and pretty much anything you could possibly suggest to us. When my wife is already taking daily hormone supplements to force ovulation on a specific date so we can do timed artificial insemination and we are researching fertility clinic success rates through the CDC and trying to decide how many embryos we might want to implant if we use IVF, you sound really fucking stupid when you tell us to try doing it "doggie-style". And it killed me to have to smile and thank you for your well-intentioned advice instead of telling you to fuck off.

Whew. At least now we can stop worrying about fertility, and start worrying about day care :)