First Offical Apointments

Poor S, she wrote a blog about our day yesterday just a few minutes ago and then it accidentally got deleted.  So I will have to inform you about our day because she is going to bed now.

The appointment with the OB/GYN wasn’t too exciting.  We got alot of important questions answered about CMV and RH and all that sort of stuff.  She took blood and urine from S to test for a few things- can’t remember what exactly now they were all testing for.  When taking blood they managed to mangle S’s arm pretty badly.  As you can see from the picture on the left, it is nasty looking.  This picture really doesn’t do it justice.

One very sad thing she told us is that from basically now til the baby is born, I am in charge of scooping/changing the litter in the cat box.  Ugh.  I hate doing this so much.  Those cat-holes can make a real stink and normally we just take turns doing it each once a week.  I told S she would owe me 9 months of scooping once this was all over and she told me that “I’m growing a baby for you, so I don’t think I’m going to owe you any thing.”  OK fine, I’ll do it, but everyone should note that I a doing this under protest.

At the OB/GYN they will do the insemination there if we do an IUI insemination, but it is $400 for them to do it unless S’s insurance will cover it, which we should find out about next week.  Seems a little pricey considering it is just sticking a tube up in her and ejecting semen in her uterus.  Is this is sort of thing that if the insurance doesn’t cover it, we should call around town to other OB/GYN’s?  I mean, $400 is really going to add up when you think about how much money we will already be spending on the actual sperm and the shipping fees and the cryo-tank fees and the cryobank website (which reminds me, we ended up picking the California Cryobank) fees and blah blah blah.

Our other appointment was to tour the South Austin Birthing Clinic, which was awesome.  I was a little bit apprehensive about S’s desires to have a natural childbirth not in a hospital, but after seeing this place and taking to them, I am convinced it is the right thing for us.   This picture is of the front entrance.  There is also this beautiful reception area , but the best part is the rooms. Each of the rooms has a great big bed and a giant bath tub and a huge walk in shower with a big built in bench.  We were able to see two of the rooms, the music themed room and the art themed room but there was a lady giving birth (!) in the third room, which is apparently folk themed.  We both loved the art room best but the music room is cool too.  Here are both of those rooms:            

They provide pretty much everything you need once you get pregnant.  All of your monthly/weekly pregnancy check ups, the delivery and then 6 weeks of care after the baby is born.  All of this is just $4,000 without insurance and will of course be less if our insurance will cover any of it.  Hopefully we will be finding that out next week as well.  Also they had really good info on what sort of pregnancies they can and can’t handle and when they would take you to the hospital and what sort of drugs they could give out.  And only your midwife and whoever else you’d like will be in the room at the time of delivery, so there isn’t a crowd of strangers hovered around you.  I think that is nice.

So much progress!  There are more things to tell, but it will have to wait for another time.
-L