1) Over a school break, I would discover a new character that wrote her deepest, darkest secrets in a diary. Said character would immediately feel better about life in general, as if putting pen to paper validated every unbalanced emotion she felt throughout the day.
2) As a gawky adolescent, I identified with the character. I decided to emulate her behavior, in the hopes that I'll become less gawky and attract more friends and/or possible boyfriends. I'd decide that the key to her success was the diary.
3) I'd beg mom to buy me a new diary. Sometimes she acquiesced, and sometimes she didn't. When she didn't, I would find a used notebook, tear out the school-work from the previous year, and save the leftover sheets for my inner-most thoughts and feelings.
4) The diary quickly filled up with mundane facts about my day ("ate breakfast, went to the beach, took a shower, went to bed"). After a few days of chronicalling the day-to-day operations of my household, I grew tired of the diary and gave up on the whole venture.
This process repeated itself at least once a year, usually over summer break, for about 5 years. I stopped mid-way through high school, probably because I was too busy to read and/or had my licence. Also, I may have developed an overinflated sense of self that comes with being an upperclassman in high school.
After college, I tried to start a journal again. Although I no longer believed that diaries were the key to happiness, I still felt there was value to the process. My first attempt was the year after I graduated from college, also known as "my first year on my own". I was fairly good at maintaining that journal, mostly because I was filled with angst about two failed relationships. Also, for some reason my roommate and I decided to live in a suburb with a "dry downtown", which really was an odd choice for two 20-somethings in the greater Boston area. No neighborhood bar plus no cable TV/internet equals plenty of time to brood about lost loves from college. When our lease ended, I moved to the City, and threw away my diary of loneliness.
I've tried to restart the journaling process several times since then - namely, when I was grieving my mom while planning a wedding, and when we first started trying to get pregnant - with little success.
Long story short, I'm bad at journaling, so I shouldn't be surprised that I'm bad at blogging.
On the baby-making front, we saw a reproductive endocrinologist in January. He ordered a series of cycle-day-3 tests. Since I saw the doctor on CD-5, I had to wait a whole month to begin the diagnostic tests. We had our tests mid-February, and we have a follow-up appointment with the RE on March 4th. I expect to get my period shortly after March 4th, so hopefully we'll be able to start our protocol next cycle. I plan to do a better job of updating my blog once the protocol starts.
