Two years ago, at age 33, my partner and I decided we wanted to start trying to create a family. We'd been together for seven years at that point and decided we were really ready. I spent several months researching anonymous vs. "known" donors, sperm banks in New York City, where we live, and elsewhere, and I read this book, the Lesbian Guide to Fertility, Conception and Pregnancy. It's this hippie-dippie, very natural take on lesbian fertility issues, which was very helpful to me.

We decided to inseminate at home using frozen sperm from a sperm bank in New York City. I'll have to wrtite a subsequent entry about the first insemination, but, shock to both of us, the first, at-home insemination worked. Eight weeks later I had a miscarriage. We spent the next nine months trying again, to no avail. We spent the next year taking a break from trying to conceive (TTC).This fall, we've decided to start to try again. I've had two vials of sperm on ice at the Reproductive Medical Associates of New York, the reproductive endocrinology clinic we started inseminating at when trying at home wasn't working so much anymore.

This time around I decided to take another approach: acupuncture. I skimmed Fertility Wisdom, which I found on the free pile at work. The Chinese medicine doctor who wrote it seemed to help a lot of couples conceive. The book focuses finding your internal temperature and eating foods that create warm or cool energy in your body accordingly, using acupuncture to help move energy, and then, I think, the most important idea of all: avoiding rigorous exercise or the changing of your body's internal temperature once you have either inseminated or achieved conception, so as not to upset the nest that is holding the embryo. I didn't follow the rules of this book to a T, but I tried to keep to as much of it as I realistically could. So far, I'm five weeks late, so things are looking good. I haven't taken a pregnancy test because I'm superstitious about securing pregnancy this time around, but I'm hopeful. I have greatly reduced my exercise routine: now I'm doing very mild yoga and walking only. No spinning, no insane hot vinyasa yoga, no running, and no aggressive weightlifting--all things that were among my favorite activities. I guess we attribute success here to whatever we want to believe, but this program seems to have worked for me, so I'm going with it. Wish us luck.

I started this blog two years ago. Well, not really. I started emailing myself, and a close friend, two years ago, when I was trying to get pregnant. But I never got to the blog part. I'm a lesbian. Who wants to have a baby. With her partner, I. (I'll protect her identity for now, even though no one else but me--and her--are reading this.) We've been trying to conceive using "alternative insemination" on and off for two years now. Well, really, on for a year and then off for a year, and then recently, started again. I never really understood the term "artificial insemination," because it's not artificial, really. It's just... insemination. I mean, isn't "natural insemination" just... heterosexual sex? Plus artificial insemination just sounds so medical. Well, let me tell you my story. It's pretty medical, the beginnings anyway.