Infertility: My third ectopic pregnancy.

Last spring I wrote a bit about my struggle with infertility up to that point. In the most recent entry I shared my feelings about having to go through a bilateral salpingectomy (i.e. removing both of my fallopian tubes), and what it would mean for my future TTC journey. Here’s an excerpt:

Some studies suggest that a salpingectomy can increase the success rate of IVF for patients who have had repeated ectopic pregnancies. Moreover, it would prevent me from having another life-threatening ectopic pregnancy in the future.

This is what my doctors told me in 2015, and I fully believed them. When you’re struggling with infertility, you quickly learn more than just the basics about how babies are made, and you learn to question everything people, including doctors, tell you. However, with my understanding of the female reproductive system, it seemed logical that no tubes would equal no place for a pregnancy to get stuck, and I saw no reason to question what I was told in this instance. A year and a half later, I would learn the hard way how wrong this was.

Project Life: April 2017.

My intention is to finish documenting each month during the following month, when memories are still fresh on my mind, but this didn't really work out in March and April. The reason why I fell behind is that I've been focusing on some other projects and also because documenting March (especially the trip to Budapest) took longer than usual. Last week I finally finished documenting April though, so now I am almost back on track. I've already started working on my June spreads and I hope I can finish my May spreads before the end of the month. For now, I thought I'd share my spreads for April:

Project Life: Budapest 2017.

Today I thought I'd share the spreads I made documenting my trip to Budapest in March. I filled up eight whole spreads, which might seem like a lot, but since I don’t make separate travel albums I want to document everything in great detail in my annual photobook. Not having to limit the number of pages I fill up is one of the main reasons why I prefer digital Project Life for my current memory keeping. At the end of the year it won’t matter if my book is 150 or 250 pages long, but it would have made a huge difference if I were using physical 12x12 albums.

To make the pages cohesive I tried my best to stick to one kit, and after trying out a bunch of different ideas I went with Sunny Days Ahead by Paislee Press. I threw in some cards from the Everyday, Midnight and Moments Like These editions and Weekend Vibes + an element (Go See Do) from Summer Manifesto. (Some items have been recoloured.) As you can see I also included some memorabilia which I scanned when I came home.

Life Lately: May 2017.

Watching | Believe it or not, we did not watch a single film in May! I don't if that has ever happened before. It says a lot about how many episodes of The Office that we watched throughout the month. We've made it up to season 7 by now :)

Listening to | I dusted off my summer playlist to get in the mood for summerrrr :)

Consuming | Nectarines that are finally in season.

Reading | Still The Zookeeper's Wife. Thank goodness my summer vacation is coming up so I can catch up on my reading. Haven't finished a book since March!

Visiting | Our parents + some other relatives.

Enjoying | Warm and sunny days, all the beautiful flowers that were in bloom, feeling close to achieving my dreams for a little while (until it all came crashing down, unfortunately).

Making | Project Life pages for my 2017 album + my (physical) infertility album. Also I added a second extension floor to my dollhouse so I spent a lot of time making plans for that :)

Looking forward to | Summer, especially our trip to Istria in July!