So now that the cat’s out of the proverbial bag and I’ve revealed to the world that I’ve been going through IVF, I’ve had a little bit of blogger’s remorse I admit. But being a blogger means there’s a very thin line between your personal life and … well … your blog. After last week’s post went up, I experienced the requisite after-shock, but then I got a handful of sincere emails from friends and acquaintances, people who’ve taken the time to share their own fertility struggles with me, to reassure me that I’m not alone, that it’s all worth it in the end, and that I have people to turn to when the going gets tough. And that was all I needed to hear…

POLL! How early is too early to take your newborn out of the house? Like, say, to Goodwill where you want to hunt down some midcentury glassware and candlesticks for spray painting and Gorilla gluing purposes, because your pregnancy-fueled Pinterest obsession turned you into this giant quasi-DIY freak and you absolutely cannot help yourself? 

Or, you know, to Target, where the normal moms go. ???????

Sorry for the expletives, but I don’t really know how else to put it at this point. Because at this point I’ve tried giving Alex almost everything you can imagine and he continues to come home from school with a lunchbox that looks like a chipmunk snuck into it for about 30 seconds then got scared away (i.e., a few bites here, a few crumbs there). He’s now in his fourth week of school and every day continues to be a challenge. We have a few things working against us…

We started potty training yesterday. We’d been working up to it for a while, having placed a potty in plain sight and made it a regular topic of conversation, encouraging Kaspar to sit on it now and againand even narrating our own trips to the bathroom (not in extensive detail). We got a DVD all about Elmo and the potty, too, so we figured that by the time we went for it, he’d be all set to put his pee and poop where they belong and we’d be off and running. Well, we were off and running all right... just not quite in the way I imagined.