Jeff's birthday

Tomorrow is Jeff's birthday, but we celebrated over the weekend. I have been experimenting with some ideas, and made an experimental chocolate orange ice cream cake. I baked a chocolate cake in a springform pan lined with parchment, froze it (still in the pan), made an experimental orange flavored and colored ice cream, poured it on top of the cake, sprinkled chocolate shavings over the top, and froze the whole thing. This is how it turned out:

It tastes pretty much just like a Terry's chocolate orange, only made of cake and ice cream. There are a couple of things that I would do differently next time, but would also definitely call it a success. I think next time I would make the cake layer a bit shorter, and make the ice cream just a bit firmer (slightly less melty, perhaps by adding more egg yolks), so that they both can be at an optimal temperature at about the same time. However, I am fairly proud of this accomplishment, as I came up with this specific method for ice cream cake making on my own (not from a cookbook or the Internet).

Also, in case you're wondering, the shirt Jeff is wearing is for the Canadian Football League team called the Hamilton Tiger-Cats. Yes, Tiger-Cats, affectionately known as the Ti-Cats. In Saskatchewan Roughriders territory it is probably best not to be seen outdoors in this shirt, but Jeff got it at a white elephant gift exchange last year, and likes to wear it occasionally. He does have some pretty incredible shirts :-)

Recipes, Cats, and the Evening News

First, let me publicly address comments from last week:

The sweet potato ice cream recipe I used came from The Perfect Scoop by David Lebovitz, and someone has posted the recipe online here. I used less sugar (a little under 1/2 cup), and omitted the salt and lemon juice, and didn't make the maple glazed pecans. Also, I used evaporated milk (a whole 12 ounce can instead of 1 cup +2 tablespoons like the recipe calls for) instead of whole milk to make it creamier, and baked the sweet potatoes (probably more like 1 1/4 pounds as opposed to just 1 pound) instead of boiling them. Oh, and I also put in about a teaspoon of cinnamon instead of 1/4 teaspoon. In my mind, I followed the recipe, but my ice cream probably tasted quite a bit different than it would if you actually followed the recipe. Jeff makes fun of me for this, and also finds it very annoying at times. He often has to ask me how we actually make various dishes knowing that if he follows the recipe it won't turn out quite right. He has sometimes made me write things down, but a lot of this stuff is just in my head.

Jeff's cat shirt is kind of amazing, but I have become habituated to it and forget how funny it is. Jeff is  slowly decorating the house for Halloween (he wants everyone to know that it is not done yet), and this weekend brought the addition of another giant cat, this one looking out our window:

Note the giant green cat eyes

Things are slowly moving along on all fronts. My hormone levels are back down to normal non-pregnant levels, and I am in a rest phase. We are taking a bit of a break from things in that domain, which is nice and allows me to think more about other things.

We are in the middle of the semester now, and it definitely feels like it. I spent much of the weekend working, as did Jeff. Jeff has been working on deadlines for various things, including multiple grant proposals, since the beginning of the semester. He still has about two more weeks of this craziness before things get back to the usual level of middle of the semester craziness. I am hoping things calm down soon, because if they don't it is possible that Jeff will lose his sanity completely :-)

But, even with all the craziness Jeff managed to find time to be interviewed for the local news. The video is here, with Jeff's part starting around 5:45. One of our friends commented that Jeff should be a hand model :-)

October-iness

It is feeling very October. Jeff is watching as many horror movies as he can in honor of Halloween month, and creepy monsters are becoming a bit more prevalent around here.

A monster called Pumpkin Head presenting me with a spoon to stir my morning tea

It is also Canadian Thanksgiving weekend. We will be celebrating again with our friends Vanessa and Jason as we did last year, though this year there will be the addition of their almost 10-month-old at the table. This morning I baked a pie, we have bread baking in the breadmaker, and Jeff is preparing some of our garden vegetables.

I have said it before and I will say it again – Thanksgiving is a great holiday to celebrate twice, particularly the pumpkin pie part.

I also experimented with a sweet potato ice cream recipe yesterday. I was skeptical, because it is a fairly healthy recipe, and very healthy as ice cream goes: the only ingredients are sweet potatoes, milk, spices, and a bit of brown sugar. The result was surprisingly good – creamy, smooth, and delicious. I'm not sure if I could see myself eating it year-round, but it will definitely be a regular in the rotation for fall!

Picking up and returning to normal

Thanks to everyone who left comments and sent kind words my way. This has been one of those hard times, and it is very helpful to be reminded that we have people thinking of us and have support. And, as we always seem to do, we are getting back to normal.

Last weekend Jeff's dad visited, and we had a very nice time barbecuing, harvesting the garden, going out to dinner, going for a short hike, and just hanging out.

The haul from the garden this year was less than last year, partly because of a wet and cool summer, and partly because we planted less potatoes. Overall we had about 4 1/2 pounds of beets, 10 pounds of carrots, and 16 pounds of potatoes. We ended up with three giant bags of beet greens, and even though we had harvested all of the Swiss chard a couple of weeks ago, it seems to have started growing back and we have a bumper crop. And possibly most exciting is that we finally harvested some rhubarb.

We were away when we would have started getting some rhubarb in early summer, and then the plant shot up a large flower stalk and stopped producing the the part of the plant that we would eat. We had to leave it alone so that it would regenerate energy into the root and not kill the plant. We know now that as soon as a flower stalk starts to appear we should cut it off so that the plant doesn't use so much energy that way. But, just at the end of summer it started shooting out regular stalks and leaves again. I am not 100% certain that this is the right thing to do, but we are starting to have frosts at night, and since that would likely kill the rhubarb leaves/stalks, I just cut them all off so that we could get at least a little bit of tastiness out of our rhubarb plant this year. I do worry a bit that cutting all of the leaves/stalks may end up killing the plant so that it will not come back next spring, but I don't think so. In the words of my internship friend Jeff J. (who grew up in North Dakota, with weather not so different from what we have here), "Rhubarb is bad ass." I think it will survive.

This free-form rhubarb tart just came out of the oven:



We will be enjoying it shortly :-)

Avoidance is getting too hard

For a long time, and very prominently since May, I have been avoiding a topic on this blog that has featured very importantly in our lives. I had plans to let the cat out of the bag when the issue resolved, but now that is not going to happen as quickly as we had hoped/planned. Avoidance is getting too hard, so I'm just going to spill it: Jeff and I are trying to get pregnant.

The full story is extremely long, so I will try to give an abbreviated version. A little over four years ago we decided that the timing was right to have a baby. We had first started talking about it around four years prior to that, but it wasn't the right time with the stresses of grad school (financial instability, future unknowns, etc.). After spending some time trying unsuccessfully to get pregnant, we got some basic testing done to see if there was a problem in that department, and discovered that Jeff had a very low sperm count.

Skip ahead to early 2012, and we were making plans to start in vitro fertilization (IVF). We had gone through quite a bit of discussion, consultation with doctors, and even medical intervention, and it turned out that this was our only option if we wanted to have our own baby. After much testing and preparation, we were finally ready to proceed. Then, the day after our appointment with the reproductive endocrinologist (IVF Dr.), my brain bled.

So I had brain surgery in June 2012, and for a good long time after that was really in no position to have a happy, healthy pregnancy. Then, once again after much discussion and consultation with doctors, we decided in early 2014 that the timing was right, and I could physically handle a pregnancy without putting my own well-being at risk.

Saskatchewan is the only province in Canada that has no health coverage for fertility treatments, and since that means we would be paying out-of-pocket anyway, we decided to go to Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) instead of a more local but less well-established clinic. This has involved many phone calls, several trips to Portland, and lots of complicated coordination between very different healthcare systems.

Our road trip to Oregon in June was only part vacation – we were also in Portland for IVF. We had some idea what we were getting into, but didn't really understand how intense a process IVF is until starting it ourselves. There are many weeks of drugs, including a variety of self-administered injections, many blood draws and appointments that are at times daily, and the whole process is very physically taxing. We had originally hoped that we would be coming home from Oregon pregnant, but for medical reasons (related to IVF, not to my other medical issues), pregnancy was once again put on hold. We were able to get six embryos created, but they were all frozen for later use.

After returning home, we started to prepare for a frozen embryo transfer (FET). The preparation involves about seven weeks of drugs, blood tests, and ultrasounds. We went back to Portland for a FET on September 3, and then waited twelve (excruciating) days for a pregnancy test.

Have you ever heard that saying "you can't be half pregnant?" It is supposed to suggest that there are some things in life that really are black and white. As with most things, it turns out that this is an oversimplification. On September 15, my pregnancy test came back "inconclusive," because my hormone levels were in between what is considered to be definitely pregnant, and definitely not pregnant. I went back every two days for blood tests, and my hormone levels were low but rising, indicating that I was not not pregnant, but that the chances that this would be a viable pregnancy were quite low.

Finally, on Monday, it was determined that my hormone levels were not rising quickly enough, and that this would definitely not be a viable pregnancy. Still up in the air was whether it would simply be an early miscarriage, or an ectopic pregnancy (which can be quite dangerous if not treated appropriately). So, more blood tests. Today my hormone levels started to drop considerably, meaning that this failed pregnancy will be taking care of itself, with no need for such careful monitoring or intervention.

People talk about miscarriage as if it is an event that occurs at a specific time, with a clearly defined beginning and end. Maybe in some cases that is how it works, but in my case not so much. It is hard to say exactly, but I have probably been in the process of losing this (very early) pregnancy for about a week, and before it is fully over it might be another week or two (before hormone levels get back down to definitely not pregnant levels).

We can't say yet exactly when we will be headed back for round two, but it will definitely be a few months. We have to wait for my hormone levels to get all the way back down to normal, then let my body rest, then dive back into seven weeks of preparation (lots of drugs, blood tests, ultrasounds) before we can actually transfer another embryo.

So, that is where we are. All this going on at the same time that we are trying to focus on other things, like the start of the semester. I am ambivalent about posting all this. On the one hand, I feel like some people already know more about my personal business, like medical issues, than they need to. Also, pregnancy is one of those things that people tend not to talk about until they have a viable pregnancy with low chance of miscarriage. On the other hand, it feels like I am putting up a front, and to be honest is just really exhausting, to continue talking about what is going on in my life while leaving out what is most central to me right now. Plus, many of the people who read this blog already know parts of this story. I know that some of you are wondering what is up, and since it has been a difficult couple of weeks I haven't really been up to providing an update. A blog post seemed like the most efficient way to do it.