Hello World

So.  Hi.  Thanks for stopping.  A bit of introduction is probably necessary.  I'm Joe -- my wife is Jill.  I tend to think of this as "our" blog and hopefully you'll see posts from both of us at various points.  Anyways -- We're in our mid-30s and we own a home.  When I was younger I had what I called the trifecta -- it was the measuring stick by which I judged how "grown-up" a person was.  It, logically, consisted of three parts -- marriage, owning a home, and having kids.  So we have the first two taken care of, but the third -- that one wasn't quite so easy...

I don't want to ruin all the good stories right off the bat, so I'll save the specifics of why we're going through IVF for a later time.  Clearly, though, we can't have kids the 'old-fashioned way.'  We tried -- and it was fun -- but after about six months or so it become clear that it just wasn't going to happen, so before we relocated from Chicago to Milwaukee we were both scoped, poked, and prodded to find out what was up.  Not too long after moving to Milwaukee we started the process by visiting with a few different IVF docs.  Now -- about a year after moving here -- we're actually getting the process started.  And its a lot.  Which is why we decided to start a blog.


The way I see it, there are roughly three main goals we would to accomplish with the blog:


1) Educate.  Probably for the most part this will be friends and family, but it would be neat to help people we don't find out more about the process.


2) Update.  See, the thing about IVF is that -- we think about it all the time.  It's all-consuming.  So when we're not talking about it, or - amazingly - not thinking about it -- we don't really want to talk or think about it.  But we also fully recognize that people are interested -- as they should be.  This is our way of saying -- hey -- this is whats going on, without having to answer the question "How is IVF going?"  Because the honest answer really goes one of two ways -- its either 'it kinda sucks and it costs a lot of money' OR 'I'll tell you in 9 months.'  Both are pretty accurate.


3) Record.  Maybe this is narcissism - I don't know.  I just think it'll be interesting to come back and look at this in the future -- regardless of how things work out.


Lastly, just a heads-up as to subjects coming at some point in the future -- I'll break down that $25,000 number in the blog's title, give more about the biology and what is happening, and we'll definitely spend a lot of time talking about what the experience is like.  Because it's crazy, it's weird, and hopefully -- it'll be successful.