I think the hardest part of IVF is how plain spoken it is. You know that aunt or uncle you have, who’s all straight talk and says stuff like “I tell it like it is” in a hideously self-righteous way, while whoever s/he just straight talked cries in the kitchen? Yeah, well, IVF is way more obnoxious than that. With IVF, you don’t have guesstimated conception date, you know exactly when you got knocked up, because you, your partner, the doctor, a nurse, and a few other people were there. Suppose you forget the date, all you have to do is call up your RE, who wrote it down in several places or consult all the paperwork that was sent home with you. Then, if you do manage to get knocked up, you know that for sure within a matter of 10 days. If you get a negative pregnancy test with IVF (or a BFN [big fat no] as we call it online), it’s not like a negative home pregnancy test, where a small percentage of the time, the woman’s actually pregnant, but the test isn’t picking it up yet or whatever. No, IVF, is all like, “You’re not pregnant. Straight-up, you’re not pregnant. Don’t even hang a little shingle of hope for pregnancy, because you totally aren’t. Expect your period any day now.” If your HCG levels don’t rise, then your doctor has to tell you that you are having a very early miscarriage before you actually have it. During our first miscarriage, my husband said a few times that he wished we had never even known we were pregnant. He wondered if there was a way not to be told the next time we got pregnant, if we could just have the...

Hello Dearest, Welcome back from the weekend. I don’t know about you, but I’m exhausted. Beta-testing and content wrangling, as it turns out, while good for the soul, is also frickin’ brutal. And Confession: I’m feeling a little old and responsible, because I missed out on a GREAT and highly-anticipated party in order to get Fierce and Nerdy all sussed out. My early 20’s it seems, aren’t just over. They’re buried in a graveyard under a headstone that reads “Fun Used To Be My Middle Name.” Ah Well. Hopefully today’s posts will get us all fired up for the week to come. BT-dubs, what did you do this weekend? I’m pretty much living vicariously through you until Fierce and Nerdy gets all good and going, so please let me know what you did in the comments section, and I’ll try to imagine it was me doing it. 100% Inspired,...

Ask not what your country can do for you, but how you can help your country procrastinate. –Ernessa T. Carter If you can, try not to quote yourself. It only makes you look like a self-involved asshole. –Ernessa T. Carter So Willkommen, Willkommen* to the Fierce and Nerdy blog. This is the first, and probably last, Sunday post that you’ll ever read on this blog, unless there’s some huge breaking newsy sort of thing that we just have to post on. But for the most part, Fierce And Nerdy will be a weekday blog for fellow fierce And nerdy people like ourselves. If you need an explanation of what fierce and nerdy is, then you’re probably either only fierce or nerdy and not both, but hopefully you’re enough of one or the other to enjoy this blog. And don’t worry the Fierce and Nerdy blog will definitely make you more of both. Feel free to quote Fierce and Nerdy on that. Fierce and Nerdy will also introduce you to music you’ll want to download, points of view that you’ll want to consider, and advice that you’ll want to take. Fierce And Nerdy is basically your best friend — but you know, much more fiercer and nerdier. Fierce and Nerdy will also decrease your taxes by at least 15%, so work that savings into your 2009  budget — not really. But Fierce and Nerdy is willing to make promises that it can’t possibly keep if you read it. That’s how much Fierce and Nerdy likes you. So please take that into consideration before refusing to give Fierce and Nerdy your number, because Fierce and Nerdy will be crushed, just crushed if you reject it. Fierce and Nerdy promises that most of its blog posts will...