IVF Journey: 19w2d pregnant

This is my IVF diary. My husband and I have been trying to have a baby for four years now, and have a diagnosis of 'unexplained infertility'. We have finally reached the top of the waiting list for IVF - a form of assisted conception. I'm blogging about what happens as it happens, as a kind of therapy for me and as an awareness raising exercise of what IVF is all about.

I bought this baby outfit a few weeks back because it was cute and lovely. But it is really most suitable for a girl baby. At this point we don’t know if we are having a girl or a boy.

Since the embryo was replaced within me, we’ve called the future baby ‘Kipling’ and we’ve referred to Kipling as a he.

Kipling is I’m told an ‘in utero name’ and it is just a silly nonsense that we selected. Nope, it’s nothing to do with cake or the poem ‘If’. We’d been talking about some people calling their baby after the place it is conceived. Our baby was conceived in a test tube months before the embryo was replaced rather than the usual conception day a few days before it implants. But as we knew what day the embryo would be replaced we knew which day was the nominal conception day, five days before replacement. On that day the husband and I were at the Scottish Boat Show in Inverkip and we joked about it being conception day without us taking the usual steps… So in the footsteps of the Beckhams and many others we took our location on conception day (Kip) and in our case we added a diminutive (-ling).

We refer to Kipling as Kipling, Kip, K, Special K, Little K… all sorts of things along those lines.

And we refer to him as a him. He might or might not be a him – and his gender doesn’t really matter to us – but we thought it was nicer to go for one or the other to make things a bit more pleasant and personal than ‘it’.

This is very relevant this week as we are about to have our 20 week foetal anomaly scan at which we can decide if we want to find out if Kipling is a boy or a girl.

Most people I know that are pregnant or have had babies have left this as a surprise and I’ve heard all their arguments in favour of this. It seems the surprise is fun, and gives you something to look forward to finding out.

I don’t really identify with this though, I just feel like I might as well know if I can know. For me that would be nice, make it more real, make it more personal. It will help me visualise our future baby.

Plus it will make baby clothes buying easier for us and others buying (or knitting!) on our behalf, and it will make the naming discussions less complicated.

Happily the husband would like to find out too.

So later this week we might need to switch to referring to Kipling as a she!

I’m looking forward to seeing Kipling again at the scan and finding out more about him.