And now for something lighter...

Photos from our trip to Melbourne!

I love Australians, but I can't claim to understand them. Allow me to illustrate:

For all their quirks, I can't help but admire their devotion to shopping, as embodied by this granite changepurse announcing entry to the city's shopping district:

Oddly enough, I didn't buy anything. Well, except a hip blue oxford shirt that looks like a Maoist uniform with puffed sleeves. The Asian influence is big in fashion there.

Oh--and the moon is upside down. Crazy. And--AND!--Maltesers are way better than Whoppers (the candy, not the hamburger).

The first thing Greg did when we got there was flush the toilet to observe the coriolis effect. The man likes his wine.

Barren

Is it possible to grieve the loss of someone you've never met?

G and I have been actively trying to conceive our second child for 8 months. In February I battled with my insurance company to get them to cover infertility services, and I'm still astonished that I won: they agreed to start coverage March 1 instead of making me wait until September 1.

We had already paid for some tests out of pocket. There are problems on both sides. The biggest problem is that my test for anti-mullerian hormone (AMH), the gold standard indicator of ovarian reserve, came back almost undetectably low. It's supposed to measure both quantity and quality of eggs. The weird thing is, my cycles have been normal. Usually women going into premature ovarian failure have wonky cycles. So my fertility docs think it might be an indicator of quality for me; they're guessing that my Graves' Disease accelerated the aging of my eggs, so I keep ovulating but every one is a blooper. They said that they don't see AMH levels this low in 38-year-olds... it's as though I have the eggs of a 45-year-old.

They gently delivered the estimation of a 5% chance of conception, even with aggressive treatment (in-vitro fertilization). We're going ahead with it not because I think it'll work, but because now my insurance will cover it and I want to be able to look back and say I did everything in my power.

Off to kiss my daughter. I knew I was lucky to have her, but that was all intellectual before. Now it's in my gut. I'm afraid I'll become overprotective. She's been such a gift. Still, I keep thinking about the one I will never have, and... I'm sad.