Makeup & Beauty Monday: D-Bronzi Anti-Pollution Bronzing Drops

I’m posting pretty late in the day, but figured I’d try!
I’m a lesbian, and my wife and I very desperately want to have a baby. We made first contact with our fertility clinic two years ago. Due to my clinic’s testing policies, COVID delays, and just general slow movement, we have only had 3 IUIs in that time and are trying to assess what to do next. Our greatest priority is to get pregnant as quickly as possible.

I have no fertility issues except a lack of sperm, so we could continue with the natural IUIs. We tried a letrozole cycle and it was a disaster – I do not respond to letrozole, and had strange side effects. My doctor will not try injectables with IUI for us, given my relatively young age and lack of fertility challenges (too high a risk of multiples, not professionally justifiable in his opinion). So natural IUI is the IUI option. The procedure is completely free – covered by our provincial health insurance – unlimited attempts. Vial of sperm makes the cost per cycle around $1,300. Can continue trying right away, next attempt in two weeks, and then keep going every month now that we’re in the active queue. But success rates per month are modest.

OR – Go straight from 3 IUIs to IVF, even though I may not strictly need IVF for fertility reasons. We would have to pay completely out of pocket, which would be around $11,000 + pay the 20% of the medication costs that are not covered by my company insurance (which covers up to 80%). Grand total would be around $15,000. Given my age and test results, it’s possible we would be able to bank embryos for multiple transfer attempts to get pregnant this time/future children. Wait list of a couple months to even get started. May also have to do a “freeze all” cycle, take a one-cycle break after egg retrieval, then get on wait list for frozen embryo transfer.

I’ve read really inconclusive success rates for natural IUIs with donor sperm, ranging from 5 – 19% per cycle. Our clinic keeps saying 19% for donor cycles, but more than half are stimulated using oral medication or injectables, and it’s been impossible to get info from them on what a completely natural cycle’s success rate is. Which option would you choose?

Our daycare teacher has reached out and offered to babysit for us. We’re thrilled — she is great and our kid loves her, and we’ve never used a baby sitter before (kid just turned 2). But now we can’t decide how it should go — should we have the babysitter come over just before bedtime, and help us put kid to bed, and then we go out to dinner? If so, she’ll just be sitting in our house for a while. Instead, should we have her come over in the afternoon to play with our kid, so we can go see a movie or something? We’re way overthinking this but let me know what y’all think.

Combo feeding question – I have been mixing some formula in with bm because I don’t pump enough, but haven’t given LO a full bottle of formula, because I don’t really need to. He doesn’t seem to care about the taste of the 75% bm 25% formula mix.

He’s 10.5 months, so we could start introducing cow’s milk soon. Would you discontinue formula at that point, and do the same level of mixing with the bm? I know when kids are like, full formula people will mix formula and cow’s milk to get them used to the taste, but he doesn’t do full formula at all.

I’m a regular poster and this will out me, hence the anon. This weekend DH and I took our just 2 year old to her first soccer practice. We have been very covid cautious and she hasn’t been around many other people other than us and our nanny. We tend to go to the playground when its empty, have been to the garden center once, the shoe store once but no other stores/places really. She started going to the splash park but mostly watches the other kids and doing a few outdoor activities in the last couple weeks. Soccer was about eight 2-3 year olds and their parents in a new location. She refused to participate. She would only be carried. She is perfectly capable of kicking a soccer ball and running between cones (we do it in the field by our house). But I think all the people caused her to shut down and she kept screaming pick me up, pick me up, and then tantrum-ing face down legs kicking in the grass if I or my husband tried to put her down and hold her hand instead of carry her. It didn’t help that she got carsick on the way there (she is frequently carsick so that’s just going to be part of the ordeal I think).

We talked about going to soccer before we went, explained there would be other kids, she watched kids play soccer in the park, and we practiced kicking the ball. What else can we do to make this a better experience for her? In our house / yard / the field she is very confident and happily runs away from us and does her own thing. She’s a daredevil and climbs and jumps off stuff when she is the only kid at the playground. She is starting preschool in the fall and it will be “at the door” drop off. Part of doing this was to get her more comfortable around other people. Obviously we’ll keep trying but is there a better way to approach it? Should we sit and let her watch practice rather than carry her through practice? I think her reaction is probably within the range of normal, but she was the only kid that had to be carried the entire 30 minute practice.

My about to turn five year old is obsessed with octonauts. Any good octonauts toys or products I could get him for his bday? I was sort of unenthused by just searching Amazon – he’s not super into action figures.

What’s popular for bookbags for elementary school boys?