The Elderberry Sausage Wangers (thread 5) and the hunt for immaculate conception - a frightfully good thread for the over-30s TTC their first baby.

[Bunnygirlie]

Our new home, hope we will all be very unhappy here and leave soon ;-)

[navis176]

merkin - I got + opk yesterday - when's yours due? Is it sad that I get excited about + opks?! You've gotta love a second line

[CatsCantFlyFast]

navis welcome back from afar. Expecting sometime between Sun and Wed BUT am being extra careful after the odd cycle from hell last time round... I don't want any surprises! Enjoy your TWW of doom

[Pipbin]

I get so excited about opk lines. Heaven knows what I would be like if I ever got a line on a pg test.

[Bunnygirlie]

Soph80 forget all this TTC nonsense, I am so jealous of you going to see 'the Last Leg' I LOVE THAT SHOW, I also think I may be a bit in love with Adam Hills!

Mike perhaps we could start a petition to keep you! We all think you comments are ace (perhaps not the c-word though lol) on our thread!

This thread is a lifesaver to me, I haven't told many 'real' people about TTC so unless hubby wants me to whinge to him then he'll have to cope with me being on MN for a bit each day!

[SidneyBristow]

Soph I think preoccupation about TTC is totally normal, in fact I defy anyone to find a woman in her 30s who wants & is ready for a baby who can truly go through all this malarkey with a breezy attitude. Last week I pointed out to DH that it's awfully hard to put TTC in the back of my mind, when there's no real way to escape it as it involves my body - sometimes being terrified of what I might find when I go to the loo, or having to do a wee test while in there, or wondering if that glass of wine with dinner is alright, etc - and it helps to talk about it with other women who go through the same thing. Plus, the more people to cheer for you when you do get a BFP, the better, right?

Fx that everyone's test lines hold out - just starting the 2ww here, cautiously hopeful as always

[navis176]

sid - I agree with you completely - my oh doesn't really understand that I can't just stop thinking about it, I think it is so different when it is your body that is involved. Oh, and I'm just starting 2ww too - fx for us mid march!!

[Soph80]

Bunny Alex Brooker is one of our friends! We met him and his girlfriend on holiday a few months back so getting the tickets via him. Oh and I am a 'real person' by the way lol but I do know what you mean.

Sidney bizarrely, one of my friends has a really breezy attitude towards it (her husband is away so much she never thinks she'll get pregnant) yet has conceived 3 times in the last few years, and will undoubtedly get pregnant again soon. Really wish I could be more like that.

[CatsCantFlyFast]

Can you get an evap on a OPK?? (Chuckles). Yes my first OPK is as white as snow

[janey1234]

Right. I'm not even officially on this thread but am sick of them banning Kerry/Gail/Mike.
Humph.

I'm up for a petition. If she's so bloody offensive people shouldn't look!!

[MotherOfCleo]

Ok, so I'm even doing my own head in now (sorry) I just did a cheapy strip test from the pharmacy and the second line is as dark/light as the test I did first thing this morning. God who'd have thought the colour of a line on a pee stick could be suck a frickin minefield.

I've uploaded it but don't expect anyone to look lol.

Sorry again for being an uptight crazy woman! I think once I'm through the weekend I'll feel better, but then I will be all alone for 10 days while the OH is away. I think I may have to call in reinforcements in the shape of my 2 best girl friends as I don't think I can get through those 10 days dealing with this totally alone.....eeeek. I am a total loser aren't I.

[CaptainMollingtonCholmondeley]

Janey I'm with you. It is so very very annoying.

Syd instadiffers are always breezy. I was breezy until about cycle 7, at which point I had total meltdown and developed my current cynical, despairing, enraged attitude towards the whole thing.
I remember my aunt once telling me that the most amazing, beautiful sex one will ever have is the sex one has when conceiving. PAH.

[janey1234]

Captain - urm, despite knowing when I ovulated, I'm not certain which time 'worked'. One of them was nice enough, the other rather functional and tbh a bit boring. No offense to your aunt but I think that amazing/beautiful statement is a load of bollocks! Most people don't know which time it was, the others absolutely knew and were DTD precisely because it was the right time, making it less than beautifully romantic in the real world...

Mother - I PROMISE the line is as pale as mine to begin with. Have you looked at my photo? Still got everything crossed for you.

[CaptainMollingtonCholmondeley]

Exactly Janey - but then my aunt was an instadiffer.

I think what she meant was that having sex with the aim of procreation was a beautiful experience, whether it works or not, but TBH after a year of TTC, when it's come down to just getting some sperm in the right place at the right time, there's very little of the beauty left!!

[Rache1S]

There was nothing beautiful about our conception love making.... a tea time quickie and then the age old pillow under the arse technique was the time which worked for us I think.

Who is starting the Free the Elderberry One petition?

[CatsCantFlyFast]

Mother the pics on here are tiny (hence why I prefer canyouseealine.com) BUT i can easily see your line. To me (based on my total lack of experience ) it just looks like an early positive BFP with a good, easily visible line. And remember hormone levels take 48 to 72 hours to double, and even then in the early days you are doubling relatively small numbers so I wouldn't expect noticeable changes early on. For example on your first test day you could have had HCG levels of 10 and now they could be on their way to 20... both levels are hard for tests to detect. (Had a look and at 13DPO HCG levels can be anywhere between 10 and 100 in a normal pregnancy!)

[barkingtreefrog]

Ok, catching up so bear with me!

MotherOfCleo Cleo is gorgeous!! (finally on a computer so can see your photos!) I have a dog who is definitely my child substitute. I am the person I always ridiculed, the dog owner who has been heard referring to herself as ?mummy?, who lets the dog sleep on the bed when DP is away, and who melts when the dog cocks his head on one side and works those gorgeous brown eyes?
Anyway, I?ve also seen your ?line? photos but am not getting drawn into the debate as I?ve never tried them myself so have nothing useful to add. I?ve always gone for the CB digital so I could just get a ?pregnant? or ?not pregnant? and not have to agonise over the strength of a line. However, I can?t resist POAS every time AF is late as I can?t cope with the not knowing even though when given a BFN I optimistically refuse to believe it, which kind of defeats the point and it?s not cheap!! So, Merkin, I might just have to make a purchase from your link there, as I won?t deliberate over wasting using a test or not if it?s cheap or cheaper actually as chips! Bring on the is it a line?! stress!!

And on the theme of TTC costing too much money, who uses the CBFM? After a year of trying I decided it was time to get more technical (I?ve been charting for the last 8 months but thought I?d step it up?) so bought one from ebay, but the sticks cost £20 for 20, and the first cycle I used it I had to use all 20 sticks as I didn?t O until CD 22! Apparently it?s normal to use 10 per cycle, but this cycle I still had to start POAS again today (CD9) so I?m not going to have 10 left to use next cycle. Will it learn from 2 cycles to not ask me to start until later next time? Can?t be using 20 sticks every cycle!

Soph my DP has no idea I?ve started coming on MN, no-one in RL does, I don?t think they?d understand. It?d definitely be you?re trying to hard/thinking about it too much/it?s not healthy etc so you lot are my dirty little secret? I do have a close friend who is also ttc and has been trying for 16 months now, so slightly longer than me, but she gets upset about it so I don?t want to ?use? her to offload to as it might set her off as well if I?m having a bad day. My two closest friends both have children and both know we?re ttc. One has two kids and didn?t struggle to conceive (although it took them 4 months to sow the second seed, so she says she understands how hard it is?), the other had an (unplanned) ectopic pregnancy then a late mc before getting her ds, so I?m lucky to have two people with different experiences to cry on talk to. Both got in touch straight away when I texted them to tell them SiL was pg again as they unlike my mother who said it was great news understood it hit me hard.

Anyway, rambling on so must go walk the dog before it gets dark?.

[SidneyBristow]

Well I guess my theory is blown, and that there actually are ladies out there who are easygoing about TTC. Sadly I don't think I'll ever be that way, even if I have Baby #1 and go on for Baby #2, 3, 4 or whatever - maybe I'm too much an overachiever but it really bugs me sometimes that I'm on cycle 8 now. All my life I thought getting pregnant was a easy as ordering a pizza, and it annoys the hell out of me that a)I was misled and b)I've not been on the lower end of "average # of months TTC" thingie and c)that I give myself such a hard time about it all sometimes. I want to enjoy this part of my marriage, not cry through it bc we haven't made a baby yet.

Cap'n LOL @ your aunt! once upon a time I might've thought the same, but last weekend laughed with my DH that wouldn't it be ironic if the shag that winds up working was the shag we'd had the night before, which I barely remembered bc I'd drunk too much

Mother a line is a line is a line! Fx for you it gets super dark soon, just to ease your mind!

[SidneyBristow]

Barking I use CBFM, for the second month now. 1st time I think I had to use 11 sticks (needed 2 for one particular day as the first one fell in the toilet...) and this second month have needed 9, I think, so there's the first box gone. It can be frustrating but I think it eases my mind a little, especially as this month CBFM & my iphone fertility app were at least 4 days apart.

[CatsCantFlyFast]

This is an experiment of sorts as using my kindle (phone out of battery and in the bath...tmi??)
I snorted at one fell down the loo Sydney!
outside of instadiffers my pet peeve is people who tell me they decided not to get pregnant for a while after getting married so they could enjoy being married first. I'd love to do that but happen to have run out of time and dont need people rubbing that in my face. (Unfair grumpiness i realise but always makes me feel inferior to people who "left enough time")

[HelenMumsnet]

Evening. We've seen the post on here about setting up a Free the Elderberry One petition, so we thought it best to post ourselves.

This is a highly unusual situation. We do understand how miffed you must feel to see a fellow Elderberry repeatedly deleted and banned. But we also hope you'd understand that we wouldn't take this kind of action lightly.

We very, very rarely post on the boards about our dealings with posters we have banned. But, in this case, we think we might make an exception, just so everyone is clear what has been going on here.

OK, we first suspended Viv/Gail/Mike (etc etc)'s ability to post when she was posting as goldengirl71, way back in December. She had come onto a very innocuous thread about living up north to post a good number of offensive, disablist posts. We're not going to repeat them all but, suffice to say that she appeared to us to be deliberately provoking the other posters ("Gosh! How easy is it to raise hackles on these threads? Love it!") and when she was asked not to use the word "retard", she posted "I'm sorry I offended you. I feel a proper mong now".

We quite often suspend posters temporarily, in this sort of situation, partly to stop them continuing to provoke and partly in order to enable us to have a quiet word with them about our Talk Guidelines.

Viv/Gail/Mike, however, re-regged within a couple of hours, posting that she'd decided to namechange.

She then posted on a regular Conception thread about how bizarre she found some of the posters on the Fabulous 40+ threads. We deleted her post and, it being Christmas and all, decided not to re-suspend her but send her a mail, asking her to please to moderate the tone of her posts.

Unfortunately we then, in late Jan, had to delete another thread she'd started in AIBU that seemed to have been started purely to criticise/poke fun at other Mumsnetters who were TTC. We did ban her for good then.

After that, she has repeatedly returned under various new accounts. And we have rebanned her each time, as is our policy.

She has mailed into us, once, recently, to apologise - for which we were grateful. But when we came to reply to her, we found she had already reregged again! We mailed her back to say:

"Hi Kerry

Thanks for your mail.

We appreciate your apology, although we have to be honest and say we would struggle to classify some of your comments as irreverent humour; they did come across to us, and many other posters, as rule-breakingly provocative.

We do understand that you value the support of the Elderberry Pavlovas and that you'd like us to reinstate your posting ability.

But we hope that you'd understand that your repeated re-regging while you are suspended doesn't give us much faith that you're willing to post within our site rules.

We can see that you've even re-regged at least once while you were waiting for our reply to this mail of yours.

Best
MNHQ"

Since we said that mail, we have heard nothing. But she had reregged again many, many times and sent very abusive PMs to several other Mumsnetters.

Apols for the very long post but we hope you now understand that we can't really allow someone to keep posting on Mumsnet when they are repeatedly breaking the site rules and, it does unfortunately seem, trying to provoke bad feelings between one group of posters and another.

[barkingtreefrog]

Ha! Merkin - I also feel like I've run out of time to do things the right way... Can't remember exactly how he phrased it, but over a year ago DP essentially asked which I wanted first - marriage or kids. I said we could get married at any age but if we wanted kids we'd best start trying (we didn't meet until I was 30) but I didn't envisage it taking 15 cycles and counting. We could have planned and had a big wedding by now!! If When we get a dc I foresee arguments about whether it has his name or not. Maybe I should just propose to him and drag him down to the registry office at the next available opportunity. Seems a shame to miss the opportunity for a big party though. I don't want to get married while pg as I won't be able to drink!!!

[Boodle9]

Oh my god, sod this TTC lark, Soph I am INSANELY jealous about your tickets for 'The Last Leg'; I absolutely LOVE the show - got into it during the paralympics as I had seen a bit of Adam Hills before and loved his stuff. Josh, Alex and Adam are such a great team together - the dramatic interpretation of a worm hole with Brian Cox had me in tears!

Well, I missed A LOT going to bed early, didn't I?! Appreciate the reply, HelenMumsnet, even though I missed the events of last night. I still feel really sad though, because at the end of the day, Kerry to us is just a friend who is struggling to TTC and dealing with it in her way. I am so glad I found the courage to stop lurking and get myself joined up and posting. I've found it extremely cathartic to bitch and moan about real-life and I don't like to think of people getting denied that opportunity. I can't really comment on most of your reasons for banning Kerry as I wasn't involved in the threads etc. However, I was around for the AIBU thread and I just think it all got taken out of context. I also feel partly responsible for that thread because we had all been talking about AIBU on here, and what a scary place it was. We were joking about starting a TTC-related thread there and so that's what Kerry did! I also think that the posters that got upset on there over the 'TTC for 10 years' remark completely misunderstood the point that she was trying to make, but Kerry's posting style is blunt and argumentative (I'm hoping she doesn't mind me saying that, because I love that - no pussyfooting round issues suits me fine.) and so the point she was making just got lost in the ensuing row.

ANYWAAAAAYS, I've sort of made my point. Far less eloquently than I would like, as usual.

[CatsCantFlyFast]

Barking that's exactly it... The amount of times i've been asked since the wedding (Jan) whether i'm pregnant and told 'we'd better hurry up'. I KNOW, but unfortunately I didn't meet DH until 5 years ago, 4 years later he proposed and then it was a year before we got married. We were NTNP for 6 months pre proposal and actively trying since about 6 months before the wedding. I would have loved to have met him sooner and had more time to go about things, but that's not the way it panned out...

[HelenCanKissMyArse]

Dear Helen of Mumsnot Towers,

How on earth can I be disablist when I myself possess only one leg? I have achieved many things in my life, notwithstanding the cruelty of my disability; didn't you see me on the telly during the Olympics (I came 52nd in the three-legged race)? I don't actually believe you when you say you banned me for the above reasons (iz it coz I iz black?!)

Anyway, I have decided to take absolutely no notice of you whatsoever (you're not my mum, you know!) and shall indeed be returning in the not-so-distant future. You will recognise me: I'm the gorgeous, large-breasted bird who's been shagging your husband for the last twelve months whilst you've been busy being a Guardian-reading fascist at Mumsnet Towers.

Ta-ta for now! xxx

[Boodle9]

www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21601880

The bit at the bottom about 'anxiety amongst sexual researchers' because they think people overestimate/exaggerate tell bare-faced lies about how much sex they have.

Come and interview the Elderberries on their sofa; we'll tell it like it is, and you can have cake!