It's Snow Joke

Here I am, in the mountains in Tignes, France . . . it’s a glorious day outside, the sun is shining, the snow conditions look idyllic, and where am I? In the chalet, yup, it’s snow joke, I’ve hurt my leg in a fall on Day 2 (Day 2, argh!!), it seemed ok yesterday morning on Day 3, but by the afternoon and a couple of falls later after miserably failing to avoid the bumpy moguls the pain was back and so it was painful to make my turns down the mountain :-(  So I’m giving it a rest today, I’ve had a dip in the hot tub and hopefully with a massage later it will be ok tomorrow.

We are in the loveliest chalet we have ever stayed in at Tignes Les Brevieres with the lovely Mr & Mrs B. . . actually we are in the attached apartment downstairs with full use of the catered chalet upstairs and the spa for the first half of this week until this evening when a new group arrives, for the last couple of nights we’ll eat out instead so we get the best of both worlds which is kinda cool. We’ve met some interesting characters . . . the owner, her son and his girlfriend (aka Mrs Battle-Axe, Mr Posh Boy and Miss Princess Wannabe). It’s all quite weird really, we join them for dinner each night, it’s a bit like intruding on a family meal . . . we listen to them talk about their world, a world that is sooooo different to our world, a bit like a soap opera really, Miss Princess Wannabe literally does not stop talking, everything is either ‘beautiful’ or ‘ridiculous’ (imagine a wannabe Victoria Beckham), a skinny minnie in her designer wear with a suspiciously ‘perfect’ nose, quite amusing to watch, especially with super cool Mr Posh Boy bringing her back down to earth every now and again.

Despite being on holiday there is still no break from our infertility dramas! In the run up to our next IVF cycle in March I’ve been secretly hoping for a miracle (as you do) and I’ve been using our fertility monitor to track ovulation. In January I seemed to be text book, this last month though not so much, I didn’t see my peak days until as late as Day 19 (I’m usually a Day 14 or 15 kinda girl). It seems odd, I have been under quite a lot of stress though with the brother-SIL debacle and I wondered if the IVF drugs would affect anything, but since the IVF cycle everything did just return to normal like clockwork until this month. So I knew Aunt Flo wouldn’t be visiting at my usual Day 26-28 unless life really did have it in for me and wanted to throw in a short luteal phase into the mix. From about Day 26 onwards I had some abdominal pains, different to ‘normal’, I felt pretty emotional and I had some spotting, this continued for a few days (unusual for me), something definitely felt different (should have come prepared, finding a pregnancy test at a ski resort is not so easy!). It was hard not to get my hopes up a little bit, this has only ever happened a couple of times before in our TTC journey and each time my period has never been late (just some implantation spotting) so I was never left wondering for long, this time though was torturous. I POAS that evening just in case, negative . . . I waited until the morning, POAS again, another negative and then almost immediately Aunt Flo made her appearance, so so frustrating :-( I loathe POAS, all it ever does for me is send a signal to my brain to say, you can stop playing the joke now, send the good old Aunt in, and if by magic she appears that instant, ugh.

I wanted this holiday to be different, a snowboarding holiday is definitely one that helps you forget everything on your mind, because if you don’t concentrate, you fall flat on your face and eat snow, a phenomenon I’m quite used to!  So I’m a bit disappointed that it’s still on my mind, even OH is struggling too, my tears = tears for him too, bit of a vicious circle that one, I realised yesterday how fed up he is of all this too and that it’s impossible to shift it from his mind too. I know we have our new cycle coming up very soon, but even so, we had hoped for a miracle and it seemed we were quite close, but yet again our embryo’s are just not strong enough, which does make me think, will they ever be?

Anyhoo, despite not such a good start and an injury to contend with, I do hope for a better end to the week . . . after my day off I managed to get up to a cool bar on the slopes via a bubble lift (La Folie Douce in Val d'Isere) in the afternoon and had a bit of a boogie, bring on the wine!