Not great at this blogging thing

Yes, I realize it's been a few years since I "rebooted" the blog. I see from previous blog entries that I hinted at a problem with fertility, but left the subject hanging there.

So here's an update:

1) We have a child now. Her name is Abigail (meaning: source of father's joy), and she is going to be 16 months old in a couple of weeks.

2) We figured out what the problem with conceiving is - and before you say "well, duh" and point to #1... I have something called "46/47 xxy Mosaic Klienfelter's Syndrome". That's the root cause of the issues with conceiving, but it's not clear what this is without some explanation:

a) First a lesson on making babies, beyond the fun part: as the boats drop hordes of soldiers onto the beach, many don't make it out of the water. Many more die just at the shoreline. Many more are gunned down a few steps onto the beach. Of the few that penetrate the many defenses, only one makes it into the bunker. When that happens...

i) Life begins, and the cell starts dividing.

ii) More cells divide from those cells. They tell two friends, and they tell two friends... and so on.

iii) These cells make up the building blocks for every function and form in your body.

b) In my body, the first cell split in two imperfectly. There were errors. One of the two cells decided there was an error, and fixed it. The other did not. This is where the "mosaic" part of the disease comes in - half my cells are normal, half are affected with Klienfelter's Syndrome.

c) Klienfelter's Syndrome is characterized by an extra "X" chromosome (or multiple "x's") attached to the normal XY chromosome (only guys can have Klienfelter's. Sorry ladies.). This makes for all kinds of silliness, including (in my body) the inability to produce Testosterone.

d) No Testosterone means many things, not the least of which means no sperm. No sperm = no conception, no conception = no babies.

e) But... hold on... #1 says we have a baby? She is the result of a donor + my wife. No sperm also means no IVF (invitro-fertilization, where my army dude gets put directly into her bunker). There's something called "ICSI", but it's $5000.00 more per shot, and we're not made of money. Besides, all the children from that procedure would either be carriers of Klienfelter's (all the girls), or have Klienfelter's to some degree (all the boys).

3) I'm coping with this knowledge that I can't make life. Part of me wishes for the technology that would make time-travel possible, if only to go back in time and tell myself this piece of information... I'll probably make that a spin-off post sometime in the near future.

4) I'm done school. I work as a youth leader in Cobourg, ON. Sometimes I question that decision. I didn't make it through the second round of ordination testing, and honestly sometimes I question that path as well. I'm doing a lot of path questioning these days.

That's all for now. Before I forget and three more years pass, I'll end this post and post the other one.