Time for your dosette box, granma

I haven't mentioned the baby plans for a while and given that this is theoretically a baby-making blog I thought I'd better keep my avid (!) readers up to date. We took Christmas off, and what a relief that was, too. There's a whole world of activities to think about when you're not calculating what day you can wee on a stick. Lovergirl starts again this month, in a week or so; she's doing it the 'natural' way (i.e. with a turkey baster) while I'm planning to throw a few thousand dollars out the window try the IVF clinic in a couple of months.

These are my morning pills. They make my body a veritable baby-machine, apparently. You see eleven pills, three potions and two dietary supplements. The black stuff on the spoon and the brown stuff in the glass at the back are disgusting. I could add that after taking these, all morning I do small quiet yukky tasting burps - sometimes fish oil, sometimes seaweed (not too bad), sometimes herbs - but I hate to ruin the ladylike impression you have of me.

According to my understanding of the situation: Two pills and the brown heap at the back are making my eggs soft - they get harder as you get older????!
Two pills are to calm my immune system (as you know, I kill sperm on sight).
The white powder and the white pill both increase my circulation for a more nourishing uterine environment.
Two more pills balance progesterone so it happens in tandem with something else it's meant to be happening with.
I'm not sure what the evil herb syrups are for.
I have about half of these in the evening, as well.

Also I'm meant to be not having any sugar or wheat, drinking two litres of water and exercising every day (to increase blood flow to the uterus).

The naturopath is a bit of a double edged sword - it's good to feel like I'm actually doing something other than just waiting for Dr K to tell me when to inject myself with cancer-causing ovarian stimulants and when to hop up into the stirrups; but if I don't get pregnant, it will be all my fault because, being far from a perfectionist, this excellent regime invariably fails.

To encourage myself I bought myself a little diary. The idea is that I note down all the things I'm s'posed to be doing- pills twice a day, exercise, diet - and when I do everything right in a day I give myself a gold star (I know this is childish but ten thousand cognitive-behaviourists can't be wrong). After a week of gold stars I get some kind of reward. I haven't worked out what the reward is (my usual reward is chocolate - what else is there?), because after a month of keeping the diary I haven't accumulated a single gold star. That's right, I have never managed to do everything right on the one day.

I haven't even bought the gold stars!