Today marks a special anniversary, a milestone I’m guessing most people don’t mark: One year ago today, I had surgery. Why is this noteworthy? Because it changed my life completely. Stephen and I had been trying to make a baby for almost a year and a half, we’d done Clomid, we’d done injectables with insemination, and all we got was heartache. A lot of heartache. And then someone whispered in my ear: Maybe you’ve got endometriosis. I didn’t have a lot of symptoms, but I had enough to convince me to check it out. Unfortunately for many, the only way to be sure you’ve got it is to have surgery, a laparoscopy. On Thursday, December 8, 2005, I had mine. (If you click that link, you’ll see that today is also Stephen’s great-grandmother’s 104th birthday. Happy birthday, Little Gram!) Not only did my surgeon, Melanie Marin, confirm my diagnosis, she excised whatever endo she found (and it wasn’t all that much—I had a relatively mild case). And two weeks later, right around the time of my 40th birthday, Stephen and I made a baby the old-fashioned way. Talk about a gift! Harry Mose is 3 ½ months old now, and he’s just about the sweetest baby on the planet. Yeah, I’m his mom so you can take that with a grain of salt, but he really is. He’s mellow and playful and flirtatious and devilishly handsome…
Harry’s my biggest gift, of this year or any other, and lord knows the man himself has received a ton of gifts in his short time on earth. But the other day the doorbell rang with a present for me that was smaller than Harry, not quite as sweet, and nearly as addictive (hint: it’s FOOD!):
Sweet Riot chocolate-covered cacao nibs! The geniuses at Sweet Riot read my blog and thought I might enjoy them, and they were absolutely right. Nestled inside a clear plastic box was the Happy-Holly-Days pack: three different varieties of goodness, each in its own nifty little pocket-sized tin. The Flavor 50 are coated in 50% cacao dark chocolate (so they’re the sweetest of the bunch), the Flavor 65 sport 65% (making them slightly more assertive), and the Flavor 70 rock 70% and a touch of ground espresso (they’re the most sophisticated, and the ones I keep by my desk for when I’m drooping after a day of Harry-wrangling, but too lazy to brew fresh joe). I’d have a hard time saying which are my favorites—we finished the 50s first, but the 70s are just.so.handy… And did I mention that an entire tin has only 140 calories? That’s right, these are diet-friendly! Perfect for when you need a hit of chocolate but don’t want to overdo it. In fact, I think it would be pretty hard to eat a whole tin at once—no wait, who am I kidding? Of course I could eat a whole tin. I just like to think that I won’t…
And now I hear my boy crying from his crib, so I must go. Here’s hoping that each of you gets the gift you most want this year. I’ve already gotten mine, and it ain’t chocolate.