This is a quick post to catch up with the latest news in my life: my IVF treatment eventually went through okay and I’m currently 5 months pregnant!

There’s never enough time for everything

I’ve been quite silent lately in this place. Saying that things have been hectic is an understatement, but I’ll try to summarise what I’ve been up to over these first few months of 2019.

There’s never enough time to look after all the balls I’m juggling!
I had to put many hobbies and projects aside, and focus on the most urgent and important stuff. It hasn’t been an easy task to accomplish, but eventually I found my way by applying this brilliant quadrants of time article.

The forced hiatus on the crime fiction writing

I had to face the reality of the facts, and put Chase Williams crime fiction novels on time off for a while.

I noticed that forcing myself to write in order to finish the latest leg of Chase’s new mystery novel was dramatically lowering down the quality of my writing. Would you rather wait a bit longer and enjoy a well-written, involving story or have sooner in your Kindle a dull, sloppy plot?

You’ve got the answer. Sighs with guilt.

New challenges at work

Last February I was asked to lead the EMEA JPOP (Jetpack and other WordPress.org related products wrangled by Automattic) support team.
It’s a huge responsibility I accepted humbly, and that put me on a stage where I started to learn tons of new things practically from scratch.

It was exactly what I was looking for: a new tough professional chapter within the company to challenge myself, and have a lot of room for learning new things, and grow also as a person.

Now that I’m gradually settling in my new role, I can say that it’s been a very intense and stressful couple of months, especially because the new role at work came at the same time of my other big main challenge (and accomplishment) – the pregnancy.

This new team leader role allows me also to do some more travelling, which included and will include trips to The Netherlands, Germany for WordCamp Europe, and our team meetup in Budapest.

I will skip the Grand Meetup this year because I will be 7 months pregnant and won’t be safe to travel overseas for the annual company gathering 😭

IVF treatments and baby Frosty due October 2019

On the day of my third official month of gestation, Franz and I announced publicly that we are expecting a baby due October 2019.

We kept this secret for three months as many couple do, and we did it knowing that the journey to that very special day has been one of the most complicated and troubled time of my life, hoping to be helpful and provide info to whoever wants to try IVF.

On the same day I also released a series of vlogs I shot during my IVF journey to document everything I’ve been gone through

In fact, we call our baby Frosty as it will be the beautiful result of a 5-day embryo frozen implantation (FET) coming from an IVF treatment.

I run a cycle of IVF treatments in the autumn of 2018, and the first fresh 5-day embryo implantation resulted into a devastating miscarriage.

That didn’t prevent me to start immediately working on the following stage (the frozen embryo attempt), and luckily this time we’ve been successful.

I also decided to document the development and growth of our very own Frosty on a blog I’m curating every week, with updates, curiosities and fitness pregnancy insights: it’s Frostygrows.blog.

Other news (less important than my IVF treatment 😛)

Meanwhile, I didn’t have time to catch up with the series of fire extinguisher posts I have all well queued in the blog’s dashboard!

The most challenging aspect here is to sync the blogging with the Extinguishers Everywhere Instagram account – here’s why I’ve stopped posting whatever it’s ready in the draft! Silly, isn’t it?

That’s a very legit #firstworldproblem. I promised myself to be less perfectionist and letting things go! (hence, more posting)

Franz has left Human Made at the end of January after 5 years of successful cooperation. He took a couple of months of vacation to reset, and you have NO idea how great it’s been having Franz on my side 24/7 during the frozen embryo stage of the IVF treatment!

He finally accepted a product manager position at the prestigious Oxford University Press: in this role he’s got the great opportunity to combine his studies as a linguist with his product ownership background.

How many chances would he have to land into a such peculiar and exciting role? I know right!

It’s a wrap!

This is it for now. I tried to be as quick as possible but I eventually dropped a thousand words 😂

In a nutshell, my biggest news is related with the successful IVF treatment, resulting into a healthy pregnancy currently at its 5 months stage, which I hope it will continue to be as great and nasty-side-effects free as it’s been so far 🤞