Photo Friday: Travel and 200th/300th Blog Roundupl!

Today is a big day in Photo posts.  It's our usual Photo Friday, brought to us by the fabulous Calliope at Creating Motherhood.  Today's topic is Travel, so I pulled out some photos of, well, various forms of transportation taken while I was travelling!  The 2nd part of it is the anniversary of Mel's Blog Roundup.  To that end, we are posting pics of cake and writing about what the ALI community means to us. 

So here we go!

This is a vestige of Old Route 66, smack dab in the middle of Petrified Forest National Park.

A view of Fisherman's Wharf from the top of Lombard Street. 

Road trippin' with Mom.  Yes, she always hugs the wheel.

Hot Air balloons getting ready to lift off in Sedona, AZ.  It was one of the most fabulous things in the world to do!

Now, the 2nd part....for the cake, here is my wedding cake! Total cheese, and we loved every face-smooshing moment of it :) 

But what's important here is our community, and what it means to us.  Where to start???  In March of this year I was lost, in despair. And VERY alone.  A friend said, "I have a friend who did IVF and was successful."  The last thing we want to hear, right?  But he wore me down, and I emailed the friend.  His wife had blogged about all they went through, and she was my first contact in this community.  To this day, I owe her ... the gift of this community.  So, thank you to Andrea for the welcome and support she gave me when I was blind and stumbling. 

What this community has given me is a support system that I cannot get IRL. Women (and occasionally men) who completely and utterly understand what my husband and I are going through, suffering through.  I get insight into our disease.  I get the pleasure of holding up those same women when they need it, just as they do for me.  I get to read AMAZING posts that are so moving, so insightful, so beautiful as to move me to tears, and make me really THINK about my life.  I get to read posts that make me pee my pants laughing, which on the bad days, cannot be beat.  And I get to create those posts as well. 

And I am pretty sure I could go on and on and on about this.  But the important thing is that I feel love, support, joy, sadness with these women, a connection that I could not live without now that I have it, and for which I am eternally grateful.