The Two Week Wait


Book Description

For the last two decades, Jane has been trying for a baby. She knows all about surviving the agonising two-week wait between ovulation and test. Increasingly desperate, Jane opens her laptop, clicks, 'TWW Forum: New Thread', and types. 'Anyone else starting their two-week wait? Shall we wait it out together?'




The Two Week Wait Challenge


Book Description

Trying to conceive is an exciting (read: excruciating) time in women's lives, but there is no more daunting a task during her cycle than the two week wait. It's a time when wanna-be mommas can find themselves anxious and emotionally wrecked. Enter The Two Week Wait Challenge: a handy guide to navigating the time between potential conception and the day you're able to test for pregnancy. Chock-full for easy, inexpensive self-care practices and positive affirmations, the challenge encourages women to take time for themselves (while simultaneously speeding up the 14 days) and allows their partners to be a part of the process in a loving, supportive way. Add a dash of sass and humor to help you survive and you've got a recipe for a successful (less painful) two week wait.




Just a Miracle


Book Description

It's a privilege to be a woman. Gifted with the ability to procreate, she stands apart. Being able to carry a child and become a mother is a dream for most women. When dreams don’t become realities, life seems meaningless. Using her own journey, Neena George in her memoir Just a Miracle – My Tryst with Infertility shares the roller-coaster ride she endured. She aims to bridge the literary gap about the associated stigma, societal pressures and emotional trauma which are hardly talked about. The book provides stress relief, support, hope and even encourages the reader to cling on to life, faith and love, especially when you’re at a cross-road and the end seems too far. Her experiences give an insight not only into the strategies to effectively handle infertility, but also any situation in life across the barriers of age, gender and background. The journey would resonate with many, make them understand how fortunate they are and would highlight the importance of being more empathetic and sensitive to others facing challenges. Rising like a phoenix each time she hit a roadblock, forms an integral part of her narrative. The book concludes with many learnings and takeaways. You’re sure to draw inspiration to pursue your dreams with rock-solid determination and faith despite all odds. It’s all about understanding your potential and empowering yourself to handle situations. After all, everything is just a mind game.




The Art of Waiting


Book Description

A brilliant exploration of the natural, medical, psychological, and political facets of fertility When Belle Boggs's "The Art of Waiting" was published in Orion in 2012, it went viral, leading to republication in Harper's Magazine, an interview on NPR's The Diane Rehm Show, and a spot at the intersection of "highbrow" and "brilliant" in New York magazine's "Approval Matrix." In that heartbreaking essay, Boggs eloquently recounts her realization that she might never be able to conceive. She searches the apparently fertile world around her--the emergence of thirteen-year cicadas, the birth of eaglets near her rural home, and an unusual gorilla pregnancy at a local zoo--for signs that she is not alone. Boggs also explores other aspects of fertility and infertility: the way longing for a child plays out in the classic Coen brothers film Raising Arizona; the depiction of childlessness in literature, from Macbeth to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; the financial and legal complications that accompany alternative means of family making; the private and public expressions of iconic writers grappling with motherhood and fertility. She reports, with great empathy, complex stories of couples who adopted domestically and from overseas, LGBT couples considering assisted reproduction and surrogacy, and women and men reflecting on childless or child-free lives. In The Art of Waiting, Boggs deftly distills her time of waiting into an expansive contemplation of fertility, choice, and the many possible roads to making a life and making a family.




Two-Week Wait


Book Description

An original graphic novel based on the IVF stories of its husband-and-wife authors and the 1-in-50 couples around the world like them. Conrad and Joanne met in their final year of university and have been virtually inseparable since then. For a while, it felt like they had all the time in the world. Yet now, when they are finally ready to have kids, they find that getting pregnant isn’t always so easy. Ahead of them lies a difficult, expensive, and emotional journey into the world of assisted fertility, where each ‘successful’ implantation is followed by a two-week wait to see if the pregnancy takes. Join Joanne and Conrad, their friends, their family, their coworkers, and a stream of expert medical practitioners as they experience the highs and the lows, the tears and the laughter in this sensitive but unflinching portrayal of the hope and heartbreak offered to so many by modern medicine.




Klondikers


Book Description

For readers of The Boys in the Boat and Against All Odds Join a ragtag group of misfits from Dawson City as they scrap to become the 1905 Stanley Cup champions and cement hockey as Canada’s national pastime An underdog hockey team traveled for three and a half weeks from Dawson City to Ottawa to play for the Stanley Cup in 1905. The Klondikers’ eagerness to make the journey, and the public’s enthusiastic response, revealed just how deeply, and how quickly, Canadians had fallen in love with hockey. After Governor General Stanley donated a championship trophy in 1893, new rinks appeared in big cities and small towns, leading to more players, teams, and leagues. And more fans. When Montreal challenged Winnipeg for the Cup in December 1896, supporters in both cities followed the play-by-play via telegraph updates. As the country escaped the Victorian era and entered a promising new century, a different nation was emerging. Canadians fell for hockey amid industrialization, urbanization, and shifting social and cultural attitudes. Class and race-based British ideals of amateurism attempted to fend off a more egalitarian professionalism. Ottawa star Weldy Young moved to the Yukon in 1899, and within a year was talking about a Cup challenge. With the help of Klondike businessman Joe Boyle, it finally happened six years later. Ottawa pounded the exhausted visitors, with “One-Eyed” Frank McGee scoring an astonishing 14 goals in one game. But there was no doubt hockey was now the national pastime.




The Two Week Wait


Book Description

After a health scare, Lou is forced to consider that the time to have a family is running out. The problem is: even though her eggs are viable, she and her partner don't have enough money for the necessary fertility treatment. Meanwhile, up in Yorkshire, Cath, a little older than Lou, is longing to start her own family with her husband, Rich. But she's recovering from cancer, and as a result of chemotherapy is infertile. Lou and Cath, brought together by a fertility clinic, end up egg-sharing - a process where a woman who has good eggs can donate them to another who needs them, in return for free IVF. As both women simultaneously try to conceive, with the same woman's eggs, the novel follows their parallel journeys to create a family - and as the foetuses grow, so does the novel.




The Friendship Challenge


Book Description

The Friendship Challenge can help you get the conversation started about bridging the racial divide in your community. The Friendship Challenge is a six-week guide, helping individuals and groups promote racial reconciliation in their communities—one person at a time, one friendship at a time. The first week prepares individuals and groups to reach out to a person on the other side of the racial divide, whether it is a person at work or in a nearby church. The next five weeks take that small group through a study that fosters true reconciliation—the kind of reconciliation Jesus showed in his own life and death. Take the Friendship Challenge and spend the next six weeks cultivating true reconciliation in your community.




The Impatient Woman's Guide to Getting Pregnant


Book Description

Comforting and intimate, this “girlfriend” guide to getting pregnant gets to the heart of all the emotional issues around having children—biological pressure, in-law pressures, greater social pressures—to support women who are considering getting pregnant. Trying to get pregnant is enough to make any woman impatient. The Impatient Woman’s Guide to Getting Pregnant is a complete guide to the medical, psychological, social, and sexual aspects of getting pregnant, told in a funny, compassionate way, like talking to a good friend who’s been through it all. And in fact, Dr. Jean Twenge has been through it all—the mother of three young children, she started researching fertility when trying to conceive for the first time. A renowned sociologist and professor at San Diego State University, Dr. Twenge brought her research background to the huge amount of information—sometimes contradictory, frequently alarmist, and often discouraging— that she encountered online, from family and friends, and in books, and decided to go into the latest studies to find out the real story. The good news is: There is a lot less to worry about than you’ve been led to believe. Dr. Twenge gets to the heart of the emotional issues around getting pregnant, including how to prepare mentally and physically when thinking about conceiving; how to talk about it with family, friends, and your partner; and how to handle the great sadness of a miscarriage. Also covered is how to know when you’re ovulating, when to have sex, timing your pregnancy, maximizing your chances of getting pregnant, how to tilt the odds toward having a boy or a girl, and the best prenatal diet. Trying to conceive often involves an enormous amount of emotion, from anxiety and disappointment to hope and joy. With comfort, humor, and straightforward advice, The Impatient Woman’s Guide to Getting Pregnant is the bedside companion to help you through it.




The Great State of West Florida


Book Description

From the beloved author previously compared to Cormac McCarthy and Joyce Carol Oates (Washington Post), a startling and unconventional neon-pink Western of vengeance, family, and first love as two warring factions vie for control of a blood-soaked Gulf Coast It’s 2026, and Rally is thirteen years old. The long, hot Louisiana summer looms before him like a face-melting stretch of blacktop, and the country is talking civil war while his adoptive family acts more vicious than ever. Rally spends his days wondering about his dead father’s people, the Woolsacks of West Florida, who long ago led a failed rebellion to carve their own state from the swamp and sugar-sand of the coast. That family might have been his too—if his mother and a crew of vigilantes hadn’t tried to kill them all back when he was a baby. Rally lives in the shadow of guilt and in fear of the only other survivors: his uncle Rodney, now a professional gunfighter on the app DU3L, where would-be shooters square off in armed combat, and his mysterious cousin Destiny, whereabouts unknown, whose own violence brought the massacre to an end. When the Woolsacks’ legacy is co-opted by Troy Yarbrough, a far-right politician leading a movement to turn the Florida panhandle into a white Christian ethnostate, Rodney bursts into Rally’s life, taking him on a journey into the wild heart of West Florida, where they join forces with a woman known only as the Governor—part prophet, part machine, with her own blazing vision for West Florida. Soon Rally will learn what West Florida means to the Woolsacks, and the lengths they will go to protect it, all while he falls for the machine-gun-toting, ATV-riding girl next door. An explosive, genre-redefining take on family, violence, and the costs of preserving a legacy in a sun-soaked world of megachurch magnates, suburban guerillas, and robotic warriors, The Great State of West Florida is also the tender coming-of-age story of a young man caught in the wheels of something bigger than he knows.