Potential Infertility (once removed)

My other sister (not the mural one) is accompanying her husband on a 4-month educational trip, and they are leaving next Thursday and returning at the end of December. They will be going to countries all over the world, so they have gotten a zillion and one shots to protect them from whatever foreign buggies that might be lurking there.

Some of these shots don't jive with pregnancy, or young children, so while she has wanted to try to have children for at least the last year and a half, they have held off because of this trip. Supposedly, according to her, they will start to try in late fall (on the boat). (I have my reservations about whether her husband is "on board" (get it? ha) with trying for kids on the boat, but if he isn't, it is going to break her heart, so I hope for her sake that he is.) Her hubby has a chronic health condition that has had him on auto-immune and other bigtime meds for his whole life, and I think that knowing that Mr. A and I are both totally healthy and it still took us 4 years to conceive this baby girl makes her nervous about waiting much longer (she will be 29 in October)...

Last year, the fact that they were waiting was comforting to me. You know how it is, sigh of relief that my younger sister wouldn't bear the oldest grandchild. It eased my mind that maybe by some crazy miracle, we'd have a baby before they got back, or at least that I'd be pregnant by then.

Enter crazy miracle.

So I've offered that she could take my fertility monitor and "Yoga for Fertility" DVD with her on the boat trip. Because I know she has wanted to try for a while, I thought for sure she would totally want these things.

But when I asked her about them yesterday, she said she maybe wants the DVD, but not the monitor. (They are "trying to cut down on the amount of things they are bringing". Um, it is the size of a big deoderant... anyway...)

I have to admit that my heart sank a little. Didn't she want to bust onto the TTC field armed with all the tools possible?!

I worry that her husband has convinced her to not really worry about it on the boat, and that she is again having to make excuses for why they can't/won't really try yet. I worry that he has decided he doesn't want kids until sometime further in the future. I worry that they will also have unanticipated issues conceiving, and although I am well-prepared to support her in the trenches, no sister wants to see her other sister go through that.

Of course when they decide to try is totally up to them, a lesson that infertility smashes in your face and makes you learn the hard way- not to judge others' family-expansion time lines. But I know that she wanted to start trying a year and a half ago.

So I guess my monitor will stay put in our bathroom for a little longer.

But really, who am I kidding? Who wants to start the betting pool that they will come home 2 months pregnant?