When Kati and I first got married neither one of us really wanted to have kids. Kati was very ambitious with her schooling and I just found kids to be, well, pretty annoying. After a number of years some good friends of ours had a child who we saw often and would babysit periodically. That was the turning point for us. We started thinking that this was something that we wanted. So the journey began.
We had no reason to think that we would have any problems conceiving but it just didn't seem to work. The other issue was that with Kati in school we just didn't have the finances to dig very deep into the reasoning as to why it wasn't working. So it got put on the back burner for a long time. Probably too long to be honest with you.
Years passed without talking about having kids at all. Kati went back to school for her PhD, then couldn't find a job, then found a job where she was working excessive hours. All of these things made us keep pushing the decision off until we were in such a routine that we wondered for a few years whether throwing a child into the mix would cause the whole thing to come crumbling down. That fear led to idleness, idleness led to selfishness and selfishness led us to finally asking the question "What are we contributing to society and our future?" Part of this change came because, through church, we started working with a retirement center. Each Monday night either Kati and I or another family from our congregation would visit this retirement center and share a short Bible lesson and have an activity with them. This really got us thinking "Who will come visit us when we're this old?"
The agreement between Kati and I was if both of us weren't 100% on board with this baby thing then we didn't proceed with it. I'll admit that I was the hold out to the point that I put a moratorium on discussing it at all. I was just tired of it dominating most of our conversations. While I felt like a jerk for doing it, I believe that this was exactly what I needed to come around. I needed a break from it and to let the thought percolate in my own time.
It didn't take long for me to come around and that we were going to pull the trigger and get this thing going. We knew we couldn't have biological children and agreed that if we were going to have a child it was either going to be both our genetic child or neither and since we knew it wasn't going to be both this left us with less options at our disposal. We could adopt a baby or older child or we could adopt an embryo from a family who had done IVF, had all the children they wanted but didn't want to destroy their remaining embryos. This was an option that we had never heard of and it seems that a lot of people haven't either considering the response we've received from people that we've told. Even a number of doctors we've talked with had no idea this was an option. When our fertility doctor gave us this an an option to think about Kati and I both knew pretty immediately that it was the direction we needed to go. I don't know why but it was the only one that we felt good about.
In some ways this mixed the options of adopting a child and IVF. We still had to go through some legal paperwork and work with a lawyer to draft up an adoption contract, review families and their medical history to see who we wanted to adopt from and go through the implanting of the embryo.
On January 17th, 2017 we were officially the owners/parents to 3 embryos and on February 14th the best embryo was transferred. It will have to clarify that Valentines Day was not something that we chose in order to have the event be more meaningful or corny (depending on how you look at it. I think it would have been corny). It just so happens that the doctor only does embryo transfers on Tuesday and Valentines Day was on a Tuesday this year.
The transfer was followed by 9 anxiety ridden days. All one could do was wait and use Google to try and find out if there was really any way to improve ones chances of having a successful transfer. I read about everything from eating pineapple cores and avocados to acupuncture and message. Who knows whether any of those actually work. These were the longest 9 days of my life. Finally we got to do our first blood test and see what the baseline hormone levels were. The Dr. said we wanted something greater than 50mlU/ml and we were at about 92mlU/ml (I think). This was a good start. Now a 4 day wait for the second test where we hoped to be around 350mlU/ml which would tell us if the embryo liked its new home. We were ecstatic to hear that to levels were at 420mlU/ml. We were pregnant!
In respect of space and time I'll close this one for now but hopefully I'll post more later as we go along.
