Welcome to the blog of two lesbians trying to conceive their first child!
My partner, C and I have been together for just about three years and just married in NYC on 11/30/2012. C is everything I could ask for in a partner, she is truly my better half. We have a house together outside of Philadelphia with a two year old yellow Labrador retriever named Bowie and a seven year old black cat named Melvin. We are itching to add another member to our four bedroom house (we have rooms to fill hehe)! I guess you could say we are going down the checklist of "life." We both have our career as registered nurses and now that we are settled in our relationship together we both feel we are ready to endure this road to motherhood.
So as any lesbian couple would we had to try and imagine how we could make this dream come to life. We were faced with many many questions not only for each other but from our families as well. How? Who? When? And so C and I both realized that the best way for us to create our family is to give each other equal roles in the journey considering we lack half of what is necessary to create a human life. With C's mother passing away almost two years ago at a young age it was important to C that she could carry on a piece of her mother in our future child(ren). Meaning that we both decided genetically we want our children to be the product of C's eggs. That being said I knew that my dream is to carry a child.... Yes I want to be pregnant! I believe that nurture is much more important for me than nature. This works out well since C has no desire to carry a baby. So this has become our answer to the "how" and some of the "who." What is it called? Reciprocal IVF. Since C will be the biological mother, her and I have selected a sperm donor (via a sperm bank) that closely matches my features and heritage along with my wants/need. Here is a very short description of how this works: They will put C on injectables hormones to stimulate production of many eggs. Then when the time is right they will remove the eggs (egg retrieval) and inseminate each viable egg with one viable sperm (from our donor, this is called ICSI). The product will be anywhere from 5 - 20 embryos. In the mean time my uterus will be prepped for pregnancy and when the time is right they will implant 1 - 2 embryos in my uterus for a potential pregnancy.
Now to the when which is a bit more complicated. Since this procedure is extremely pricy we not only have been saving up but we switched health plans in order to off set some costs. I am also in the process of donating my eggs (that are not being use considering how we are looking to conceive) to a gay male couple that resides in France. Donating is something I always wanted to do but in this case it has many benefits for me. I will be helping another gay family reach their dream of parenthood and I will also be helping the financial aspect of our journey. So the egg donation is to take place the third week of January 2013. After that we are golden to get to the nitty gritty. C will be starting her work ups/tests before me since she will need more preparation than I will in our case.
So first up is the psych clearance this Friday. Which is both hilarious and really annoying. Hilarious because they need to clear us and make sure we aren't crazy and to see if we know exactly what we are getting into. Annoying because it is a part of the cost and we have educated ourselves immensely (probably more than they can even explain themselves).
It's crazy to think we are doing all if this to create a child for our family. But it will be so worth it in the end! Here we come 2013... Please be the year for us!!!
