An Announcement

Hi everyone,

Last night, we received the following email from the couple we met last week:

So......without further ado, [Genetic Dad's Name] and I would absolutely love for you and Todd to be the adopting parents of our precious embryos. We think you and Todd are wonderful people and we can't think of a more perfect couple to love, raise and adore any children that hopefully will result from this adoption. We can tell that you are going to make fantastic parents.

We hope you feel this is the right match for you both and we anxiously await your answer.

This was the answer we'd been praying for! So this morning, we called them and happily accepted.

There's so much I want to share about our story...how God knit it together, how He prepared our timing and our desires, how He orchestrated our conversation and how he even matched us with a couple so similar to our own selves in so ways. I'll try to take the time in coming weeks to begin typing everything up!

In the mean time, we are officially happy parents-to-be. There are 12 Embryos, all in the blastocyst stage (day 5 or later--great for implantation potential).

10 of them are frozen in pairs, so that is how we will thaw and transfer them. The other two are each frozen individually and we will either thaw and transfer them together or pair each one with another pair and have two transfers of 3. Assuming at least one embryo from each pair survives the thaw, we'll have 5 or 6 transfers.

The number of live births that will result from these embryos remains to be seen. The first Phoenix Snowflake family had 11 embryos, which resulted in one live birth. Another family we know lost a lot of embryos through 4 or 5 matches, and finally had two children. Our Genetic Family had 5 successful implantations out of 8 embryos, and 3 live births (and 1 miscarriage of twins). So it really can be all over the map. We could end up with 1 child, we could end up with 12. If I recall one of her emails correctly, their embryologist thinks that the most likely number is 3, maybe 4 (though for the life of me I can't find that email so if I'm remembering wrong, S, please forgive me!). It really is anyone's guess and all in God's hands. We're sure He already knows the size family He has for us so we are resting in that.

The next step is to wait for the homestudy comes back. Even though we are matched, we still can't move forward without that piece. When it comes back to our caseworker here, she'll transfer it to Nightlight. Once that is done we can enter the process of signing actual documents. The other family with have 72 hours from date of signing to change their mind. After that, our coordinator at Nightlight will coordinate the shipping of our embryos from their clinic (in the San Francisco area) to our clinic here, which will store the embryos and eventually do the transfers.

We will update when our homestudy is completed and when we sign documents and perhaps when the Embryos safely arrive in Phoenix. But we are not planning to announce in advance (even to family!) about when the first transfer will be so that if it is successful, we can enjoy the process of planning and surprising friends and family with the news, and also so we can protect the information if we find ourselves wanting to wait a little bit longer in to the pregnancy before we share. And, if the transfer is not successful, we can grieve in private and not have the pain of answering "how did it go?" a lot of times over from everyone who'd know to ask 10-14 days after the transfer date (about when a pregnancy test is conducted).

It's still a little while until we get to that point but we're telling folks now so that when the time comes, we can be cryptic without seeming secretive or intentionally hurtful. What we can say is that if things go smoothly, a transfer could happen as early as October-ish. But we won't know more til later.

So, that's our news! We're very excited! We are very eager to share our story with anyone who could benefit from it so please feel free to ask any questions!

Thank you for celebrating with us!