Our non-bio baby - a world away

On a more serious note, I wanted to expand upon one of our efforts to bring a baby into our lives that I haven’t mentioned yet.

, We tried to get pregnant for several months “naturally,” then moved on to ovulation induction -- a fertility treatment where you’re pumped full of follicle-stimulating injections, your hormone levels are closely monitored, you have ultrasounds every few days to see how your follicles are growing. Once the follicles are large enough, you take a “trigger” shot to get them to drop and then ever-so-romantically your fertility doc tells you exactly when to have sex (also called “timed intercourse”).

When the OIs didn’t work, our next step was IVF, which we were kind of expecting, but we started wondering if we should “double down” our efforts and look into adoption, too.

After careful consideration, we decided to adopt a baby from Vietnam.

A side bar here before I get judgmental thoughts from those who think we should have tried to adopt domestically (and yes, I am hypersensitive to this because so many people ask me about this and offer not-asked-for commentary on the subject). Every couple makes their own personal decisions based on how their family gets made and it should be based on what they are most comfortable with and it’s no one’s business except your own. OK, I’ll step back off my soapbox.

So, while going through our IVF cycles, we were also filling out paperwork, getting physicals, having our backgrounds checked, unveiling our financial portfolio, having friends write recommendation letters and dreaming of having IVF twins AND a sweet bundle of joy from Vietnam.

In the meantime, none of my IVFs worked, and we waited and waited for the call that we had been placed with a baby in Vietnam. And, waited…what was supposed to be a 9-12 month wait turned into two years.

Finally, last July we got the phone call. A baby boy! We were ecstatic, and for the second time in our lives, we experienced love at first sight. Our agency sent us photos and we couldn’t take our eyes off of the sweet little boy with full cheeks and a black shock of hair sticking straight up off his head.

Jack Bauer got excited about giving him a faux hawk. We picked out his name. I went crazy buying him outfits, getting decorations for the nursery, and looking at the calendar for dates for baby showers (it was FINALLY my turn for one, darn it!).

Our adoption agency’s guess was that we could pick him up in January 09. There were still a few hurdles to get over, but they didn’t seem overly concerned.

Then the rug got pulled out from under us. In September we learned that there were some major issues with getting final approvals from Vietnam (Unfortunately, it wasn’t just us, it was also 22 other families adopting from the same orphanage). No kids were coming home any time soon and our agency wasn’t sure how to resolve the issues.

So, when the Nest offered her uterus as a temporary home for our last two embryos, once again, we had visions of a family with both bio baby(ies) and our non-bio boy.

Flash-forward to now and we still don’t have our darling boy and at this point, it is very likely that we won’t get him because of yet more issues and problems at the U.S. and Vietnam levels.

We’re OK, though, especially with the hope that our Nest can hatch those embryos into a baby or two.