To Be or Not To Be

That is the question on this very important day. Today is July 23rd; the last business day before July 24th, the all-important first day of cycle medications. This is the day that all paperwork must be completed by in order to be on schedule for the transfer on August 26. For all of you out there making bets on whether it would really get done and signed in time, the final answer is.... kind of.

A full 9 days ago, I optimistically hoped it would be done in 48 hours... and then the gods laughed and laughed and laughed. It was a week of little to no news, pacing, nail biting, calendar watching stress. The nurse coordinator from the IVF clinic emailed me yesterday nervously asking if it was done yet, and I passed along the anxiety in kind to my attorney to see if she had heard anything from Ellie and Matt's attorney yet. While there was no official response, the nurse coordinator went ahead with sending the medications, and we all slept uneasily on it for another night. This morning I received a somewhat panicked email from Ellie and Matt that they had received the final version of the contract and were ready to sign it, but the one and only representative from the surrogacy agency that has to witness their signing and notarize the contract, unexpectedly went out of town and won't be back until Monday the 28th. Did I mention that dealing with this agency makes my teeth itch? Regardless, we have the finished contract in hand, and that's a win all on it's own. In the meantime, Ellie and I came up with a plan where my husband and I will sign and notarize the contract today, send it back to the attorneys this afternoon, and then Ellie and Matt will have it in their possession while waiting on the agency rep to return, allowing them to execute their portion. This was agreeable to the nurse coordinator in terms of starting the medications tomorrow and will keep us on schedule. As I said 23 days ago: coo coo cachoo, we have a completed contract... kind of.

Now comes the fun (?) part. I'll be giving myself an injection of Lupron in the abdomen once per day starting tomorrow for the next 28 days. I've rationalized that it's a tiny little insulin needle, and I've built up a nice "protective layer" over my abs, so this shouldn't hurt a bit. I'll let you know how that goes. The Lupron is very important though, as it will quiet my ovaries and prevent me from releasing an egg of my own during this process. We want to be VERY sure that the only little storkie in this adventure is Ellie and Matt's! So tomorrow is day 1, the beginning of an exciting and highly anticipated stork adventure. Let's do it!

Don't Stop... Believin'...

I'm tired. Exhausted, really. It seems crazy; the process hasn't even really begun yet, but I'm totally wiped out. My work schedule has been particularly hectic in the past 6 weeks, and the paperwork of the stork adventure has continued to steadily roll in. I keep remembering how tired I get in the first trimester of pregnancy and thinking that I can't imagine adding that onto how worn out I am at this point. Luckily, the projects I have at work are dwindling down again, and we're close to the summit of Mt. Paper-manjaro, so hopefully I'll be able to catch up on some rest before I start incubating the storkie.

Here we are, two weeks since my last post, and we don't yet have a signed contract in place. That sweet, 10-day cushion that I boasted about is wearing a wee bit thin, but it looks like we're on the brink of success. Ellie, Matt and I have been through the first draft of the gestational agreement, conferences (very. long. conferences.) with our respective attorneys, and a fun little game of 'telephone' between our attorneys. I think we're lucky: We had a great foundation to our relationship before the attorneys were involved, and we worked through every contractual point that we could think of before sending it over for the attorney to draft. Still, the process has been mind-numbingly tedious. I can't even begin to imagine what it must be like for intended parents and surrogates that have had very little communication. Needless to say, we're looking forward to applying some ink to those pages and putting this part of the process behind us. I'm cautiously optimistic that we'll be doing just that in the next 48 hours. I mean, really: Have my time estimates ever been wrong during this process? Wait... nevermind, don't answer that.