Operation Baby Spaceship – Transfer Day

Like so many in the infertility and child-loss communities, Malcolm and I know that a successful IVF transfer does not always mean a viable pregnancy. As I write this, we are in the two week wait. As you read this, it’s later. I have created this buffer to protect our hearts and allow us time to process what is happening in real time before sharing it with the world. Just because as you read this I’m ready to share this part of the story does not necessarily mean I am ready to share what happened next. Please be patient.

Operation Baby Spaceship: The Days Leading Up to Transfer

As I write this, Transfer is two days away. By the time you are reading this, we will know whether or not the transfer was successful, and whether we will be announcing a pregnancy soon or not. I am protecting my heart and Malcolm and Brooklyn by delaying these posts and giving us all time to process.

Operation Babyspaceship: What’s a Little More Stress?

Sometimes it feels like if it’s going to be our story, it can’t be smooth.

Once again, I have created a buffer of time between writing this and releasing it so that we can take our time to process quietly without feeling obligated to share more than we’re ready to. Thank you for your continued understanding.

Operation Babyspaceship: Is this our month? Is this really happening?

Today as I write this, but a while back as you read it, Brooklyn started IVF meds. She’s taking Gonal-F, an injection med that I have had a bit of experience with. If things go well, we should be doing a transfer at the end of the month! I am excited, but I’m also feeling a lot of “I believes it when I sees it.” It doesn’t feel like reality yet. I guess that is both the blessing and the curse of being the intended mom and not the person taking the meds.

Surrogacy – The Coin Flip Results

I am writing this just two days after my previous post, but I know that by the time you are reading this, more time has passed. This buffer is here for me and my heart and to protect Malcolm and Brooklyn as well.

The blood work had to be redone. We are out of the running for this month. We have completed almost all of the paperwork. Malcolm and I met with Dr M2 on Friday and she went over the consents that we needed to sign, and I am uncertain if we need one more appointment with the IVF nurse or if it was just Brooklyn who needed that. But the IVF meds have been ordered, and Brooklyn will be able to pick those up when we are ready. When will we be ready?

Surrogacy – Waiting on a Coin-Flip

I’m writing this today knowing that I will not be posting it until we are much further along in our journey. I’m creating a buffer because I need it. It’s the start of a new year… 2024… The year our journey to become parents reaches its final chapter. Two embryos left, one surrogate ready to go. And by this time next year I expect to definitively know if I will ever get to be a mom to a living child here on earth. Honestly, I know it might sound doom-and-gloom from the outside, but inside there is peace. By this time next year I will either have a living child in my arms or close to being born or I will have no more maybe-babies in deep-freeze limbo. They will have had a chance at life! That is amazing!

A Long Overdue Surrogacy Update

I realized that the last update that I gave about how surrogacy was going was back in July. I think at that point in time I was hopeful that by this December we would have updated that we had a surrogacy pregnancy underway. Spoilers: we do not… Yet.

Operation Babyspaceship: Picking Up Steam

After months of posting on the Facebook surrogacy groups with marginal degrees of success, and posting on Instagram publicizing our search, Malcolm and I sat down to have a chat. We’d had another match fall through and Malcolm was feeling like we’d hit saturation of the methods we were using and getting less and less results. He was wondering if I’d be okay with us creating a Facebook page and running ads in order to reach a wider audience and perhaps find a surrogate who hadn’t yet stumbled upon one of the Facebook groups and wasn’t following the other IPs and GC’s who had shared our posts.

I was nervous about doing this… There are a lot of people out there who do not understand surrogacy, who are willing to spread hate because for whatever their reasons they think it is wrong and maybe it scares them. Up until that point we had been pretty well shielded from the hate. I had seen others with larger followings on social media attacked, and we had received a bit of backlash, in private messages and on reddit. But creating a public page on Facebook felt like standing outside a saloon in the Wild West at sundown… But… I agreed.

What Has Brought Us to this Surrogacy Search

There is a lot on this blog to go through and I invite you to look through our story if you are thinking of possibly matching with us for Surrogacy. But with over a decade of posts here, I thought I’d take a bit of time to help highlight some of our key moments. I will be including links to some related blog posts here, and the first thing I will comment on is the fact that my husband changed his name legally this past summer after assuming the name Malcolm in 2018. So in older posts you will see him identified as David, and in posts after 2018 as Malcolm.

Malcolm and I met doing Sci-Fi Speed Dating on August 23rd of 2012 at Fan Expo in Toronto. We connected immediately and left the event together, then I got nervous and disappeared into the crowd. The next day we got our emails that we officially matched and we set up a half hour visit in the games room to see if the connection was real. Two and a half hours later, we realized the time and decided to regroup with the people we had gone to the con with. We met up for dinner at a restaurant outside the convention centre and then we spent the rest of the weekend going to the same panels and Q&A sessions. We exchanged emails, phone numbers, and friended each other on facebook. We texted, chatted, and Skyped pretty much every day, Malcolm was living in Ottawa and I was west of Toronto. The next time we saw each other in person was October 5th when Malcolm came to visit for Thanksgiving weekend and met my whole family. That weekend we officially became boyfriend and girlfriend. Fun fact: Malcolm said “I love you” first!

The Strangest Kind of Dating

My husband comes up to me with his phone in hand. There’s a messenger conversation open, and the name at the top is a woman’s. He tells me a bit about her, and we discuss the ways she could be a good fit with us. He asks me if he should add me to the conversation with this other woman and I agree.

We chat, the three of us…

She tells us about her life, we tell her about us. We share some pictures back and forth, and my husband and I smile at how nicely she seems to fit with our needs.

We arrange a video call…