Dish babies have arrived!

It's been one hell of a ride so far.

In my previous post written over nine months ago, my husband and I had finally come to the conclusion that the safest, most logical decision for us was to enlist the help of an egg donor. This was not an easy idea to come to grips with as I had always pictured a mini-me as our child. Knowing that Dennis would have a biological link to the human being we were eventually going to create - and I would not - brought about some emotional upheaval. And I'm not going to lie - there are days where I still mourn over the fact that my genetics will not be passed on to our baby. I worry about what the connection will be like with a human being that wasn't technically made by me. What if I don't bond with the baby? What if I start to resent Dennis for being related while I am lacking that connection? Worse, what if our child begins to disregard me as the lesser parent because the genetics aren't there?

But then I think about the progress we made in just a few short months, and I realize that in the end none of this is going to matter. When I think about holding our child for the first time, I doubt the first thing in my mind will be "this baby isn't my genetic offspring." No. In fact, when I picture what that moment will look like, I start to cry uncontrollably because of how life-changing that will be (tip: picture that while listening to an emo indie rock song - I suggest "All Eyes on You" by St. Lucia - and it hits even harder).

If you had asked me four years ago, I would have said that I wanted children by 2018 at the absolute latest. I didn't think I'd be sitting here on January 4, 2019 all by myself in my tiny apartment in downtown Toronto with no responsibilities besides, you know, the obvious - making sure our condo doesn't fall apart, doing laundry, feeding our fish Halladay (named after the late Toronto Blue Jays pitching ace Roy Halladay) and other adulting-related chores. I originally thought 2018 was going to bring us incredible luck in the form of an actual baby. I also thought it would bring me a career change. 18 is a good luck number for Jewish people, and some of the best years of my life have ended in the number 8. In the end, 2018 ended the same way it started. We're still in the same apartment. We still have the same jobs. And there's still no little Jackie or Dennis to take care of.

Except it didn't actually end the way it started. Because there was a ton of progress behind the scenes. Progress that finally enables us to take the next step toward creating the human being we have affectionately dubbed #BabyRosenChung2020 (although I don't think Dennis had anything to do with choosing the hashtag. That was all me).

In May, we met with Dr. Baratz at Create Fertility in downtown Toronto, conveniently located a quick subway ride from where we live. Our doctor at Victoria Hospital in London had recommended Create and said they would be the best solution for people in our situation. Immediately upon arriving - and despite an awkward moment of spotting an ex-coworker with his wife in the waiting room - I knew we had finally found the right place. Everyone was welcoming, supportive and non-judgmental about the path we had chosen. After an hour-long appointment, we were actually PHYSICALLY on the way to getting the ball rolling. We weren't just doing research and consultations anymore.

Create immediately put us in touch with EggHelpers to help us find a donor. (I had initially wanted a Jewish donor to give me a stronger cultural link to our child, but we were told that was likely to cost three times as much and would be about 100 times harder to find.) One week later - on our fourth wedding anniversary to be exact - we were in touch with the donor agency for a consultation, where we decided to pursue an anonymous donation. And less than four weeks after that, we'd matched with someone. She was petite, she had similar features to me and she seemed to be a bit of a free spirit - exactly the type of donor we were looking for. However, it still wasn't easy to sign off on the decision. She was one of triplets - could we handle the possibility of three babies? She had a few health issues unrelated to fertility, but was this going to impact the quality of her eggs anyway? And most of all ... she's not me. She just. Isn't. Me.

With that, I didn't expect that her decision to pull out of our agreement five weeks later was going to cause me such heartbreak. Her family didn't agree with her choice to become an egg donor and as a result, she turned us down. I was angry and upset and had to go back into my "we're never having kids" mindset - something I do often when we hit roadblocks, just so I can prepare myself for the worst-case scenario. But only five days later, we rematched, and this time that match was much closer to what I had hoped for. As soon as I saw her photos, I knew this was it. She was my height, my weight (well, at least when I was as young as her current age), my body type exactly, my hair colour, some of my features, and while she wasn't Jewish, her family hailed from the same part of Eastern Europe that my grandparents did. I don't believe that things happen for a reason, but perhaps the first match just wasn't meant to be and this one was. We signed all the papers and everything happened so quickly that I was shocked. What I wasn't prepared for, though, was the wait we would still have to endure after all the signing was done.

In our three years of research leading up to this point, we expected that the process of egg donation would be the easy, non-emotional part. From everything I'd read and from what I knew of friends who had done IVF, it seemed pretty simple - at least for a healthy person: she goes on meds and produces eggs. Two weeks and it's all done. But this was a case of expectations versus reality. The fall was a tumultuous time in our home when we learned the donation process was nothing but simple. In fact it was extremely complicated and involved a ton of moving parts for everyone involved, as well as plain old dumb luck. Once I realized all of this, I think part of me believed that things couldn't possibly go right and as a result, we were all doomed to fail. Maybe part of me thought we didn't deserve this, that I didn't deserve this and maybe these were signs that it just wasn't meant to be - that I, not Dennis - just me - wasn't meant to be a mom. In the meantime, our donor was patient and kind and didn't give up on us. From the little we have learned about her, we could see she was determined to make it happen for us in any way she possibly could.

2018 finally started to live up to its good luck number in December. On the first Wednesday of the month, between getting reports of life-changing exciting news from a friend and from a family member, we got our own: our donor was ready. Now it was go time. My spirits were the highest they had been all year because I decided to let myself feel hopeful. And as I wrote a thank you note to our donor - being very careful to not identify who we were - I sat and cried tears of joy, thankful for all of her efforts, regardless of the outcome.

Again, I don't think anyone quite prepares intended parents for just how nerve-wracking and emotional this stage of the game is, with each step carrying its own risk. The media makes us very aware of the surrogacy process - finding a match, having her screened and all the steps leading up to the implantation, even the dreaded two-week wait. But this process wasn't exactly a walk in the park. First is the sperm donation - and even that has its risks. What if the sperm don't function properly? Then, a few hours later, the egg donor went in for her procedure. I confirmed with the clinic that she came through okay and had no complications. We would find out the following day how many eggs fertilized. The next step was two days later. How many would make it to day 3? Perhaps the most important step, what about our total on day 5? And since PGS testing was included in our package, what if it showed that all of our embryos were useless?

It's now January 4, 2019, and we have 11 healthy embryos. And we're so excited for what's to come.