A Pictures Worth a Thousand Words....OR MORE

This entire process and the last year has been all about pictures.  Pictures have played a role for us in every step in this surrogacy process. It started off by searching the internet finding websites and pictures of agencies that could help us with the surrogacy process, this was the first step in our research. We were amazed with the amount of postings, pictures, links and blogs about this topic but to us there were less than a handful of choices for us that looked "legitimate".

Through deeper research we had pictures of the hospital in Panama we chose to help us, as well even pictures of the doctors that will be performing our procedures if lucky enough to venture on this journey. Its amazing how much you can find on the internet when actually looking....

When dealing with our doctors we chose our egg donors with just seeing pictures, not unlike internet dating sites when you get profiles, statistics, health and IQ from these women who were offering up their own eggs for purchase. Yes it seemed a bit dirty at first, but soon we were excited to see exactly who these women were and how our genes could be mixed with theirs...the excitement began!
At that moment pictures formed in our heads, or how our baby would look like, how it would smile, laugh, cry...it never ended the non stop picture show playing in our minds.

Now that we are actually pregnant (8 weeks 2 days!) pictures will play the entire part of how our baby is developing and growing, and I am happy to say we received our first ultra sound picture yesterday it took everything not to stop and cry at work, the excitement to actually see a part of us growing inside the small outline of a uterus that was shown on the ultrasound. The only thought that played through my mind was, "this is actually real now".

Since being thousands of miles away from our surrogate, the hospital,  and our baby most of this process will have to be done through email and pictures, hard to comprehend, but this is the way our journey has to unfold...excited about the prospect of our next set of pictures and news we know we are luckier than most for having these pictures that will shape our future and the future of our family.