We have now passed the thirteenth week, amazing changes are happening with our baby. Our baby can put its thumb in its mouth like it wants to suck even though the muscles aren’t fully developed yet. Our baby will be fully formed soon and right now it even has it’s own fingerprints, even though it is the size of a peach!
For us the time is going by faster than we thought, the reality of being pregnant is sinking in and there is a mixture of excitement and anxiety.We are anxious on starting things like purchasing some large items like a stroller and car seat, and then contemplating a bit of work in the baby room. One day we are ready to start things, the next we are nervous about starting too early and wondering if we should wait a while longer. Baby names are constantly whirling around our heads non-stop, the stack of baby name books we have beside the couch probably has nothing to do with that, but we should be able to find out the sex of our baby at our next ultrasound that will take place on March 16th and that will make picking names even more exciting.
Today would be my mom’s birthday; she passed away when she was 56. She would have been so excited for Daniel and me and a day doesn’t go by that I don’t think of her and how proud she would have been to have seen my baby and take part of their lives. I know deep down she is watching our every move and I can picture her smiling at the thought of once again being a grandmother to another baby…the thing she loved being the most in life….
The surrogacy process we are going through definitely does not come with a manual that we could have read ahead of time that answered all of our questions, and answered questions we never would have thought of. This was made clearly evident to us right from the get go.
Working with the hospital in Panama we realized that they don’t offer up loads of information about the process, or how the surrogate is doing on a weekly basis. They give you the minimum amounts of information they think you need and unless you ask them the questions you want answers to, you will go without. This hasn’t been easy for us, we are the type of people that want to know everything that is going on and when we get a lack of information it can be disappointing. I am sure there are couples that would be just fine with knowing they are pregnant and then knowing the date when to be at the hospital to pick up their baby. If only things were that easy or cut and dry.
We learned this past week that our surrogate is being very well looked after by the nurses at the group home she is living in, she will be living their until the birth of our baby in August. Having three kids of her own I can’t imagine how big of a sacrifice this would have been for her. She gets daily visits from the in house nurse to monitor blood pressure and weight and a visit from a nutritionist twice per week as well to make sure she is eating properly and taking all of the prenatal vitamins that are suggested. We even learned that the nurse lives on the premises with our surrogate. Right away this made us feel more at ease, and it’s a relief to know the surrogate is being monitored constantly and being given the best medical care that they can offer. We really can’t ask for more than that.
What seemed to us to be an eternity of waiting, we finally received our 12 week ultra sound report and pictures last night. This marks the end of our first trimester! Technically the end is next Wednesday marking the 13th week, but the doctor assured us that we are now officially pregnant and everything looks perfect!
We received the ultra sound pictures at about 7:30pm last night, later than we thought we would receive the email but still it was fantastic news when we it was received. We were with friends when we received the email and this made for a bit of a celebration between the 4 of us. We quickly had to leave and make our way home and let our parents know since they were anxiously awaiting the phone call and news of the ultra sound.
Through this process all of our friends and family knew step by step where we were in our pregnancy from day one, actually before day one. Because this pregnancy was so planned out and scheduled our friends knew from the moment we planned to talk about having a baby to when we conceived, and each step along the way, privacy and secrets were pretty much non-existent. This is ok with us though, we feel lucky and grateful for this entire adventure we have been on, and lucky to be able to share it with people.
We are full blown pregnant! It’s great to say without hesitation now, and we feel relief that we can shout it out to the world.
Emotions are running high this week as our pending 12 week ultra sound on Thursday and although we are excited about this we are still a bit nervous. We still haven’t had any updates on how our surrogate is doing, but we assume all is well and if anything abnormal happened they would let us know immediately.
We were able to pick up the new “baby mobile” over the weekend and this will kick off some of our planning of having a new baby. Hopefully after this week we can plan slowly for everything else that we will need to do before we bring a new baby home.
I have been thinking about the surrogate lately and how she is feeling. I know it must be strange for her to carry a child that is not her own and doing this purely for another couple and for monetary reasons. We know so little about this women and no clue what she looks like. The hospital told us the odd bits and pieces, we know that she has three children of her own and she has had easy pregnancies and deliveries. We know that she is healthy, takes care of herself and leads a healthy lifestyle (non-smoker). As well we know that she is at a great age to carry a child, not yet 30. We do know that hospital has done its due diligence regarding proper screening, medically and psychologically and assures us that she is doing all of this for the right reasons. Our doctor Sindy had also mentioned to us that she herself chose her to carry our baby.
There are a lot of people in Panama that don’t have a lot of money, we have been told stories of women who do this so they can get enough money to provide for their families, fix plumbing, a leaky roof, or even just makes a better life for themselves. In our case, this is the third surrogate we tried before being successful and at each failure the doctors let us know that these surrogates were devastated, knowing that they would not have the opportunity to make a great deal of money for them and their families.
Once the surrogate becomes pregnant, they are housed in a special housing unit with a nurse where they can be monitored for the first trimester and make sure they are taking care of themselves and not putting the baby at any risk. They are not allowed to stay at their own home until they are cleared after the first three months and then are able to go home for the remainder of the pregnancy with scheduled visits back to the hospital. Once the baby is born, the baby is taken from the surrogate and placed with the parents. I don’t even think the doctors hand the baby over to the surrogate to even hold for a moment. After a long 9 months of carrying another couple’s child inside them, their job is now complete.
I have to give credit and appreciation to these women who spend this amount of commitment helping out couples that cant’s carry children of their own and the surrogate that is helping Daniel and me. We do understand the reasons our surrogate is doing this are mainly for monetary reasons, we truly know Daniel and I will come out of this experience far richer than we were before…....
So we have now passed the 11 week mark and for some reason feel more nervous than ever, one short week away until our 12 week ultra sound which marks the finish of the first trimester and the mark where most people start announcing their pregnancy. For us this more signifies that we really are pregnant with less to worry about, other than now planning for the arrival and saving loads more money.
One more week we will get another picture sent to us of the ultra sound, what will the baby look like? Will we be able to see anything that we will recognize? All we know is there has been major growth this past week and the baby is the size of a lime! The growth of the baby is phenomenal now and the baby’s length will double in the next three weeks. The head is grossly out of proportion and is almost half of the baby’s length. We can’t wait for the next ultra sound, and like kids at Christmas we are counting down the days!
This week we had a good friend Paula come over with her baby Charlotte for a visit, Charlotte is 10 months old and a perfectly happy baby. For me it was a bit different this visit. We have always had friend’s children and babies over and our house and this is not abnormal, but for me I was looking at things differently and I was internalizing everything I did with Charlotte, was I attentive enough? Was it awkward me picking her up, would I be awkward with our own baby? Was I feeling a connection like I should since I was having a baby of our own…all these questions in my head. Everyone tells us everything is different when you have a child of your own, your thoughts, emotions, feeling, etc. It’s funny how you start over thinking things when given the chance. Although I was questioning everything, and how good of a parent I would be, in the end it just re-confirmed my excitement that soon we would have a baby of our own.
When embarking on the path of surrogacy we had to make some decisions right off the start, one of these major decisions was selecting who we wanted as our egg donor.
There are a few different ways a person can chose to do this, and ultimately any way you chose has to be the right reason for you.
Some people do ask people they know, or close friends or family. Daniel and I did think about this for a quick minute, but for us it wasn’t an easy topic to ask people. Although many people did offer to help, I don’t think people fully understood what that meant. This is a huge commitment for people, and we just didn’t feel comfortable in asking anyone we knew. For us the decision for an anonymous donor worked best for our needs.
The next step most people choose would be to go online and look at donor profiles. There are several agencies available online depending on what you are looking for in a donor. You can pick skin color, eye color, nationality and IQ. Anything really that is of any importance to someone looking for their ultimate choice in what their child could look like. For us most of these agencies were out of the United States and most egg donations come at a large cost to purchase and then the costs of having the egg donor fly out to Panama to do a fresh harvest and coordinate each step with us being down there at the same time.
There was another option for us that seemed to fit best with us. The hospital we are using in Panama had women who were on an egg donor list that they use for just these purposes. Our doctor Sindy send up some profiles to look at and we were amazed on how beautiful these women were and for us the choice was easy. We weren’t really sure what to expect before seeing the profiles but once we saw it was easy for us to feel comfortable with choosing one of these women from Panama and that is how this process started for us. Another good reason for choosing the local egg donors was that if we needed to have one of them come back in for a second round of harvesting they were already close by.
We never met any of the egg donors, this process is completely anonymous. The only thing we have is a profile with a picture, along with a questionnaire that the donor fills out on why she is donating, and some medical information with test results making sure she is healthy and fit to donate.
Each step has been complicated, and each step completed just adds more steps in the entire process. What to us seemed like an unimaginable goal we set for ourselves has become all too normal and familiar but in the end it will be well worth it to bring our baby home and everything we went through initially will be nothing but a distant memory.
It is now the ten week mark in our pregnancy, and still things are going well. There are two more weeks before we have our next ultra sound and even though two weeks isn's a long time to wait, it seems like forever.
We are too early still to jump into planning for the baby, so we are at a bit of a stand still until a few more weeks pass and we can go hog wild in talking about names, picking a scheme for the baby room, and even eyeing out the things we want to purchase for our new addition to the family.
We look at websites daily on the development of our baby. We found out that at week 10 our baby, that was considered to be an embryo at this stage fully develops into a fetus. This week is somewhat of a landmark, our baby's complete body plan is laid down. The fingers and toes have separated and the tail has disappeared. Our baby actually has taste and tooth buds this week also...crazy how much goes on in such a small period of time......
