Life Abundant Blog

Part of the embryo adoption process (which I shared in our checklist post!) includes required third-party counseling. Without releasing too many personal details, I wanted to share what this looked like for us in case it helps others going through embryo adoption. The counselor we chose was recommended by another local embryo adoption family, so we were able to do this close to home instead of at the clinic, thus saving another 6-hour round trip! All three sessions were completed back-to-back on the same day, which also made life easier. Glenn and I took half vacation days from work to make this happen, and we scheduled it at a time that the embryos’ biological mom was off work so it wouldn’t affect her normal schedule.

SESSION 1: Our Session: We met with the counselor for 90 minutes. The purpose of the session was not to identify our ability to parent children who are not biologically ours. She was not trying to identify how well we parent our current child either. She helped us walk through potential issues we could come up against, she encouraged us with best practices for handling such issues, and talked through different resources that would be beneficial for us. A lot of the conversation was “how would you handle this if it came up?” And we talked through whatever that thing was. I felt like we walked out of there better prepared for what lies ahead. I would say we were very encouraged!

Now that we are officially in full “embryo adoption” mode, we currently have three active embryo adoption fundraisers that I wanted to share today!

T-Shirt

I can’t even begin to explain how many times I’ve edited this shirt design before I finally had to say “enough is enough” and launch it! That’s the enneagram 1 in me, I’m telling you. But it’s finally here and I’m so happy with it! It was important to me that this shirt honored many different avenues of adoption, not just ours. I wanted this to be a shirt for all adoptive families. I even had an adoptee on Instagram message me and tell me she loved the shirt! That made my heart melt! This shirt design is available to print on 5 different garments, and each garment has a variety of color options. Here is a little peek!

Bonfire doesn’t have the exact same colors for every garment type they offer, which makes sense, but I wanted to make sure people understood that if they’re looking for the same color for the whole family. It can be a bit tricky. If you order a shirt, please tag me on social media! I want to see it!

Order: ADOPTION is a BEAUTIFUL Adventure

We had our very first appointment with our new Reproductive Endocrinologist to start embryo adoption! The point of this appointment was to get established as a new patient and to identify a process for finding out if I can carry the two embryos we are adopting. While we know nothing is ever a sure thing (the embryos could not survive the thaw or the transfer), this appointment gave us so much hope.

What I particularly loved about this appointment was how supportive this doctor was. He didn’t try to convince us to do IVF with our own eggs and sperm, he didn’t push an agenda that benefits him and his clinic, he listened to us, encouraged us, and it was very clear that he supports us 100%. He personally knows the individual who has chosen us for this embryo adoption and thinks the world of her (all the staff there does!) so it was blatantly obvious that we were in the right place for this whole process.