A year and a half ago The Wife and I began the process of starting our family.We love babies and all the ones in our lives that we’re invited to love, and have big hopes and dreams of focusing that love on our own littles. We sought God and felt this was the next step for us as a couple and held on to His promises of good things for our lives, including the pitter patter of little feet.
Being a same-sex couple, we found a fertility clinic and decided that I would be the first to carry one of our children (we dream of having at least four). I was pricked and prodded and had numerous tests done, a few procedures and eventually given a clean bill of health and was told we should have no problems quickly getting pregnant. We selected a donor through a national cryobank who reminded us of each other and who we could see ourselves having coffee with on a Sunday afternoon. After reasearching we decided on doing an Intra Uterine Insemination (IUI) approach as it was less invasive and more cost efficient than starting off with IVF, and there were no glaring reasons why it shouldn’t work for us.
You can imagine our excitement when we did our very first IUI procedure, sure that this one would take. It didn’t. Without faltering we quickly moved to do a second IUI. And a third. And fourth. And fifth. By that time we had moved to adding hormones in hopes that it would help the procedure take. After the fifth one didn’t take, we had already spent over $20,000 and were slowly losing hope that we were moving in the right direction. After the sixth one didn’t work, we took a break.
I was emotionally raw and frustrated at my body for not working. 
We sought God some more and felt it was time to pull away from our day to day lives and seek what the next steps for our family journey would be. We took a 2 week sabbatical and invited our tribe to pray that God would meet us in this time. And He did. Through prayer beads and prayers of intention, through humble communion and labyrinths we were reminded that we were loved and fearfully and wonderfully made and that He has big plans for us.
Without discussing it with each other during the sabbatical, The Wife and I each got the same confirmation and we left the sabbatical with pristinely clear direction that IVF was next for us.
So we’re meeting with our doctor next week and it is beginning!
Stay tuned, folks – this wild ride isn’t over yet!
❤
It Gets Better, Darling 