Short Introduction

Hello and welcome IComLeavWe'rs (and everyone else)!  It has been a long time since I have participated in this special week, but I thought it was finally time for me to get involved again.  If you are a first time visitor to my blog, here is a short introduction to our story:

My hubby and I have been married for 17 years.  It took us a loooonnnnggggg 14+ years to finally have our family.  We thought we were destined not to have children, but then just a few years shy of age 40, we decided we needed to make that final push.  We didn't want to end up in our 40's/50's, looking back and regretting that we didn't do EVERYTHING in pursuit of our family.  If it didn't work, it didn't work, but at least we would know that we tried everything we could.

Our infertility journey consisted of a few years of charting temps and timed intercourse, as well as a surgery for me to have a cyst removed from my ovaries, and just waiting.  And waiting some more for it to be our time.  We were told that it was highly unlikely that we would ever be able to get pregnant.  Not only did I have issues, but Tony had poor swimmers as well.  We both settled into the fact that we were probably not going to have our own kids.  Here's a summary of what we did once we bit the bullet and finally sought an RE:

• We did an IUI that everyone knew wouldn't work.  It didn't, of course.
• Our first IVF resulted in 5 eggs retrieved.  3 embryos made it to a day 3 transfer, in which we transferred all 3 embies.  Chemical pregnancy.
• Second IVF got cancelled due to a poor response and only 1 mature egg.  Turned into an IUI which everyone knew wouldn't work.  Guess what?  It didn't.
• Decided to use donor eggs.  We debated using an anonymous donor, but also had the option of my sister being our egg donor.  You can read about this decision process here.  We chose to go with the amazing, generous gift my sister was willing to give us.
• They retrieved 14 eggs from my sister, 9 mature.  5 fertilized, and 4 made it to embryo status.  The embryo quality wasn't super high, so they did a day 3 transfer of 2 embies.  There wasn't a lot of hope that the other two would make it to freeze.  However, on day 6 of fertilization, one of the embryos met all of the criteria to freeze.  The other one wasn't quite there and normally wouldn't have been kept, but since it was close, they decided to freeze it anyway since they try to freeze the embies in pairs.
• BFP!!!  However, at 9w5d, we found out our baby had no heartbeat.  Chromosomal testing showed the miscarriage was due to Trisomy 18, which was a less than 1% chance of happening.  Lucky us.
• FET, transferring our last two embryos.  This was it for us.  If it didn't work, we would be living child free.
• BFP!  Turned out to be twins!
• Water broke at 32w3d.
• December 23, 2013 at 33w2d, our babies were born.
• 19 days in the NICU.
• January 11, 2014 we brought our babies home.

Then

Now