WHAT CAN YOU DO... FROM R

I am feeling okay about the KD; a little annoyed, but it is okay. I just wish we had known earlier. I am glad that the guy bailed early versus after we were expecting. I can't imagine what it would be like to have to fight to keep full custody of our child. That is not a hell that I want to explore.

I really wanted to give this baby try the best shot I could, which to me means that we do at least two insems. I will say that the amazing quanity of meds I took did the trick and we do have two or three (hard to see exactly how many on the ultrasound) good-looking and mature eggs, and a few others that were smallish. At least that is something, plus we have the high count sperm guy as our donor. The reality is I am trying to convince myself that we really do have a chance of this working. I want this to work so badly, and it is a huge disappointment every time when we find out that it just hasn't worked for us.

Being pragmatic, I am already thinkng about next month's try. I have set an internal number of 8 tries. I know that this is a lot, but the idea of trying to get up the cash for IVF is just so scary for me. We are very average folks, and just don't have $30,000-plus bucks laying around, and if we did I am pretty sure that we would prefer not to spend our money in this fashion. We are having a hard enough time with paying for all of this stuff every month, much less mortgaging ourselves to the hilt for the purpose of having a baby.

I know the reality is that if we needed to, that we would do IVF or lie to the foreign adoption people and pretend that I am not gay, or frankly, whatever we needed to in order to have a child that we raise. I just hope that it doesn't come to any of that!

I have been looking into embryo adoption, mostly because unlike traditional adption, there is no birth mother to contend with and there isn't a foreign adoption official to lie to, plus we would (obviously) get a newborn baby, which is important to us at this point in the game. I don't know if that will ever become unimportant to us, but I don't think either of us would really be able to say no to the opportunity to be parents if the child was older. Who knows what we will do in the end.

If anyone knows anything about embryo adoption outside of the super-Christian snowflake people, LET ME KNOW!!!

Maybe we will just get lucky and have an amazing Christmas... and we will be able to just move on to the next thing.