Gratitude

In this month of Thanksgiving I couldn't have a more thankful heart.
I am so thankful to my Heavenly Father and also Vanessa for helping my dream come true.  Last night I went and kissed my 2 sleeping princesses.  I adore my children.  They are absolutely priceless.  Heavenly Father and Vanessa are giving me a priceless gift.  Yes, I'll be paying Vanessa, but you can't pay the price of the child.  I'm only paying her for her inconvenience and discomfort for being pregnant.
S and I have thus far paid a HUGE sum of money towards our many many attempts at this.  Lets just say we could have paid cash for a home here in Illinois with that $.  When I thought it had not worked I was really distraught at the idea of what we could have used that money for instead of loosing it all.  But now that this has worked, it was worth every penny and I have absolutely no regrets.  I'd pay it all again without hesitation.
I'm so grateful and excited. I'm having the hardest time waiting until December 2nd to find out how many we are having.  Based on the numbers thus far, there is an extremely good chance of multiples.  This is both exciting and scary since Vanessa isn't quite 5 feet tall (not much room inside!).
I've told just a few select people about our pregnancy.  I'm excited to announce it after the 2nd. I know I'll get some interesting reactions but at this point I couldn't care less about what people think.  I now allow myself to imagine going and watching our babies be delivered and bringing them home.  This is going to be the fastest pregnancy every (all of my 9-month pregnancies seemed to last about 5 years or so).

Lastly, Vanessa is about 5 weeks pregnant now.  I was thinking about that fact last night.  When I was pregnant with #3 I was 5 weeks pregnant at Christmas and me and my family had gone to Utah to Visit (from California).  We knew I'd most likely be hospitalized around 6 weeks since that is what had happened with my previous 2 pregnancies.  But by the 23rd (5 weeks) I was already getting sick so we celebrated Christmas on the 24th in the morning and I flew home and Steve and the kids drove the entire way (and mind you it was Steve's birthday).  Honestly, I was scared to death.  I knew what was coming and although we had planned it,  I was terrified. Christmas day I was only able to keep down the juice I sucked out of an orange and by the 26th I was in the hospital for dehydration.  Shortly thereafter my feeding tube went in.  3 weeks after that we lost our baby.   Vanessa is at the same point of pregnancy where I would be hospitalized.  I'm so grateful that I'm not going to be hospitalized and suffer beyond belief this time.  I cry as I write this.  I just can't express my gratitude.  It was horribly ironic that the only way to get what I want most (a baby) was through my horrific pregnancies.....until now.  How do you thank someone for a priceless gift and saving you from such suffering?  I have no idea.

We are expecting!!!!

So very excited to announce the fact that we are expecting!!  We are pregnant!!!  


So much to catch up on.  I quit blogging because
#1 we planned on being done trying and
#2  Blogging was to painful.
Even when I knew we were trying again I didn't want anyone to know because i couldn't handle discussing something so very raw emotionally with everyone.

So, in the extremely shortened/condensed version of what has happened in the past 6 months is that my doctor offered another option we had not tried yet:  Get 2 batches of embryos, test them all for genetic problems, and try to get at least 2 good one's to transfer.  We also found a new way of funding all of this (since we were out of $).  So we decided to give it one last go.
Unfortunately, Jane apparently decided she was done with us.  (this was about 1 month after the last failure). I tried calling/emailing/facebooking about 10 times asking if she was willing to do it again (for more $ this time) and telling her that it was perfectly fine if she didn't want to, but I just wanted to know.  I got absolutely no response.  She wouldn't respond to anyone at the clinic either which baffled them since she had recently told the nurse practioner at the clinic that she'd be willing to do it again for us as many times as we wanted.  Nobody ever got a hold of her so I finally moved on. Through a little facebook stalking I discovered she had an unsuccessful attempt at another surrogacy in september.   I have no ill feelings towards Jane.  she was wonderful while I had her.
Finding another surrogate was a HUGE struggle.  I was burned by so many people and lost thousands to agencies who provided nothing for me.  I figured my best bet was to advertise on craigslist in Utah.  I got all kinds of weirdish people who would respond to me.  They'd send HUGE emails giving me every detail of their life and telling me how they qualified in every way "I've never done anything against the word of wisdom in my life".  I learned to not even read the long emails until I first copied and pasted their names into Facebook.   Most of the time I could get a lot better idea of what they were truly like very quickly on Facebook.  When Budweiser is on their list of favorites and they have pictures of their tattoos I get the point rather quickly.
But then I got an email from Vanessa.  She didn't have insurance which meant automatically that I wasn't going to waste my time with her although she looked wonderful.  Well, see for yourself:One of my favorite pictures of her and her husband.
When I went to Utah and we got together a few times.She is the cute one on the left whereas I'm the completely awfully frumpy one on the right.

Shortly after Vanessa first contacted me we realized that whereas she didn't have insurance, she could have insurance since her husband Clark had just started a new job and was still in enrollment period.  PERFECT timing.  So we got her signed up.  Perfect.  Everything with Vanessa went extremely easy.  Not a single bump along the path.  It just felt so right and she was too good to be true...   Not only that, but she lives within the same zip code as not only the clinic we've been using, but also my parent's house.  Even better! (although I would have used her even if she would have lived in Maine).  
Vanessa is wonderful, I'm sure I'll blog more about her later (still trying to keep this the short version).  Oh, and she is completely fine with me using her name so no code names needed.  I however still prefer my name not be paired with the fact that we are doing surrogacy.  Why? because when we move again in 18 months I want to go to a place where nobody knows my baby(s) are surrogate babies.  I don't want people to be able to google me and figure out that my babies were born from a surrogate mother.
Vanessa has a great blog. Currently it contains a lot more about the details of what is going on.  http://myamundson5.blogspot.com/ 
I'm making this announcement to my blog knowing that there were only a few select people that I gave the link to originally, and that I'm sure most of them stopped following this long ago. We are not going announce our pregnancy to the public just yet (still feeling cautious I guess) and so if you are lucky enough to run across this post, feel privileged but please don't pass on the information just yet.
I just HAD to tell my blog.  Even if nobody out there is reading it.
Lots more to come later.  We'll find out if we are having multiples on the 2nd of december.