Making Baby Davis the Sequel/ Graham is 11 Months!

Our sweet boy is 11 months today. I have an equal amount of pride and sadness when I think about that in only one month Graham will be a year old. He has come so far in the last few months with his gross motor skills. He can army crawl quicker than you can run to keep him away from cords, pull up on his knees and even crawled 4 steps just today! He loves balls, music, pushing buttons, reading books, repeating words and sounds and still thankfully LOVES to sleep. We have never felt more blessed in our lives. The 25th is a big day in the Davis family. Just a month ago to the day we were at the fertility clinic with our gestational carrier, Katie, to see if she can help make Graham a big brother soon! Everything went perfectly at her med screening and our doctor said we could begin meds with her next cycle. Wouldn't you know that she started her meds today on the 25th! 

Getting a Graham fix at my mom's house before our appointment

Katie and me at NFC for her med screening. The boys were here too. 

So Katie will be on birth control pills, Lupron, Estrogen and Progesterone and then the transfer will be the week of June 10! Please pray that this little one will survive the thaw and snuggle in tight for 9 months. If it takes then the due date will be in late February so go ahead and pray for our sanity as we will have two kids under 2 for a few months! haha!!! Seriously, we are ready for the challenge and can't think of a better reason to be super tired. 

Katie's friend Heather accepting the meds for her until she could pick them up today!

Got 'em!

Thank you Katie. Ugh that's a lot of needles

Today's menu

We will keep you updated of course, whether it sticks or not. I have been open about our journey for 10 years and so I owe it to this little one to do the same for him/her. No matter what happens he/she will always know they were loved from the start. <3

Graham had his first Easter! After the Easter bunny visited him, he went to church with us and his Gran Randall then met his Davis family at Calhoun's for lunch. It was a fabulous day!

Here he is meeting a few of his recent gross motor milestones. Next up, first birthday!!!!!

Happy 11 month birthday!

This one just because he's a doll

Pulls up on his knees

Can push up from belly now

Crawled four steps!!!

Let's Get This Baby Started!

I've been here six times before. Using the pills and shots to manipulate your cycle into becoming ready to receive a precious little embryo. It's not for the faint of heart and the fact that someone I've only met once is willing to go through this entire process for us is so humbling. Katie knows how I love to document everything so she has been so great to send me pictures so I can be a part of this every step of the way. So here is a picture calendar of our last few months preparing for Baby Davis! Please be in prayer that this baby will stick in September and met us all in May 2018.

 Prescriptions and medication calendar. 

NFC gave this to us the day of medical screening. 

 Birth control pills and antibiotics started on July 20, 2017.

 Medication delivery on August 1, 2017! 

Lupron, Estogen patches and Progesterone in Oil

 Lupron shots started on August 2, 2017.

 Kids pretending to be scared of the needle! haha!!!!

 First shot completed! Didn't hurt a bit!

 First lining check and blood work on August 15, 2017. Estrodiol is 38.5 which is perfect! 

Had to be under 75. Start estrogen patches. 

 Perfect uterus and lining to get ready for our sweet child. <3

 Second lining check and blood work on August 28, 2017. 

Pineapple core is believed to help embryos implant. 

There was even a newborn who came in for a checkup that was 

wrapped in a pineapple blanket because she was an IVF baby! 

We took this as a great sign of things to come for us. 

 Sweet little girls went with their mom for blood work. 

Someone asked if Katie is ready for another one but Evelyn set her straight!

They were so good in the waiting room that they earned a donut as a treat. 

Evelyn said, "I just love blood draw day!" 

So we don't have the blood test results yet but apparently we don't need them! 

Katie's lining check was 10.4 today (had to be at least 7) 

and is triple striped which is what you want. SOOOOO, the transfer date is......

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2017!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thank you for all your prayers throughout this process. Everything has gone like clockwork and I know it's because of the prayers of God's people and the willingness of sweet people to put themselves before others. I will praise God for this journey, even if this isn't the transfer that takes. 

I leave you with an IVF calculator that hopefully will come true soon. Beta day is September 19 but we will know before then because of hpts of course. Please pray this sweet baby sticks and stays with Katie for 9 months until he/she comes home to our family. Love you all!

Nice to meet you. Will you carry our child? ;)

June 2017....The beginning of our surrogacy journey

I can't believe the time has come. 

June. 

Katie and I have been waiting for June to come because not only is June the month of our first surrogacy appointments, it's the month that we meet each other in person. This meeting isn't like any other either of us have ever done. We are meeting the lady who will love our child(ren) as they grow and develop inside her. She is meeting a couple who she must trust without reservation. This was big. 

Katie and her husband Brian arrived in Nashville on Sunday so they could explore the city. It was a complete mess from the Predators game (GO PREDS!) and an Alan Jackson concert but they managed to have a great time just being together, even while trudging through the beer on the street! She sent this picture to me and huge tears welled up in my eyes. I can't believe she's in Tennessee!

They're here!

Exploring Nashville

On the way to take the longest test ever!

Her first psychology appointment was at 5:30 on Monday night. She had to take a 600 question test and sit through an hour interview alone. At the end of the interview the psychologist told her she couldn't wait for her to start her journey and get to these babies. I think it was safe to say she impressed her. :)

June 6, 2017.

Katie and Brian arrived at the second appointment at 9:00am to meet with another psychologist. Brad and I needed to be there by 10:30 to meet with her also. We went into what seemed like a house but we knew we were in the right place because Brian and Katie's luggage was sitting in the waiting room. I looked at the luggage tag that had her name written on it and I thought to myself, "She's really here. She's right upstairs!" The psychologist made her way down the stairs at 10:30 alone. She said she wanted to give us all a moment alone to meet. Katie walked halfway down the stairs and froze in anticipation. Her legs were shaking. She finally made her way all the way down and this was the moment we captured....

We didn't even cry much. It was so weird because we are both criers! I think this was all way too big for even our emotions to handle.We talked for a few minutes then finished our session. We exchanged gifts then headed to lunch. We took them to Double Dogs because it's a restaurant we have here in Knoxville! We wanted them to have a little taste of our hometown. 

Our medical appointment at NFC was at 1:30. I don't know what it was but she and I were laughing at everything! It was certainly the most fun I've ever had at a fertility clinic. The nurse that was talking to us kept laughing at us laughing and said we already seemed like old friends. She was right.

Katie had her vitals checked, blood work, a lining check and a mock transfer. The doctor said, "Wow! You really picked a good one!" Brad and I would have to agree with him. :) The nurse gave us everything Katie will need before her next trip to Nashville. She will do a saline ultrasound in her home town on CD9 of her June cycle to check for fibroids or polyps. When the July cycle comes she will start the medications to get her body ready to receive the embryos. If everything goes well then we could be looking at an early September transfer! Our prayer requests are that Katie's test results will all come back clear (psychological and the saline ultrasound) so that we can get the contract process started.

I can't tell you how all of this process makes me feel! Some infertile women may feel a little sad. Sad that their body has let them down and they are unable to carry life. I don't feel that way at all. I feel extremely blessed that God has allowed this path for us. So many more people are going to love these children because of my infertility. So many more people are going to see God on the move through this process. I praise Him for my broken road. I thank Him for leading me to Katie. And I thank Him for all of you who have prayed us through this journey. Get ready to dance in September!

We kept seeing this advertisement!

I think we passed our test!

On Tuesday, May 9, we completed our psychological evaluation over the phone with the psychologist in Nashville. This was the first step on the way to our babies and now it's done! We had to tell her all the things we've tried up until this point to try to become parents and I believe she felt we were completely ready after 10 years of treatments especially after we mentioned traveling to Mexico twice! She also asked a lot of questions about my relationship with Katie and about the compensation plan. Fortunately Katie and I had already discussed all the ins and outs of this entire process so I had a complete answer for all her questions. I am so thankful to my two surrogate buddies (one carrier and the other an intended mother) for helping me know how to prepare for this whole process. If any of you are thinking about using a gestational surrogate, I would encourage you to go independently. It has been such a blessing to become so close to Katie and figure all of this out as a team. I know this is the beginning of a beautiful lifelong relationship and I'm so glad God chose this path for our family. This kid(s) are going to be so loved by more than just me and Brad and I can't wait to tell them the story of how they came to be. It's a path I never would have chosen but I have definitely not walked it alone. Thank You God for being with us every step of the way and thank you to all of you who have stood by us and prayed for us. I feel He is very close to putting an end to our mourning days!

The beginning of the dance!

I would love to introduce to you our wonderful gestational carrier, Katie Statler! She is from North Carolina and when we began talking in a surrogacy facebook group we noticed we had mutual friends. It turns out that my previous music minister in Tennessee was also her previous music minister in North Carolina! Not only that but my mother was his secretary at my church for several years and his wife was in my Sunday School class and was an educational assistant at my school. She kept in touch with both of them after they left her church and actually flew them in for her wedding. The minister married them and his wife sang at their wedding. When we realized this connection we knew this match was ordained by God himself! My First Baptist Crossville friends will absolutely love this.

Katie has two brothers and three children. She married her high school sweetheart and works from home with her large LulaRoe business.  She has wanted to become a surrogate since her first child was born. After she knew her family was complete, she started pursuing surrogacy with an agency. Luckily I found her before she committed to the agency! She is dedicated to doing whatever it takes to get us to our rainbow baby(ies). I am so thankful to her and her entire family for putting their lives on hold for two people they have never even met.

Katie and her husband Brian

I can already feel my feet starting to move!!!!! Not only do we have our surrogate but we have our appointments made, flights scheduled and hotel accommodations in Nashville. Go ahead and mark June 5 and 6 on your calendars for the days to pray extra hard for all of us. June 5 Katie will be taking the 600 question psychological test. On June 6 she and her husband Brian will be sitting down together for the psychological counseling and then Brad and I will join them at the end of the session. After lunch Katie will have the medical screening. It will take some time to get all of the results back so I don't really have a timeline in mind for when the transfer would be. After we get the results then we will contact a lawyer in her state, which we have already found, to draw up the contract for us, which we have already written! We will purchase life insurance for her and that should be it!

Brian and Katie's three adorable children

Thank you to all of you who have been there for us throughout these 10 years. The Lord has taught us so much throughout this process and although we'd certainly never choose to go through any of this, it has brought us to our child(ren) hopefully. I have more hope than ever before that my dance is coming and I want you all to dance with me!

Beta Results (not mine but still mine in a way)

If you have been following our journey for long, you know that we change our minds constantly about how we plan to get to our child, as many of us in the infertile world are prone to do. We tried on our own. We tried IUI. We tried IVF. We tried donor IVF. We tried immune treatments. We tried the adoption route. None of this got us anywhere as far as an actual living, breathing human but every step is a step closer to our end result.

I wrote a little in my previous post about a surrogate (really a gestational carrier) that was a parent of a child in my classroom this year. She had twins for a couple a few years ago and was getting ready to try again for another family. She approached me about possibly carrying for us later too. I have always wanted to try this because if I truly do have the immune problems that blood tests and RI's say I do, then this could really work! If we take my body out of the equation then the baby wouldn't be getting attacked like a cancer. But my husband had just never wanted to go that route so I reluctantly mentioned it to him. To my surprise he agreed! I guess our rocky road to adoption has helped to warm him up to a carrier. :)

So she recently tried with this other couple's genetic embryo and it failed. This time she tried it with  donor eggs and the husband's sperm and she hit the jackpot! First beta was 518.7 and today's was 1652! There's one more beta Wednesday and then the ultrasound is scheduled for July 7. I know this isn't my cycle or even my surrogate yet, but I can't help but get SO EXCITED about the future for our baby now. If she has a singleton, the due date is in February but I'm pretty sure with those numbers it may be a tad earlier with multiples. She said she should be ready to try again this time next year so a year from now we could be starting our own IVF with a carrier! I can't tell you the joy this plan brings me. I don't know if it's because I am more comfortable with fertility treatments because they were my life for so many years or if it's because God is giving me peace in this decision but I'm praying it's a little of both.

So our new plan (although that is always changing!) is to do a fresh genetic cycle next summer. I don't think it will work because I will be 39 by then but we think it would be worth it to try. If that doesn't work then we will try again with a donor. Donor eggs cycles are super expensive, especially when you throw a surrogate into the mix, but donor is our only choice at my age. This year will give us a chance to save up so it's kind of good that we are having to wait.

I would love to hear some of your experiences with surrogates and donor eggs. How do you plan on explaining to your child that dad is their genetic dad but not mom? It will be easy if we are able to use our own embryo but since that isn't likely I'd love to know how to tackle that one. Thanks friends! I'll keep you updated on this pregnancy. Even though it's not for me, I'm so thrilled that another infertile couple is most likely getting their long-awaited dream come true.

The Infertility Addiction

My RE called last week. He said he was very sorry and really thought this transfer was going to work. I agreed and told him I had implantation spotting at 3 and 4 DP5DT so when I didn't get pregnant I was shocked. When I mentioned trying a gestational carrier he said he didn't think it was time to do that. He said GCs are for women with problems with their uterus and it was extremely expensive. He said insurance doesn't cover the pregnancy and you have to pay hospital bills out of pocket. Is this true? When I looked it up online, it seemed like insurance did cover and you just paid her co pays but who knows? Have any of you had experience with this?

He suggested to try again with our last two donor embryos and said if it didn't work he might be able to locate more for us. When does it end? Granted we've only transferred 2 high quality embryos out of 8 embryos (assuming that our genetic ones aren't good) but we've done 5 transfers with only one chemical pregnancy that ended soon after the beta. He said the success rate for FET is around 40% with high quality embryos. So I guess we will put the last two in me in a few months but I really hate to do it. I feel like my body is not good at this and I thought my time trying with my own body was over. But then again I feel like I'm playing the lottery and if I just throw some more money on the table, maybe I'll win the jackpot.