Preparing for a Whole New World

From buying ingredients for cookies and selling cookie mixes to a myriad of appointments, to say we have had a busy start to our summer is an understatement! We've been soaring, tumbling, freewheeling through this breakneck summertime!

We have officially ended our #MakeSuttonSweet fundraiser! We sold over 550 jars of cookie mix! That is incredible. With your help, we received several shoutouts online from friends, generating even more sales and even had people bring in dozens of orders from their place of work. We greatly appreciate all you've helped us achieve so far and are extremely humbled by the generosity we've been shown along with all the thoughts and prayers during this journey! We are definitely no Prince Ali, but your support has certainly gotten us much closer to the reality of fatherhood.

Just bee yourself...

Things have been moving along quite swiftly, far faster than we were really prepared for, but we are embracing the timing so far! As part of this process, our clinic requires some sessions with a licensed psychologist. These sessions have been useful, allowing us to dig deep into some heavy topics we never realized we would need to discuss. Many different topics were covered related to our own medical history, how we will communicate and grow our relationship with our gestational carrier (GC), what we will do in emergency situations related to the health and safety of our GC and baby, mapping out our family trees, and much more. In our discussion, we explained that we (especially Sean) were uniquely prepared to have conversations with our future child about very complicated family dynamics. And after a 364 questionnaire, we seem much more prepared for all of this.

Along with our own session, our GC and her husband went through a similar session to prepared their family for this upcoming adventure and this week we prepare to have our final session all together before our psychologist clears everyone and we proceed to the next vital step in the journey: medical screening!

The ever impressive, the long contained, often imitated, but never duplicated …

LAWYER OF OUR SURROGACY!

We have officially retained our Third Party Pregnancy Lawyer, as they are called. This is the lawyer who will read over contracts related to our embryos, draft our contract between us and our GC, and draw up parentage paperwork to legally claim this child as our own. This guy is pretty swell. He knows his stuff and has come well recommended by multiple sources. All that to say, we are in good hands with this piece.

Itty bitty living tissue

Our embryo donor family had a contract drawn up, mostly repurposed from the other recipient families, and last week we reviewed that contract and sent back with nearly no changes or alterations. Tomorrow, we are thrilled to be signing that contract, which means that our embryos will be transported from their clinic on the west coast to our clinic in MN within the next few weeks! After Tuesday, these embryos are ours OFFICIALLY!

All this to say, this means we are likely only a couple months away from implant! The timeline we had set out with could actually be realistic and we could be dads by this time next year. To say we are a bit overwhelmed is a fraction of the emotion we are feeling but so much of it is fueled by an absolute adoration for this little bundle, and we just can't wait to meet them!