In the two weeks since we’ve announced on Facebook that we are having a baby there has been such an outpouring of love and prayers and positive thoughts that it has almost been overwhelming. The Monday after the announcement, I spent all day checking to see who was the latest to make a comment or to hit “Like”. Each click brought happy thoughts.

Since then, there hasn’t been much to report. I hope those of you who came to the blog in the days following the Facebook post will keep checking back, as I will continue to update the blog throughout the pregnancy (and also, maybe, after; if I can stay awake long enough to write something).

The one thing that has happened in the last two weeks is that the Holidays are wearing down our resolve not to purchase any baby clothes until we know, definitively, the sex of the baby. Last Saturday we were just a few miles from the Wrentham Outlets and we decided to take a peek inside some of the children’s stores there.

Lordy, that was a mistake. We tried to keep everything unisex. I could write a whole Gender Studies paper about the onesie that we bought with a dinosaur on it. A girl could pull that off, but had we bought a onesie with a butterfly on it we wouldn’t put it on our baby boy. What, exactly, makes a butterfly a feminine symbol? There are male butterflies and female dinosaurs. A tyrannosaurus with ovaries is just as likely to bite you in half as a butterfly with a penis is to flutter around your daisies.

Well, either way, we saved receipts.

Here's the photo from the Facebook announcement. Caption: Beverage Service in the Barcenas-Smith house starting June 2013.

Today was B.’s end-of-the-first-trimester appointment and we are officially in the second trimester. That means that the risks associated with the pregnancy are cut in half. It also means that it’s time to start telling more people.

We had planned to make an announcement on Facebook on Monday. Good thing we didn’t. We would have been overshadowed by The Royal Baby. Yes, Kate and Wills announced their pregnancy on Monday, prompted by a trip to the emergency room for Kate’s extreme morning sickness. The Barcenas-Smith baby will not accede to power through hereditary means and thus our announcement will not be covered, for three days no less, by the Today show. Of course we also won’t have to deal with radio DJs impersonating our parents and confusing the hospital staff.

I’m not sure how people announced their pregnancies before Facebook. I guess I have received postcards with ultrasound pictures of fetuses on them in the mail. And a traditional pregnancy announces itself at some point in the second trimester. Although if the bearer has not made some sort of formal statement there could be some awkward dancing around the subject of weight gain.

But like most of the modern world, we’ve decided to make it formal on Facebook. Now we just need to come up with something clever, but not too clever. Cute, but not too cute. There should be a visual component. It needs to maintain B.’s anonymity and it can’t identify our surrogacy agency. It needs to be informative enough that people aren’t confused (wait a minute, neither one of them has a uterus…), but it doesn’t need to go into any uncomfortable details (that’s what this blog is for). I feel like I’m directing a short film for Oscar consideration.

In any case, we’ll post it – whatever it is – in the next few days. And I’ll post a copy here for those of you that aren’t on Facebook.

Here is the picture from ultrasound #2. I don't see anything resembling a penis, but I'll take the doctor's word for it.

Today, B. had her second ultrasound. She texted as she was leaving the appointment and said that she would email me the photos (which I’ll post tomorrow). She also said that we would probably want to call her after we read her email (but not to worry because it was something exciting).

That was cryptic. Before the email came in, Alberto and I exchanged several texts wondering what she could mean. We basically decided that the doctor had found another baby, crouching in the corner of B.’s womb where he or she had been missed in the prior ultrasound. Although I have said through this entire process that I would be happy to have twins as long as they are healthy, I have settled into the idea that we are only having one baby. I had visions of becoming buried under a giant, overflowing diaper genie.

But B.’s email came with an even bigger surprise. Although she is only 10-weeks pregnant, the doctor had a guess as to the sex of the baby. She wanted to know if we wanted to know.

Yes, we want to know. I can appreciate couples who want to be surprised, who will enjoy the months of suspense. We are not those people. A little suspense goes a long way. I can wait until the end of a movie to find out who the murderer is. I can wait until the end of a baseball game to find out who wins (Alberto is bad, even with this). But I don’t think I could ever wait a full nine months to find out whether the nursery will be blue or pink. Plus we need to get working on names now.

So B. told us. We are (probably, maybe, more-than-likely) having a boy. The doctor said she thought she could “see something growing down there” (presumably she means a penis). We are thrilled!

I’ve started reading "What to Expect When You’re Expecting". Although the book claims to be for expectant fathers as well, I can’t believe how much of this book is dedicated to caring for and explaining the changes that are happening to one’s nipples. I can’t say that I find this to be overly relevant to my situation.

But it is fascinating, and alarming, to explore the mutations that pregnancy visits upon a woman’s body. It’s like a Victorian horror story, teeming with corporal mortification and oozing with humanity. The chafing, the bloating, the gas, the hair, the varicose veins, the mucus, the nausea, the saliva, the sweat. And I'm not even to the part about the delivery yet!

Don’t get me wrong. It’s a beautiful thing, and I’m not being glib when I say that I would gladly undertake similar alterations if I could carry the baby myself. I know that is a cliché that husbands have said for millennia, safe from having to make good on their claim because of the limitations of science and creation. Perhaps someday “Junior” – not Arnold’s best work – will not only be a travesty of filmmaking, but also a technological reality. Presumably by then my childbearing days will be behind me. But future generations of fathers should be careful what they wish for.

B. had her first ultrasound today. I got a text from her a couple hours ago saying that the doctor heard a heartbeat! That means the pregnancy is now considered “viable”. We’ll still probably wait to tell most people until the end of the first trimester, but we may begin to increase the number of people that know.

Also, the doctor only mentioned one heartbeat. B. didn’t ask about that distinction, but I’m sure the doctor would have said something if he or she had heard two heartbeats. I consider that to be good news! It’s possible that both hearts were beating at the same time, and the doctor will check again in a few weeks, but it seems likely that there is only one baby.

B. still has to drive two hours to get to a local IVF clinic for these appointments. I hope that soon she can start going to her OBGYN in the city where she lives. I also hope this means that future appointments will be covered by the additional insurance policy we bought.

I discovered an interesting fact today that I had missed in my 34 years: When a woman says she is 8-weeks pregnant, that is the time since her last period. It is not the time since conception.

Two weeks ago, I signed up for an online service that sends you updates on your child’s development in the womb. Two weeks ago, our embryo was the size of a poppy seed; last week he or she was the size of a sesame seed. (I’m looking at bagels differently these days.) This week, our baby is the size of a lentil and I literally found that out while eating leftover lentil soup. In the future I’m not going to open those emails while eating lunch, at least until the baby grows to be too big to fit in my lunch bag.

But I realized there was a problem when I entered our due date (we don’t have an official due date yet, but I counted nine months from fertilization). The website kept telling me that we were two weeks further along than I thought. At first I manipulated the due date so that the development chart showed the right number of weeks, but then the due date was way too early.

So, I Googled it. “How do you determine how far along your pregnancy is?” I asked. Every response detailed the fact disclosed above. Of course, that’s not relevant to our situation. B. has been on ovulation suppression drugs for months.

I should have started with the IVF sites because I finally found that a good rule of thumb to convert an IVF pregnancy’s development (in terms of weeks pregnant) to the scale normally used is to add two weeks to the date of conception.

So we’re six weeks into this thing and not four, like I thought. That means that the ultrasound B. is having tomorrow will determine the viability of the pregnancy; we don’t have to wait another two weeks. That makes me both more excited and more nervous.

To keep myself from worrying too much about our embryo gestating over a thousand miles away, I went on a mission today to calculate its chances of survival. (I know that may sound grim to some, but I respond well to statistics; unlike Han Solo, I need to know the odds.)

It is true that we have passed the largest hurdle – successful implantation of the blastocyst on the uterine wall. The chance of a failed IVF cycle was 20%. Since a blood test confirmed the pregnancy last week, the chance of miscarriage has fallen to 10%.

As previously mentioned, the pregnancy isn’t considered “viable” until 6-weeks after fertilization. If we make it past that stage, chance of miscarriage will fall to 2.5%. We probably won’t announce the pregnancy to the general population until after the first trimester. At that time, the chance of miscarriage or still-birth will have fallen to 1%.

I’m generally reassured by these odds. I’ll feel a lot better in three weeks, though.

(The source for these statistics was www.americanpregnancy.org and www.pregnancycharts.org . I tried to take into account B.’s age and the fact that she has had successful pregnancies, with no history of miscarriage.)

It’s official. B. is pregnant with our baby. We are expectant (not just intended) fathers.

I got the call from the IVF clinic yesterday. I was at my department’s annual “End of Audit” party (I work for a non-profit and we are audited every year). I checked my phone just before I sat down for dinner and saw that I had a missed call from the IVF clinic.

I left my drink and my coat at the dinner table and ran (as casually as possible) outside. I tried calling the clinic and got a “This number is no longer in service” message. (I don’t know what that was about. Can a business have an outgoing-calls-only line?) I hung up and didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to go back into the party without knowing what the clinic had to tell me.

I decided to stay outside for five minutes and wait for them to call back. I thought they also might have tried our home phone, in which case they would have gotten a hold of Alberto. But in less than a minute they called again.

The nurse on the other end of the phone played it cool, like an American Idol judge telling a contestant he’s made the Top Twelve. She had a somber tone as if she was going to deliver bad news. But she got to the point faster than Randy Jackson. She started talking more quickly and raised her vocal pitch until she finally said, “B. is pregnant!”

I resisted the urge to shout or cry or whoop out there in front of the restaurant (I may have performed a little hoping dance) but obviously I was excited. I may have said that over and over to the clinician on the line. I got all the relevant details from her and then called Alberto with the news. It's cliche to say that we "breathed a sigh of relief", but that is what we actually, audibly did.

Now, it’s not like we can quit worrying. Realistically, I probably won’t quit worrying for the rest of my life about this child. The pregnancy isn’t considered “viable” until six weeks has passed from the day of conception. But we’ve cleared the biggest hurdle in the process. As time goes on, the risk of miscarriage will rapidly decrease.

The next milestone is in three weeks when an ultrasound can detect a heartbeat. Keep us in your prayers!

I’m at work, but I’m barely getting anything done. I got up from my desk a couple of minutes ago to walk around outside for a while. I can’t shake the feeling of suspense. This is much more nerve wracking than a job interview.

B. went to her local clinic this morning to have a blood test that will end our Two Week Wait. Either we will be pregnant or we will have to start the process over again. She will need to have hormone injections for two months and then we will travel to the IVF clinic in December for Round Two. Besides the delay, Round Two costs $10,000.

Please let her be pregnant.

We had a little bit of good news last week. B. texted us during the day on Saturday to say that she had taken a home pregnancy test. The results were positive, but the pink line she was looking for was very faint. I have no idea whether that indicates uncertainty about the outcome of the test, how soon after implantation she was taking the test, or some other hormonal glitch caused by the embryo transfer. The IVF nurse told us that there are a higher number of false positives with IVF and we need to wait until the blood test.

So we’re trying not to get our hopes up too much.

I thought that we would have heard by now. I thought that the lab that did the testing would do it in-house and that it wouldn’t take very long. I know B. has concluded her appointment because the charge has already shown up on our credit card.

I’m trying to remain calm, but it’s not working. I know we will hear soon. Just a few hours more.

Possibly (hopefully) the first picture of our child(ren).

We are at the beginning of the famous “Two Week Wait”. That’s the term the fertility blogosphere uses to describe the period between an embryo transfer and the blood test that confirms pregnancy. Most couples confronting the two week wait face worse odds than we face. Infertile couples that seek out IVF often have underlying factors that don’t apply to an egg donor and gestational carrier with demonstrated fertility and a biological father with sperm that has been tested and is presumed effective. But that doesn’t mean we’re not going to be stressed out for these two weeks.

On Friday, we traveled to the IVF clinic so that we could be present for the transfer. Our attendance wasn’t required – I’d already performed my end of the deal – but we wanted to be there to see B. again in person and for moral support. We didn’t realize we would also be able to watch the procedure.

B. arrived just after we did. She didn’t even have time to tell us about her trip before the nurse entered the waiting room and called her name. As B. got up, the nurse looked past her to us. “Are you Jonathan and his partner?”

We looked around to see who she was talking to.

“This is Philip and Alberto,” B. said.

“Oh, okay,” the nurse said. “Come with me.”

We followed her to a consultation room, but I was thinking, Who the hell is Jonathan? These people better not transfer Jonathan’s embryos into our carrier.

The nurse left us in the consultation room and went to get some paperwork. B. told us about her drive. She came with her boyfriend and their two kids, who were waiting back at the hotel. They were able to spend the previous day in New York City and they had a good time.

When the nurse returned, she held out a clipboard and asked, “So which one of you is Jonathan?”

Honey, there is no Jonathan. Go find the paperwork for Philip and Alberto.

Before we could say anything, she checked the clipboard again. “I’m sorry, Philip, which one is Philip?”

I raised my hand and took the clipboard. She gave paperwork to B. as well. “Are you two going to be present for the transfer?”

We turned to B. The nurse assured her that it would be modest. We would remain above the neck and watch the procedure on the ultrasound. The whole process would take about five minutes. B. said she felt comfortable with us being in the room.

The nurse gave B. some instructions regarding medication and behavior following the transfer. B. was going to need to take it easy for the next 48 hours, not walking very far or lifting more than 15 pounds. She was not to swim or even take a bath (showering would be fine). Then for the next two weeks she shouldn’t exercise, but other than that her life could go back to normal. I want to assume “normal” means strictly healthy behaviors and an excessive concern for safety.

The nurse left the room to get us the sterile garments we would have to wear over our clothes while in the operating room. Very soon after that, the doctor came in with pictures of the two embryos he would transfer. Most people have to wait for an ultrasound to have the first picture of their baby, but we have pictures of our child(ren) when they were only 8 cells big.

The doctor asked B. how she was feeling and she said she was a little nervous. The doctor assured her that the procedure would be completely painless, but I don’t think she was concerned about pain. I think she was thinking about her responsibilities that were about to begin. Until that point, her obligations were to give herself daily injections of hormones, drive to the monitoring clinic once a week and speak to us on Skype. If the transfer worked, she would now be responsible for a human life.

The nurse returned with hairnets, shoe covers and a gauzy apron for Alberto and me to wear and took B. to a separate room to change into her hospital-type gown. We were given approximately 30 seconds to put on those items before another nurse appeared and hustled us out of the consultation room.

The operating room (do you still call it that if there’s no scalpel involved?) looked like a standard office in a depressing office park – drop ceilings, harsh lighting, beige walls, bland art. The exception was the gurney and stirrups in the middle of the room with an old-looking monitor attached to it. A frenetic Paul Simon song was blaring from hidden speakers. Alberto said the song reminded him of the bakery where he worked during college.

A different nurse entered with B. and got her situated on the gurney. She asked B. again how she was feeling. B. said she was fine, but looked more nervous than before. Alberto and I sat behind her and focused our attention elsewhere as they put her legs in stirrups and shined a spotlight beneath the sheet that covered her. I didn’t blame B. for feeling uncomfortable and thought that maybe it would have been better if we had waited somewhere else.

But then the nurse switched on the monitor and put the ultrasound wand up against B.’s belly. As the white lines that signified her womb appeared on the screen I realized that I was about to witness something profound. Not the moment of conception, that had already happened. I'm not even sure what to call it, but certainly it’s a milestone in the life of my child. A different kind of starting point.

The doctor came in and again asked B. how she was doing. He again assured her that the process would be painless, missing the point. He asked for something more calming to be put on the radio and the nurse switched on some dramatic classical music. It was the sort of soundtrack you would expect to hear as the Starship Enterprise soars through space.

The doctor set about doing something beneath the sheet that I ignored, concentrating on the monitor. After two minutes, a door opened in the back of the room and a woman came through holding a catheter. “B., Alberto and Philip,” she announced. The doctor nodded and she handed him the catheter. I was glad nobody mentioned Jonathan.

After handing the catheter containing the embryos to the doctor, the woman disappeared through the door again, her participation in this task apparently complete. I cynically wondered how much we had just paid for the woman to carry the embryos from the lab to the operating room and how one gets that job. Is the main requirement that you can walk without tripping over your own feet? (I’m imagining a Mr. Bean episode where Rowan Atkinson is hired in this capacity and hilarity ensues as he stumbles about accidentally impregnating things.)

We returned our attention to the monitor as the doctor guided the embryos to their resting place. On the ultrasound monitor, the tip of the catheter looked like a bright, white speck of light moving through the darkness. I’m not sure if the catheter had an actual light at its tip – wouldn’t that burn the embryos – or if it was some kind of material designed to show up as a light on the ultra sound. The doctor watched the monitor as he maneuvered the embryos into place in the upper third of the uterus. I don’t know how he picked the place where he finally set them down, perhaps it had good feng shui, but again, the whole process took less than two minutes.

Then he removed the catheter, switched off the spotlight and they wheeled B. out of the room. The doctor shook our hands and wished us good luck. The nurse led us to the recovery room where B. would have to wait for an hour before she could get out of the bed.

We waited with her in the recovery room and finally got to spend some quality time with her. She said that she had lain awake the night before thinking about how this could change all of our lives. I admitted that I wasn’t even thinking about that. I had been up worrying about whether the procedure would be successful.

And that’s still where I am. I think I’ve already done the thinking about how much my life will change when the child is born. For the time being, I’m spending all of my worrying just hoping we get good news in two weeks. It’s going to be a long wait.

If you believe life begins at conception, I am now a father of nine.

Our egg donor flew to Connecticut on Friday night and underwent lab tests over the weekend. Yesterday, she was “retrieved”. That means that the IVF clinic took eleven eggs from her. It seems weird to say that the eggs were “retrieved” – that makes it sound like I was hiding them in her ovaries for a while and now I want them back – but that’s the terminology they use. Of those eleven eggs, two of them “degenerated”. I’ve seen pictures of this online and it’s not pretty. They look like broken chicken eggs, like the doctor dropped them on the way to the petri dish.

The 9 remaining eggs were ICSI’d and resulted in embryos. Now we wait for them to grow. If they divide to 8 cells or more, they are eligible for transfer. B. leaves for Connecticut tomorrow and will undergo additional lab testing on Thursday. If all is well, the transfer could happen on Friday. If the embryos need a little more time to grow, it could be Saturday.

The embryos that aren’t transferred will be frozen. With current technology, a frozen embryo is just as likely to result in a pregnancy as a “fresh” one, so we will have these embryos available as a back-up if the first transfer doesn’t take.

It’s hard not to think about the embryos growing and dividing in Connecticut while I’m sitting here at my desk in Massachusetts. Is this the way the entire pregnancy is going to be?

I’m going to try not to let this blog devolve into a critique on The New Normal, but as we prepare for the events of next week, this week’s episode really hit home. In the episode, Bryan – in a fit of gay enthusiasm – buys a bunch of baby clothes despite his agreement with David not to buy anything for the baby until they are further along in the process. David is nervous about all of the things that can go wrong with the pregnancy and doesn’t want to fully commit emotionally until they are sure they are going to have a healthy baby.

Alberto has only bought two items of clothing for our unborn (actually, un-conceived) child. But we, too, had a pact that we were not going to buy anything until a sonogram detects a heartbeat. Like David, I can’t stop thinking about all of the things that can go wrong. I don’t think it’s because I don’t want to fully commit emotionally to this child (we’re way past that point already) but I think it is just dumb superstition that’s keeping me from telling people and buying baby items. (It might also be the knowledge that, unencumbered by a baby buying embargo, Alberto and I could go buck wild and decimate a Baby Gap.)

I’m not going to be able to stop worrying (I am my mother’s son). But I will try to take the tidy, wrapped-up-in-a-bow advice from the show and learn how to celebrate the wins and enjoy the ride. And the embryo transfer next week is going to be something to celebrate. We can worry about whether it was successful later. And then we can worry about the amniocentesis. And then we can worry about… Well, you get the idea.

There was another thing in the episode that hit home. At the end Nana says, “I assume you gays have wine?” and Bryan responds, “By the cask.” Amen to that.

Last night, I watched the pilot of “The New Normal” – NBC’s new comedy about a gay couple going through the process of gestational surrogacy. I think Ryan Murphy might be stalking me. Surely he got the idea for “Glee” from watching me sing to my cat.

But there are a lot of differences between David and Bryan’s experience and ours. First, and perhaps most importantly, David and Bryan are rich. Bryan drives a Range Rover; I drive a Honda Civic. Bryan shops at Barneys; my Barneys jacket was a “gift” from the lost and found closet at my previous place of employment (it had been there 4 months, don’t judge).

Because of their wealth, David and Bryan make the choice to expand their family through surrogacy very easily. It is a matter of weeks between their decision to become parents and their first meeting with a surrogacy agency. (The agency is called “Expanding Families” which is clearly a play on the name of “Company A”, the organization that asked me about my menstrual cycle on their questionnaire.) Alberto and I have been on this path for five years and there have been a number of setbacks and challenges that David and Bryan, with their “platinum plan”, will not have to face. For instance, when things go wrong with their first surrogate, whom Bryan refers to as a “womb terrorist”, they are able to move quickly on to a different carrier. If our relationship with B. devolves into a hostage situation, we’re screwed.

A second difference is that Bryan decides that he wants to be a parent in, like, five minutes. He sees a cute baby at the mall and decides he wants one too. David is easily convinced, but up until then he was content to raise puppies instead.

As I mentioned before, Alberto and I have wanted to be dads our entire adult lives. And as much as I love my cat, he is never going to be a substitute for a child. I think it is dangerous to portray David and Bryan’s quest to become parents as a pursuit of a status symbol because there are many people out there, even within the gay community, that see the recent increase in the number of gay families that way. I get that this is a comedy, and Bryan is already a collection of gay stereotypes played for humor (which I am not generally opposed to), but I don’t think it would have detracted from the comedy to have the intended parents have a more sympathetic or well-considered motive for wanting to become parents.

In the show's defense, it seems to have moved quickly beyond the topic of initial motivation and David and Bryan now appear to want a child for more noble reasons.

Finally, David and Bryan have chosen a carrier that lives in their community. I think it would be great to have B. closer to us so that we could see the pregnancy progress on a daily basis. (And I do mean daily, which is probably why B. will be glad we live a dozen states away.) Unfortunately we will have to make do with Skype, which I understand would be awkward for the TV show.

And now for one of the things that makes me think Ryan Murphy is living under my porch. David and Bryan decide to use David’s sperm because David is an only child and carrying on his DNA would be important to his family, while Bryan has a big family - brothers with kids and a gay sister.

 Ryan, while you’re under there, watch out for the woodchuck.

Finally, finally our egg donor has signed the contract and we are moving forward again. There were many events that couldn’t happen until she signed and now it seems that they are all happening at once.

The first thing we need to do is to fill out an application for “complications insurance” for both the donor and the carrier. This is separate from the insurance that will cover the pregnancy. If either woman has a bad response to the medications they will have to take before we can attempt an embryo transfer, this is the insurance that will cover them.

I do not have a problem with this insurance; I think it makes sense. Other than the possibility of an adverse reaction to the medication, the doctor is going to be inserting a hollow needle into the donor’s ovaries. I can understand why we’d all want some coverage for that procedure.

However, I do have a problem with the (ridiculously expensive) insurance that we have to buy to cover the pregnancy. B. will be pregnant with my biological child. If she had become pregnant with my child through an improbable, random encounter, my insurance would cover her pregnancy (assuming I survived after Alberto found out). But since this pregnancy is planned and wanted, it is not covered. Although I understand the financial reasons to have such a policy, I think it sends an inappropriate message to society.

Despite the fact that the complications insurance isn’t in place yet, both women have been sent their medications (I hope this blog post will not be used as evidence in a denial-of-coverage hearing). We spoke with B. over the weekend and she will now give herself a daily shot of hormones in the leg. She said it wasn’t so bad, but I’m glad I’m not the one who has to get a shot every day. The shot will make her uterus into a more welcoming environment, like a Starbucks.

Instead of world music and soft lighting, her uterine walls will grow more robust. They will develop an infrastructure of capillaries that the embryo can cling to. Picture a cliff with vines growing on it. Now picture someone being throne off that cliff, clamoring to grab the vines on the way down. This medication grows more vines. I guess that's not really like a Starbucks.

Since the donor is anonymous, we don’t know much about her experience with her medication, but I know that it’s supposed to suppress her menstrual cycle so that there is a traffic jam of eggs in the ovaries. Another drug is supposed to “ripen” the eggs. Finally, just before retrieval, she takes something called the “Trigger Shot,” which is kind of like the starter gun at a track meet. It releases the eggs from their follicles and makes them available to that probing needle.

The final thing we need to do now is to make travel plans because the first attempt at an embryo transfer will be September 28 (give or take a day). Keep us in your prayers.

I haven’t posted in a long time because nothing is happening. So I decided today that I would post about the fact that nothing is happening.

The Egg Donor has had our contract for almost a month now. According to our surrogacy agency’s policy, she was supposed to have her requested changes back within five days. The agency has been in contact with her and assures us that she is working on the contract. They say that she has started her medications, which she is not obligated to do until the contract is signed. They say that she is just being “meticulous”.

Honey, I get meticulous. You are about to create a life. You will most likely never meet this child and you are entrusting him or her to a couple of people about whom you only have a few pages of information. But you knew the deal when you added your name to the registry of potential donors. It became more real for you when you were chosen and you got to see pictures of the two people who will raise the baby you will help to make. It got damn real when a doctor gave you a pelvic exam during your medical screening. You have had many chances to pull out along the way, but you have continued the process.

Sign the contact.

Under our original timeline – the timeline that included five days for donor contact review – B., our carrier, would have delivered the baby around the first of May, assuming the first embryo transfer was successful. This would have allowed Alberto to take his two weeks of paternity leave and then a small, unpaid leave of absence before his summer vacation started. If the first transfer was unsuccessful but the second transfer worked, the baby would be born about two weeks into Alberto’s vacation. In either of these scenarios, we would have had a few months with the baby before we would need daycare. Every week that you wait to sign the contract reduces the amount of time we will have with the baby before he or she needs daycare and makes it more important that the first transfer is successful.

Sign the contract.

In addition to the timing issues this delay creates, there is also the psychological effect of waiting. We don’t know if you are having second thoughts. We don’t have a back-up egg. None of the other donors we looked at were as good a fit. If we need to go with a different donor, that only adds more weeks to the journey. We keep having our weekly Skype conversations with B. and she’s waiting to move on to the next step of this process, too.

Please, sign the contract.

The fertility clinic called today to give me the results of the analysis of the Specimen. I already knew from my previous semen analysis that My Sperm are ready for action, but will need oddly-shaped headwear if attending a royal gala. But now I also know some details about this particular effusion, which is the one that counts.

First, my sperm count is 8x the normal level to be considered fertile. Apparently, under different circumstances, I could have been prolific as an Irish Mormon. (Is there a macho bravado thing that should accompany this revelation? Because I don’t really feel it. I’m more bothered about all that useless fecundity.)

Second, there are more golden retrievers than potheads. They are ready to be combed.

Third, they are at least average in speed, rating a 2.5 on a scale of 0-4. Not exactly Michael Phelps, but they will do. I’m not sure how relevant this is anyway, since we are using ICSI; you don’t have to be fast if you’re being shot out of a cannon.

Now, assuming encasing them in carbonite (or, whatever) doesn’t damage them, there will be no need for a second retrieval. Under the circumstances of that first experience, I’m happy to hear that.

The other medical procedures of Marathon day were more mundane than the production of The Specimen. After our consultation with the nurse and the IVF doctor, the nurse took B. to an examination room and another nurse led me off to the cheerful lab technician. Alberto was left in the conference room by himself.

After the specimen, I returned to the conference room for a brief moment, where Alberto declined to hear the story I posted yesterday.

Next, I filled out a questionnaire about my hematological history. If you’ve ever donated blood, you’ve filled out this same questionnaire – have you traveled to Africa (yes), do you have a tattoo (yes), have you had sex with another man since 1977 (duh), used intravenous drugs (no), had sex for money (no), had sex with someone from Africa (no, but this seems like an oddly racist risk factor).

I took the questionnaire to the phlebotomist and sat down in her chair. I noticed she was reading a Twilight book. “You’re a phlebotomist and you’re reading a book about vampires? Does that make people nervous?”

“Does it make you nervous?”

Um, it didn’t until you gave a creepy response to my playful question. She managed to draw six vials of my blood without its scent whipping her into a frenzy, though, so I’ll assume she doesn’t sparkle in the sun.

Again, I returned to Alberto’s room of isolation. The first nurse that we met with in the morning returned with a stack of paperwork. Apparently the regulations governing IVF are similar to the regulations that govern the purchase of real estate, because the only other time that I have signed that many documents was when we bought our house. The nurse gave a brief explanation of each form, because if we had read every word we would have been there all week.

After we had both signed all of the paperwork, my final nurse of the day took my blood pressure, listened to my heart and lungs and pronounced me healthy. Meanwhile, B. was having similar tests and procedures, as well as having a sonogram of her uterus and receiving instructions on how to take the drugs that she will need to take to prepare her body for surrogacy.

Finally we were all returned to the conference room where Alberto had been reading his book for three hours. The nurse told us that B. had a lovely uterus and it was her turn to blush. These are the sorts of intimate details that you don’t normally discuss with people you barely know, but I’m getting more used to it.

At the end of Marathon Day, as we were driving back home, we were excited about the next steps. We knew that the Egg Donor would have her medical testing the next day. If that was also successful, all the pieces would be in place to schedule the transfer.

The Specimen. It sounds like bad science fiction – like something reptilian, lurking. But yesterday morning a disconcertingly jovial man in a sterile hair net handed me a cup and told me to produce one. When I “produced” my specimen for the semen analysis I was able to take the cup home with me. I was able to “produce” in silence and obscurity. I was able to produce on my own timeline. Then I transported that specimen to the lab in my pocket (it’s supposed to remain as close to body temperature as possible).

But yesterday I had to have conversations about my specimen. I had a particular time and location to produce it. Theoretically I had all morning, but there were people waiting for me. People who saw me enter the bathroom and had a job to do post-production.

One of the questions I asked in the consultation room with the nurse earlier that day was if this specimen was going to be The Specimen. “Yes,” she said, “so make it a good one.”

I appreciated the tension-diffusing humor, but blushed anyway.

She led me down the hall and passed me off to the jovial lab technician. He had a few forms for me to fill out and told me there would be more to complete when I got back. What great foreplay and afterglow – forms.

He handed me a cup and had me write my name on it. We walked down another hallway lined with offices. All of them were filled with people who turned to watch me pass with my cup. The technician was in a great mood, laughing and making jokes. I was deadly serious.

He pointed to a room, “This one is my favorite.”

I tried to put that image out of my mind entirely. I pulled the door closed and got ready to produce. Unfortunately, there were a number of distractions.

Distraction 1: The woman outside the door talking about her son’s stomach flu. She and her co-worker – who must have had offices right next to the specimen room, lucky them – discussed her son’s symptoms in detail. Projectile vomiting, diarrhea, cold sweats. The works. I’m sorry for her son, but for God’s sake, I’m trying to make a baby here.

Distraction 2: The porn. In the rack on the wall, in full view, was a magazine with a naked woman on the cover, holding a gasoline nozzle in front of her crotch. I did not open the magazine, but I hope that in its pages the use of the nozzle never ventured beyond the realm of the symbolic. I do not pretend to understand this image or its erotic appeal, but it remained within my peripheral vision. Eventually, I turned the magazine over revealing all manner of other perversions.

In desperation I reached for the Purple Folder, labeled “Alternative”. It was offensively thin in comparison to the legion of materials on hand for the production of heterosexual specimens. It too contained all sorts of odd scenarios: naked man on the deck of a ship, naked man by a lamppost, naked man with a shotgun (presumably for the Log Cabin Republicans in the audience). I closed the folder, but used it to cover up the other magazines, so now I was only looking at a purple rectangle. (And can we talk about the fact that the gay porn was concealed, while the straight porn was out in the open? Can they get a filing cabinet or something?)

Distraction 3: Bette Midler, on the radio, singing “God is Watching Us”. Here I am, holding a folder full of gay porn, the image of the lewd service station attendant burned into my retinas, trying to produce, and Bette Midler is signing a song about how we are never out of sight of the Divine.

Eventually, miraculously, triumphantly, I was able to produce the Specimen. I took it back to the lab technician and handed it over.

“How’d it go?” he asked.

Today was “Marathon Day”. That’s what our IVF clinic calls the series of tests and procedures we underwent. But the medical exams were secondary to two of today's events: We met our carrier in person for the first time and I produced the “specimen” that will become our baby.

I’ll get to the specimen tomorrow (because there is a whole, absurd story there) but let’s start with meeting the carrier. For confidentiality, I’m going to call her by her first initial: B.

B.’s flight was delayed by 9 hours. She was supposed to arrive the night before, stay in a hotel and arrive fresh and rested at the clinic the next morning. Instead, she had to get up at dawn, catch two planes (one from a local airport the size of a small Costco) and then find the car service to take her to the clinic. Our surrogacy agency handled most of the arrangements; another reason not to do this without professional guidance and administrative coordination.

She happened to arrive at the clinic at the same time we did. When we saw her get out of the car, we thought it was her but we weren’t sure. I called out to her, with a question mark at the end of her name.

I wonder if we were what she was expecting. Skype is a great tool for our time, a great advance over the telephone, but it doesn’t give you the sense of someone like being in their presence. In our weekly video chats, B. had been shy, but gradually more open. In person we found her easy to talk to. Despite what must have been an exhausting journey already that day, she was friendly and warm. I think we were all more at ease than we expected to be, at least with each other; I think we still found the clinic to be a bit daunting.

We entered the drab, concrete-block building and were taken to a conference room where a nurse explained what we had to look forward to that day and in the days to come. I’ll talk more about the medical procedures in a future post, but we were able to clarify some things that I had been unsure of.

• We confirmed that the egg donor will be anonymous. We know an extraordinary amount of information about her, more than many people know about the people they make babies with, but we will never know her name. 
• We learned that the specimen I was about to produce would be frozen and would be sent away for testing before being used to create the embryos that we will transfer. I thought that a “fresh” transfer meant that the egg would be fresh from the ovaries and the sperm would be fresh from the testes. Apparently though, according to FDA rules, the sperm must be frozen and tested no matter the type of transfer, fresh or frozen. A fresh transfer means that the completed embryo was never frozen, but either of the two source cells could have been previously frozen. 
• We will definitely be using intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) so I don’t have to worry that my sperm is too gay to find and seduce the egg in the pick-up bar of the petri dish. 
• The transfer will occur in four to eight weeks. We don’t need to be present for the transfer, but we would like to be. Even though everything important will take place in labs and exam rooms, it will be nice to be able to see B. again and to hear first impressions of how everything went from her and the IVF Doctor. 

After all of the tests were done, we still had a couple hours before the car would return to pick B. up to take her to the airport for her third and fourth flights of the day. We walked a few blocks to have lunch at a nice place the nurse recommended. At lunch we talked about B.’s kids and her job and if she likes to cook. We talked about our families.

It was nice to be able to spend time with her. Our lives are intersecting with her life in such an unusual way. She’s not really a friend, or family or (yikes) an employee. And yet she will turn out to be one of the most important people we will meet. Since she lives so far away we will probably only see her in person twice more – once at the transfer, and then at the birth. I guess Skype will have to suffice.

As part of this process we have to write our wills. We have to make sure that there will be someone to take care of our unborn child if we die before the birth. If we die after the child is born and fully adopted by the non-natural father, there are laws in place to govern what happens to the baby. But an unborn child in the womb of a woman who is not his or her biological mother is a legal gray area.

Of course, there’s no reason to write a will that just governs what happens to the child in utero. We needed to decide what would happen to our child no matter when our untimely death might occur. We also needed to come up with a way to divide our meager assets.

We were concerned that we were going to start a minor territorial war when we started asking the questions necessary to make these tough decisions. Luckily when I gingerly asked my mother what she would want to happen to our child in the event of my death she exclaimed, “I can’t take care of it, I’m too old! And your father is ancient!”

Well, that’s one way to make a decision. Alberto’s parents expressed similar concerns about their age, but were not quite so absolute. And so, should we pass on before our time, they get the kids.

It’s a strange thing to contemplate. We know a lot of people who we think would be great parents and who we would trust to raise our children. But how do you ask someone to whom you’re not related to take on that responsibility. Especially given two sets of grandparents that intend to be very involved in the child’s life. You can’t ask your best friend to take on a child and four senior citizens, right?

Ideally, if Alberto and I were to die, I would want my child to be raised by Ina Garten. Yes, the Barefoot Contessa. Not only do I think that she and Jeffrey would be good, loving parents, but they live a magnificent life. They have a majestic house with a lush garden in the Hamptons. They eat simple, but delicious and creative foods. They fill their life with short excursions and exuberant picnics. She infuses small moments with fullness. And it doesn’t hurt that she surrounds herself with gay men.

Maybe I can bequeath my shelf-full of Barefoot Contessa cookbooks to my mother-in-law along with my child. But I don’t know where she’s going to get the house in the Hamptons.

Today we signed the Carrier Agreement, which governs our relationship with the surrogate. I can’t say too much about our carrier because of confidentiality clauses in the agreement, but I will disclose the one thing that caused us the most concern in this relationship. She lives in Tennessee.

We originally hoped that the carrier would live somewhere in New England. We hoped that we would be able to visit her regularly and attend all of the doctor’s visits with her. We thought maybe we would be too involved, and we would start to annoy her.

But with the surrogacy agency we are working with, you don’t peruse a list of potential surrogates like you do with potential egg donors. Instead, the agency matches you with a carrier they believe shares your expectations for the pregnancy. Both the intended parents and the carrier fill out a questionnaire. In order to be matched, both parties must agree on communications preferences - during the pregnancy and after the birth - and on more difficult questions such as abortion. We were asked if we would choose to abort a child with severe genetic defects (we would) or if we would “selectively reduce” a multiple pregnancy (we wouldn’t, unless the health of the carrier were at risk).

Other than those decisions, I’m not sure what criteria the agency uses to make a match. I’m not sure if our religious backgrounds or personality traits were taken into consideration. We have “met” the carrier three times now, via a video call through Skype. She is quiet, but friendly. We decided to move forward with her after the first call. She seems to be a responsible and conscientious person, who will care for our child while it grows inside her. As I mentioned before, she passed numerous psychological tests and had an extensive interview with a social worker before she was eligible to be matched.

There’s just that one geographical issue. If we had decided to wait for a different carrier, closer to home, we could have extended our wait time by six months or more. Because she is so far away, we will probably only be able to visit her once during the pregnancy. If she has a quick labor, we may not be able to attend the birth.

We expressed our concerns to the agency. They said that this is a relatively close match for them. A slight majority of their clients are from foreign countries. Clearly it is a much more difficult thing for intended parents to make it from Paris to Denver than it will be for us to make it from Massachusetts to Tennessee. According to the agency, almost 80% of their intended parents are able to be there for the birth of their child, even given the distances involved.

How does this work? We were told that we need to trust the carrier and her knowledge of her body. That is a little imprecise for me, but what can I do. It’s just another part of this process that I have to admit is out of my control.

I have asked Alberto to stop referring to my sperm as my “little buddies”. I think I’d prefer that people don’t discuss my sperm at all, but I guess it is a necessary part of this process. My sperm has been frequent dinner table conversation recently. Still, there’s something infantilizing about “little buddies”.

He asked what he should call them instead. I tried out the Swim Team, My Soldiers, SWAT, the Sailors, My Missiles, and The Force. Unfortunately none of those have stuck. Maybe we should just go with My Sperm.

In any case, the results of the semen analysis came back today and My Sperm are of sound body and fitness. They should be able to get the job done. Congratulations to me.

However, there was one odd thing on the report. Apparently, 82% of My Sperm have “irregular heads”. The doctor didn’t list this as a concern, but it’s still strange. I don’t know if they are too big (My Giants) or too small (My Roaming Gnomes) or shaped like a heart (My Lovers). As long as they’re not shaped like swastikas (My Nazis?).

I kind of want to see pictures. It would be like a yearbook (Class of 4/25/12, the next class will graduate in a few days, if the mood is right). Or maybe more like one of those moments from nature at the end of CBS Sunday Morning (Charles Osgood: “We leave you this morning at a recent ejaculation in Massachusetts, where a group of sperm are showing off their irregular heads.”).

I don’t think that’s one of the services offered at our clinic, though. Maybe someday I’ll have access to a microscope and some privacy. Until then I’ll be wondering what’s wrong with My Missiles’ warheads.

We have chosen an Egg Donor. Unsurprisingly, she is Colombian. She has impeccable cheek bones. She is smart and healthy. I can’t reveal too much identifying information about her, but one factor that lead us to choose her from the Egg Bank over the other twelve or so Latina donors was that she listed Scrabble as one of her hobbies, with the added information, “I rarely lose.”

Bring it on Egg Lady.

Actually, the donor and I will probably never play Scrabble with each other. There are differing philosophies about “open” vs. “closed” donation. Our surrogacy agency is a big proponent of open donation, which is when the donor and the intended parents meet and exchange contact information. The intended parents may or may not share regular updates on the child’s life with the donor, but if the child eventually and at an appropriate age wants to contact the donor, he or she can. The agency believes this is the best way to answer a child’s questions about his or her origins and that he or she will feel more comfortable having the option to meet his or her biological mother.

Our IVF clinic feels that closed donation is best. They believe in a donor’s right to privacy and that the donor should have the right to move on with her life. She will process her feelings about donation and trust that the intended parents are raising their child in a loving environment. The clinic retains the genetic information on the donor, so there is no medical reason why it would be necessary to contact her.

We are open to either type of donation. Ideally, we wouldn’t meet the donor, but we would have her contact information in case the child wants to get in contact with her in the distant future. We want to think of this child as wholly ours and we don’t want to know the biological mother enough to wonder if he or she got some trait from his or her mother. At the same time, we aren’t willing to pass up a good, Scrabble-playing donor, based on her philosophy on open vs. closed donation.

Because this donor did not come from either the IVF clinic’s or the surrogacy agency’s donor pools, but from a third party, I am not sure what her preference is. But either way, we have chosen to work with her and we will work with her choice on this issue.

We have now been walked through the steps of In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) four times. Once by each of the IVF clinics we met with and once by the surrogacy agency. Even more times if you count our discussions five years ago.

So I’m going to attempt to recount the process here without consulting Wikipedia.

The first step is for the carrier and the donor to sync their womanly cycles (if you want a more technically precise description of IVF, click here). The carrier goes on low dose birth control pills to suppress her own ovulation. Her eggs are not welcome here. The donor takes fertility medications that cause several of her eggs to become ready at once, instead of the usual one at a time. From what I’ve heard, a cheaper method to sync the cycles would be to have the donor and the carrier become college roommates, but I guess that’s impractical.

Next, everyone travels to the clinic for what is called a “fresh transfer”. The donor’s eggs are retrieved through the use of a hollow needle inserted into the pelvis. The natural father’s sperm is retrieved through the use of pornography.

The clinic combs through the sperm (multiple people who have described this process to me have used the word “comb” which is an interesting visual image) to find the most desirable specimens. Apparently, even healthy semen contains sperm that is deformed or lazy. The ones that are leaping around like golden retrievers are segregated from the ones that look like they’ve just smoked a bunch of weed. At this point, the doctor can either place the energetic sperm in a petri dish with the eggs and let them do what comes naturally, or he can pick up individual sperm and forcibly inject them into the eggs. The latter is more expensive and time consuming but usually results in a greater number of viable embryos. I prefer the second method because I have a suspicion that if we use the first method, my sperm may ignore the eggs and just try to fertilize each other.

Then we wait. I’m not sure if the carrier will be in town yet. It seems like she could arrive late to this particular party. The donor and the intended parents have to stick around to provide a second set of eggs and sperm if the first round fails to produce enough viable embryos. I don't think we'll be hitting the town together. That might be awkward.

We can choose to wait for three days or five days while the embryos grow. I guess if we wait five days, the doctor will know more about the embryos he chooses to implant in the carrier. Presumably if one of them starts to look like it might develop into a professional athlete or brilliant artist, that’s the one that moves to the head of the line. Yes, it is a sign of our era that we’ve started to assess a child’s potential when he or she is still smaller than the head of a pin.

Now, a choice. The doctor can implant any number of viable embryos into the carrier (technically they are “blastocysts” at this point, which just sounds cool – like the little guy is going to be piloting an X-wing through the carrier’s uterus – but I’m going to continue to call them embryos because that’s a term more people are familiar with). Most doctors limit the number of embryos they will implant to two, because they don’t want to have an Octomom situation on their hands.For infertile hetero couples, using their own eggs and sperm, doctors sometimes implant more embryos, but our embryos are more likely to develop into successful pregnancies, because they came from two fertile people.

So the decision is whether to implant one embryo or two. The downside of implanting one embryo is that it has only a 40% chance of success. The downside of implanting two embryos is that it is much more likely to result in twins. (Why is having twins a downside? There are medical reasons but I’ll just cite parental stress as the overwhelming reason why we would prefer a singleton.)

If the first IVF cycle is unsuccessful, we have to start all over. It is likely there will be embryos left over from the first cycle, so the donor and intended parents may not have to return for round two. Any left over embryos are frozen after the transfer, and our IVF clinic has a similar success rate with "fresh" and "frozen" transfers. (In fact, the reason we chose our IVF clinic is because they do not have a preference for fresh transfers, which means that if the carrier and donor are on different schedules we don't have to chose a different donor; we can create the embryos and wait for the carrier's body to be ready.) But a failed cycle is money and time wasted. The carrier needs to wait at least two months before her body will be ready to try again.

For this reason, we have decided to implant two embryos. The odds are about a 40% chance of twins and a 40% chance of a singleton, with a 20% chance of no child at all. If it has to go to a second cycle and we implant two embryos again, there is an overall 94% chance of success. If that also fails and we have to go to round three, the overall chance of success is above 99%. If that fails as well it means God doesn’t want us to be parents and we need to reassess our lives.

We are willing to have twins. Despite the added stress, we know we want to have more than one child and, given how expensive this journey is, twins would kind of be like a buy-one-get-one-free Safeway Club Card deal. Nevertheless, we strongly prefer a singleton.

My mother-in-law is praying for twins. I ask that all who read this try to counteract her by praying for us to have a singleton. But overall we would appreciate your prayers for us to have healthy children in any number.

The surrogacy agency that we picked is mainly a law office. This is a different approach than the companies that we looked into five years ago that were mainly fertility clinics. Some surrogacy agencies are independent organizations that outsource every aspect of the process.

And it’s a complicated process.

Gestational surrogacy is an arrangement in which the surrogate agrees to have embryos created from sperm and another woman’s egg implanted in her uterus through in vitro fertilization (IVF). I think when a lot of people think about surrogacy, they think of traditional surrogacy, which means that the egg is the carrier’s own. Traditional surrogacy can be accomplished through IVF or through less sophisticated means (i.e., the so-called Turkey Baster Method, which I pray involves something a bit more high-tech than an actual turkey baster).

Gestational surrogacy offers many legal benefits, but also an important emotional one. The carrier is less likely to form an attachment with the child she’s carrying if she is not its biological mother. The egg donor is unlikely to form an attachment with the child if she doesn’t carry it. In most cases, the egg donor won’t even see the child until much later in his or her life, if at all.

Gestational surrogacy is also a hell of a lot more expensive, mostly because there are more parties involved and IVF is a more complicated medical procedure. The organization that coordinates everything gets an “Agency Fee”, for bringing everything together. This is sort of like the fee a General Contractor gets when building a home.

Since our agency is a law office, they do all the legal work in house. This includes writing the contracts for the egg donor and carrier and finalizing the adoption by the intended parent who is not the natural father. In addition to the legal work, they have a team of licensed social workers on staff who screen the donor and carrier and also offer support to the carrier throughout the process. Both women have to take psychological tests and have to pass background checks. The carrier also has to have an extensive phone interview with the social worker. If the carrier has a partner, he or she must undergo screening as well. The agency recruits donors and carriers, but will work with donors from other organizations’ donor pools. Finally, our agency has an in-house staff of financial coordinators that handle billing and administer the trust account where our up-front fees were deposited.

Our agency outsources the medical work. The organizations that are mainly fertility clinics do it the other way around. We were able to pick essentially any fertility clinic we wanted, although our agency made some suggestions to narrow the field. We went with a clinic within driving distance, although compared to the overall cost, travel to a clinic anywhere in the country would have been a small expense. We chose our clinic because the people we met with seemed organized and emphasized choosing an egg donor based on her qualities not her schedule (more on that tomorrow).

There are intended parents that choose to coordinate this process on their own, just like there are some people who will build a house without a general contractor. They will choose their own lawyer, IVF clinic, egg donor and surrogate. They will attempt to recruit a surrogate online. They may work with an established egg donation agency or they may try to find a donor on the Internet as well.

Even though “going independent” can save thousands of dollars, that is not for us. I’m not going to trust some woman that I found on Craigslist and met once at an Applebee’s to carry my child. We want both the screening and the hand holding that comes from working with an agency. We’ve been assigned a coordinator that acts as a single point of contact and schedules travel as well as visits to the IVF clinic for the various medical procedures involved. She has set up phone calls and answered a ton of questions (or forwarded them to the various legal, financial and medical experts involved).

This journey is already stressful enough without having to worry about syncing everyone’s schedules. Google Calendar is not a substitute for a good agency.

I’m learning from looking through egg donor profiles that Columbians are just better looking than the rest of us. Shakira and Sophia Vergara are not outliers. As I click through the different pictures to find out more about these women, inevitably the ones I click on first are the Columbianas.

We have decided to use my sperm to create this baby. We came to this decision because my parents have no biological grandchildren. And all four of my grandparents have no biological great-grandchildren. I’m not entirely sure what the world would be missing out on if it were denied another generation of Smiths and Meekers, but we’d like to find out. The world already has a new generation of Barcenases and ample opportunity for more.

Since we are using white sperm (I mean, sperm from a white person), we want to find a Latina egg. We want our children to look like both of us, as much as possible. I’ve discovered that this process will be considerably easier if/when we use Alberto’s sperm, next time around. There are far more white eggs than brown.

The egg donor coordinator at our IVF clinic explained why. We aren’t the only couple that wants their baby to look like both of them. And there are far more white couples looking for donors and surrogates. This is not because infertility strikes white people more often or that there are fewer ethnic minority and mixed race gay couples that want to have kids. It’s because white people are more likely to be able to afford this treatment. In the case of hetero couples, there are more whites with health insurance that covers infertility (I’m saving the insurance issue for a day that I feel more like going on a rant).

So because of the socioeconomic demographics of the United States, we have a much smaller pool of donors. Ironically, because of those same socioeconomic factors, it’s more likely that donors of non-white backgrounds could use the money. Add in the fact that the eggs in the highest demand come from women who went to or are enrolled in Ivy League colleges, women who will likely make more over their lifetimes than the average donor, and it’s just like any other market – the rich get richer.

But at least God gave us Columbia and made its women fertile.

We started seriously looking into surrogacy right around the time that we were married. We had been dating for seven years and we were approaching thirty. A year earlier I had inherited a piece of saleable property from my Grandfather. The time seemed right.

At that point, there were two major, national organizations that catered to gay men who wanted to have children through surrogacy (there are now more than this, although the agencies vary in size and scope). We’ll call them Company A and Company B. We requested information from both of them.

Both of the organizations had glossy brochures. Company A included a DVD that we never watched. Both places included paperwork we needed to fill out if we wanted to have a customized presentation. Neither of the agencies worked exclusively with gay couples, but one of them had a questionnaire that was clearly not designed for this program and was more tailored to their work with infertile heterosexuals. It included questions like, “Is the semen usually deposited in the vagina?” 

Um, no. There isn’t a vagina within 100 feet of the semen.

Although we returned questionnaires to both organizations, we only set up a consultation with the agency that had no interest in whether or not I have regular menstrual cycles. It helped that they had a representative in Wellesley, just down the street from what would become the Pinkberry where I now spend way too much time.

We met with a nice, quiet man, probably in his early forties, who had used Company A to have a child with his husband four years earlier. He made it a point to say that although he was paid for these consultations he was not an employee of Company A (I guess that means that at the end of the year they give him a 1099 instead of a W-2; other than that I can’t really see a distinction). We had a lovely conversation about our desire to become parents and his experience with surrogacy. We were impressed by the level of screening Company A put both potential surrogates and egg donors through. He walked us through the timeline and the medical procedures and the cost. Because the brochures had come with cost estimates, we did not fall out of our chairs when he announced the price.

We left feeling excited. We thought that we would be fathers in 18 to 24 months, possibly before our thirtieth birthdays. We talked about Company A in the car on the way home and were in complete agreement that we would sign a contract with them as soon as possible.

Company A (as well as the organization we are currently in contract with, which is not Company A) requires that all of the costs be deposited in a trust account before the process can begin. That is to ensure that if the intended parents suffer financial hardships during the pregnancy, everyone will still get paid. You can’t repossess a child like you can a beach house. So we couldn’t sign a contract right away, but we decided that we would as soon as we could sell that piece of property that I inherited from my Grandfather.

Well, it’s five years later and that damn piece of property still sits on the market unpurchased. Company A got my hopes up a few years ago by offering a financing program. I excitedly emailed our contact there to find out the details. They said that they would finance 80% of the price at a rate of 12%. That seemed steep, but we were willing to go with it. Then I read the term of the loan: 1 year. As a financial professional I cannot think of a single person to whom that loan would appeal. Perhaps someone with a lot of money in short-term bonds. 

I fired back a terse reply: “Please let me know if a longer term becomes available.”  I don’t think I even included a “Regards” or “Sincerely” in closing. 

 And so, we waited. During this time we reconsidered adoption, but decided to keep waiting for a few more years. I re-evaluated what I consider to be a good age to have one’s first child. Alberto would want me to point out that we also continued to live our lives. We took trips and went dancing and spent a lot of time with friends. We extended our youth. 

But I don’t think it’s overdoing it to say that mostly we waited.

And finally, a different piece of property sold. My father also inherited property from my Grandfather and suddenly he was flush with cash. He intended to reinvest that money, but he agreed to let Alberto and I borrow enough to create a grandchild. Finally we were ready to move forward.

I have always wanted children. As a child, I wanted my parents to have some more, because I didn’t like being an only child. I remember telling them that I planned to have four or five children. “Just wait until you have the first one,” my father said. “You’ll want to put that one back in.”

I have never thought of being gay as an obstacle to parenthood. Well, obviously it’s an obstacle. I guess I should say I never thought it represented the end of my parental ambition. I have heard a lot of gay men say that they wish they weren’t gay because they want to have a family. I’ve never thought of the two as mutually exclusive. From the moment I started looking for a nice, young man to settle down with, I knew that one of my most important criteria for choosing a mate was what he would be like as a father (and I wouldn’t even consider anyone who didn’t want to have children).

I think the first time I heard Alberto say, “I thought I would be a father by now,” we were 23 and had been dating two years. I know he has ached over how long it has taken for us to reach this part of our lives as much as I have, but I won’t presume to enter his head and write about what the experience has been like for him. Over the course of our twelve years together we have constantly discussed how we are going to have children.

I have been an advocate for surrogacy since these conversations started. I won’t get into the Nature vs. Nurture debate (although I reserve the right to bring it up later). In any case, as much as I’d like to believe that I have biological reasons for wanting to have a child that is biologically my own, I should probably admit to myself that the decision is at least equally emotional. I want a child that looks like me and sounds like me. I want him or her to have at least a 50/50 shot of having my inborn talents, and if he or she has my innate deficiencies, at least I already know how to deal with those problems. I also want a child that looks like a tiny Alberto. I want him to have Alberto’s smile and thick hair and big head. Unfortunately, technology has not progressed to the point that we can combine our DNA into one little Philberto. (But don’t think for a second that if science came up with a method to do so tomorrow that I’d give weight to any of the Faustian arguments against it.) So, we’ll just have to have two kids.

Alberto has wavered back and forth between adoption and surrogacy. He believes (correctly) that adoption is a noble pursuit, a way to give children in need of a home the support and love they need. As a teacher he has seen the effects of bad parenting on children and believes that offering a more supportive environment to a child is a great way to improve the world. But he can also understand the desire to pass on your DNA to a new generation. I think he is even more concerned than I am that if I don’t have biological children, my family line will stop (I’m not only an only child but an only grandchild on both sides).

But again, I don’t want to dig too deep into his reasons. He can write a blog himself if he wants to share those. So I’ll tell you another reason why I want to have a biological child, even though it’s not quite as dignified. I don’t want to have to give anything up to be gay. Well, you know, except women.

That’s one of the reasons why I believe so strongly in the right to marry. Alberto is my husband (thank-you-very-much Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts). We have a nice house and good careers and a mischievous, affectionate cat. We have the acceptance of our peers. We can hold hands in public if we so choose.

And we can have children. They can look and sound like us. They can be good at basketball (if they take after Alberto) or suck at basketball (if they take after me) and dammit that’s because of our genes.

I know that’s not a good enough reason to choose surrogacy so please refer back a few paragraphs to where I was being more sympathetic.

I’m looking at a small, round, plastic container. In about ten minutes I’m going to be holding this container in one hand, and doing something with the other hand that’s none of your business. My thoughts in those moments will be equally private, so I want to tell you a little bit about my thoughts right now.

Less than a month ago, my husband Alberto and I signed a contract with a surrogacy agency and dropped it in the mail with a huge check. I mean a massive, giant check. A check that could have been the down payment on a charming three-bedroom house in a nice, leafy suburb.

Since then, things have moved quickly. We expected to be “matched” with a surrogate in two-to-six months. By that time, we would have chosen a fertility clinic to perform the embryo transfer, signed wills to ensure that if we die during this process someone will care for the child (or children, but more on that later), and had a lawyer examine our health insurance to see if our medical plan will cover any of this. But either the agency or God worked faster than we expected. Now we have to have all of those things done immediately.

And, I have to have my semen analyzed, hence the container.

Over the next couple of days, I’ll recount how we got here. Not just from the moment we signed the contract, but from the time we decided to pursue surrogacy, more than five years ago. We still have a long way to go and I’m trying not to get so excited about how close we are to having a child that I spend the next year of my life praying for the time to fly by, like a kid waiting for Christmas. I’m going to record this journey so that I don’t forget it in the future, and also to slow myself down in the present.

I will not, however, say any more about the container and its contents.