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@somecopingskills
You had a surrogacy where your surrogate could meet the baby after the birth, right? Would you recommend it to other people?
(IC this is posted after more than a week’s delay.)
It worked out for us. If you get along poorly with your surrogate it may be more fraught. Now that it’s summer she’s only visiting very occasionally.
[hollyhock-pavilion] eeeeeeee congratulations!!! (oh so tiny. oh that little nose.)
<3
Imavi.
We can feel the baby kick now, when the surrogate is here.
I have no words.
We’re going to a lot of doctor’s appointments. There’s nothing wrong, it’s just standard for the surrogacy arrangement as a way to keep us posted.
The surrogate likes her obstetrician but we don’t, mostly because he seems to think Vae’s medical degree and experience are fake because she has an accent. It’s not up to us, though.
I’m trying to concentrate on the baby we will have so, so soon, and not the parts of the experience that we’ll never get. I’m doing a lot of shopping. We have a lot of baby clothes now in a season and a half range of sizes.
She’s pregnant. We’ll have a baby before the spring is out.
Unless some kind of accident happens and we have to use the insurance fallback and have a lateborn who will appear when neither of their parents will ever spring again, which... I’m not sure we’d even do that. At that point it might be time to give up.
She’s in the doctor’s office now. I keep thinking I’m going to pass out.
We'll know if it took or if we have to retry in six weeks. I would like to spend them unconscious.
She’s in the doctor’s office now. I keep thinking I’m going to pass out.
It’s almost spring somewhere again, so I want to put out a few notes for people considering hiring a surrogate.
If you at all can, don’t do any decisions during spring. I know it’s hard, but it’s so easy to make mistakes when you’re in the middle of springing and about to finally have your baby.
Really consider what kind of relationship you are willing to have with your surrogate, especially if you are also using her as an egg donor. Finding surrogates who are willing to have no contact with the child during their first two springs is harder and thus costs more, but you aren’t comfortable with the surrogate’s continuing presence in your life paying will be worth it.
Write everything you’ve agreed on with your surrogate down. You do not want to have a fight about the terms of the contract while springing, while the surrogate is pregnant or while you’re holding your new baby.
I do mean literally everything. No matter how she is before the birth, no matter how good you think your memory is. Have everything notarized by a someyellow while you’re at it. You do not want to be one of the horror stories.
The baby will bond to the surrogate during the pregnancy. It’s better for you and your baby if you have things that smell like the surrogate and tapes of her/her family members’ voices. Yes, even if you did all the pre-birth bonding with the surrogate. Do not take everything familiar from your baby at the same time, their first weeks are hard enough as-is, they have to get used to living outside the womb.
You should realize that if you are using a surrogate you should have your baby as early in the spring as possible, both because surrogates get pregnant as soon as they can and because bonding with your child is easier.
There is nothing wrong with needing a surrogate. You are no less the parent for it.
Most surrogates quit after the first time. It is very likely that if you follow my advice for your surrogate it will not be because of you.
Does any of the "while you're springing" stop applying to my wife, who is past the fertile window?
Spring is almost here.
The zygote is frozen and ready to go. The surrogate is contracted. We bought insurance in case something happens to her.
We have enough money to take two seasons off unless there’s a credit price spike this year in Elaan, which we’ll save for when the baby is born. (In the meantime Vae’s serving tourists and expats at a large hospital and I’m doing online counseling. We aren’t fluent enough to work fully in Elaani effectively yet; hazard of orange jobs.)
I have a firmly entrained gut feeling that something will manage to go wrong anyway.
Apparently Elaan is one of those countries that restricts what you can name children because some people will try to name children bizarre things like “Sausage” or a punctuation mark. We were asked to provide Elaani names for our paperwork, and did, but I didn’t realize it extended to children.
There are lots of beautiful names in Elaani on the official list of acceptable options. We had a few ideas from years ago but they don’t matter much compared to other things we’ve already lost.
what’s wrong with naming your kid after a noun?
Some nouns are allowed, just not food nouns. They allow a lot of flowers and weather-related words, and some minerals and astronomy nouns. The whole list is on the Elaan Population Department website and it's optionally translatable.
Apparently Elaan is one of those countries that restricts what you can name children because some people will try to name children bizarre things like “Sausage” or a punctuation mark. We were asked to provide Elaani names for our paperwork, and did, but I didn’t realize it extended to children.
There are lots of beautiful names in Elaani on the official list of acceptable options. We had a few ideas from years ago but they don’t matter much compared to other things we’ve already lost.
My body is finally convinced that it’s still winter after all.
Found a surrogate. I’m not going to be able to fully relax until she’s actually pregnant but it helps. She feels sorry for us.
I can’t consistently do pronouns or plurals correctly in Elaani and Vae keeps accidentally using Tapap vocabulary she picked up when she was a kid and thought she might be a teacher, but other than that it’s coming along.
Ugh you definitely don't deserve kids if you fucked up that badly. Let someone else with better genes get the credit, and get out of my country.
It occurs to me that I haven’t actually said here what happened to wreck our original contract in Yvalta.
In my professional capacity as an addiction counselor sometimes I talk people into giving up their stashes of drugs to increase the number of steps between them and a relapse.
One day I was given such a stash out of the office, while it was closed, on a client’s impulse when he saw me on the street near his apartment. I took it home with me since I couldn’t turn it in.
Our home was inspected to evaluate our fitness as parents and the stash was found. The inspector didn’t follow up on my explanation and the appeals process didn’t resolve quickly or well enough to let us ever expect a permission out of that House.
We’re only going to have one child, so on a eugenic scale my traits have still been selected against.
The fuck? How would having drugs in the house mean someone’s not fit to be parents?
They would have caused birth defects, if Vae had been taking them and possibly even if only I had been, and weren't stored in baby-proof containers.
Ugh you definitely don't deserve kids if you fucked up that badly. Let someone else with better genes get the credit, and get out of my country.
It occurs to me that I haven’t actually said here what happened to wreck our original contract in Yvalta.
In my professional capacity as an addiction counselor sometimes I talk people into giving up their stashes of drugs to increase the number of steps between them and a relapse.
One day I was given such a stash out of the office, while it was closed, on a client’s impulse when he saw me on the street near his apartment. I took it home with me since I couldn’t turn it in.
Our home was inspected to evaluate our fitness as parents and the stash was found. The inspector didn’t follow up on my explanation and the appeals process didn’t resolve quickly or well enough to let us ever expect a permission out of that House.
We’re only going to have one child, so on a eugenic scale my traits have still been selected against.
[hollyhock-pavilion] Congratulations on the swap! I hope the search for a surrogate goes well ^_^
Thank you.
We’re here.
We can order groceries and things like that online with machine translation, which is probably a crutch we should do without in the long run, but it’s making settling in easier. Can’t get all the kinds of fruit we’re used to from the normal store without a special order but that’s not a big deal.
Shopping for surrogates now. Got to do something with all this reseasoning energy. (Yes, I also start reseasoning very fast, there’s a reason our vacation here was only a couple of days long.)
They say fourteen percent of people who try surrogacy aren’t too traumatized to do it again after the first time. Those fourteen percent are usually willing to do it every spring they’re not having their own children, which is usually not many springs since surrogacy pays so astronomically well. If there was some way to find that fourteen percent in advance - people who are just wired so being pregnant is good enough even if the baby isn’t theirs and they don’t get to keep it - maybe this would be easier.
As it is it’s not impossible that there just are not enough surrogates for any price.
(We have a lot of money but we’d be priced out if a lot of blues were in the market. Fortunately they aren’t.)
There’s a lot of things we can compromise on to make it cheaper. Purple (well, “caste neutral”, but in practice it means purple) surrogate is fine. Wanting to stay with us to see the baby until summer and visit after is fine. Timing things to have the baby born during summer isn’t, this is going to be my nineteenth year, I want a baby in spring and I’m not going to bet on being able to prolong it by traveling.
Drug use is also not fine, I’ve seen nasty things.
I can’t quite get over that we’re going to all this trouble and spending all this extra money to get something we could have and should have done without.
Nothing will ever fully make up for the injustice that my Vae will never get to be pregnant.
