Full Sibling

 In the days following Jack’s birth, while still in the hospital, I began thinking about Jack’s sibling(s).  This thought so soon after having a child may seem strange to most people, but when you are using a donor…sometimes time is of the essence!  We always knew that we would want at least two children, but considering how sick I was while pregnant with Jack I think this thought so soon even surprised Marcell, to a certain extent.

Naturally, we logged into the Cryobank website to check how many vials were remaining for our donor.  We had been keeping an eye on this for several months already.  This is the message we were greeted with:

“ALERT:

No vials are available for this donor, and no vials are expected to become available in the future.”

We were devastated when we read this!  More than anything we wanted a FULL SIBLING for Jack!  

Of course as new parents our focus quickly shifted back to our newborn son!  We finished up our short hospital stay and made our way home to a house full of our family.  Once things settled and we began to get the hang of things with this little guy, we started thinking about his sibling(s) again. 

I made a last ditch effort and called the Cryobank to make sure that what we were reading online was in fact accurate. I ended up speaking with one of the managers who informed me that our donor actually had vials left, but they were IVF vials.  Honestly, I didn’t even think through what this would mean for us at the time, I just knew this was our opportunity for a full sibling!

 I had to put in an application to see if the Cryobank would even allow us to purchase them, which gave me some time to talk things over with Marcell.  Her response was some thing along the lines of  “BUY ALL OF THEM”. I don’t think we bought all the vials, but our application was accepted and we were so excited to have that piece of the puzzle secured.

When I was given the green light to start trying for baby #2, I scheduled a consultation with our fertility specialist.  I had so many questions for her because this situation was much different than last time.  Ultimately we determined that if the goal was to have a full sibling for Jack, we would proceed with In-Vitro Fertilization (IVF).

So here we are about to embark on this journey of trying to grow our family and bring home a full sibling for Jack.  I have a multitude of emotions at this point in our journey.  Anxious, excited, nervous, grateful. 

For those of you who don’t know, our journey with Jack was much different than this, but I will go into that at another time.