Before Desiree

On June 29th, the day before the transfer, I scooped up Desiree and her mom, Lisa, at the airport and whisked them off to Manhattan for an afternoon of sightseeing and to show off my NYC stomping grounds. As luck would have it, the moment we emerged from the parking lot I heard someone calling my name. Tony P., a talented casting director and wonderful old friend whom I've known for years, plucked me out of the crowd, and I was able to proudly introduce Desiree and Lisa to him. I mention this chance meeting because we came 'out' to him about our intended pregnancy (after he, too, mistook us for sisters).  Poor Tony looked so confused, but he was too polite and stunned to ask us to explain further. So, for all you Tonys reading this, here's a brief intro of how this kind of thing works.

The elevator version is that we retrieved my eggs (via IVF), put them together with my husband's sperm, then let them grow in a petri dish for 5 days (so we knew they were viable). Then they went into deep freeze before they were thawed out a few years later once we found Desiree. Ultimately, we took the 2 strongest, healthiest embryos and had them implanted in Desiree's uterus.
My husband and I decided to embark on this process just after we got engaged almost 4 years ago.  By that time I was already over 35, and we didn't want to risk that I wouldn't have enough healthy eggs left if we waited.  I'd also heard horror stories of women who had undergone partial hysterectomies (as I had) and their ovaries stopped producing shortly thereafter.  Fortunately, that wasn't the case with me. What did suck was that our fertility clinic was 2 hours away from where we were living at the time, and we had to get up at 5am every other day to drive 2 hours each way in order to get my blood drawn. (think: needles. Lots of them.) My husband, whom I rarely call a saint, really was one. He drove and let me sleep.
After 2 IVF cycles we had more than enough healthy embryos, so we, quite literally, put them on ice. We got married, went on honeymoon, and soon crashed back to reality:  we moved, he started med school, we somehow survived our first year of marriage intact (a public thank you to my friends who unabashedly admitted that their first year wasn't idyllic, either), and then I started grad school myself. Once we finally got past the initial chaos of our new life together, we started searching for our carrier in earnest. And that is a whole other crazy story.