Whirlwind

It's been a whirlwind. We got an email with 11-12 donor family profiles on Tuesday afternoon. More specifically, I got them on my email on my phone and started browsing. We had a training for our adoption agency that night, so when I met up with Daniel after work, he looked over the profiles, too. Within 45 minutes, we had both agreed on the same first and second choice. I guess with all the talking about sperm donors and potential adoptive situations, we've wound up very much on the same page.

We didn't feel like we needed to sleep on it, because we have pretty certain specifications of what we are and aren't open to, and both of these families aligned with them. I emailed our clinic to let them know our choices Tuesday night. (The choosing a family was the easy part... the difficult part was understanding the logistics behind the different stages of embryos- this set has embryos in two stages- and the implications for transfer and needing a back up).

From there, the clinic has to contact the the donors and send some information on us, to see if they want to match with us. They are able to ask questions of us before they say yes or no. We expected to hear back in several days, or maybe a week or longer.

Bright and early Thursday morning (so really just a day later), I had an email saying our first choice donors accepted us: "I wanted to let you know that donor xxxx has gladly accepted you as recipients". Big horray #1!

The open agreement/contract mediator followed up with us later that afternoon to let us know the donor family actually lives within an hour of us and wanted to know if that was ok. Fine by us! Again, we wondered if this would be a roadblock. But, we heard back within several hours that they, too, are okay with the proximity: "I am happy to tell you that I received a prompt response from the donors.  They state that they 'don't have any problem with the geographic proximity' and are 'good to proceed'." . Big horray #2!

Now the next step will be that our mediator meets with them to see exactly what openness they forsee, and then meets with us to do the same. She will write a legally binding contract. We will all agree to it (hopefully). Then, the set of embryos from this family will be "reserved" for us, and we can proceed with transfer in the May cycle!