A Baker's Dozen.

It's official! Sunday is the day that all of my potential future children are going to come out, and Wednesday or Friday is the day that ONE of them is going to go back in. Chance of success: 50.4 percent. Chance of twins: 2%. I can absolutely live with those odds. We went in for our pre-op appointment on Wednesday and I expected the meeting to be solely about the surgery, odds, complications, etc. What I did not expect was a meeting about the custody of our potential children. In one hour my husband and I made more than a few decisions regarding what will likely be 13 leftover frozen embryos after we implant the one. What I now refer to as my "baker's dozen."

We had to decide things like:

• Who gets the embryos if we divorce? (Me.)
• Who gets them if only one of us dies? (Surviving spouse.)
• Who gets them if we both die? (Science.) Although I considered leaving them to the LM in case someone wanted to make him a sibling, but that felt a bit odd.
• How many years will we pay to keep them? (5 which is the maximum.)
• What happens at the end of five years. We had options that even included a burial. (We again chose Science.)
• And how often we can move them (Once.)

I can't explain to you how bizarre it is to think about these kind of things. While I have no emotional attachment to these embryos, I do feel like we are in some way responsible for taking care of them for the next 5 years. Going into this process I was under the impression that every month I would have to redo all of these injections, and that every month I would have to have another procedure until we were successful. I thought that if down the road we wanted to have another baby we would again have to try for a year, do the whole Clomid/ injection game, followed by another trip down IVF lane. It turns out I was wrong. If this cycle fails, or if a few years from now we want baby number 3 (which by the way I now totally do,) then all we have to do is call up the doc, get some estrogen, and implant one of my frozen thirteen. From what it sounds like is the whole thing would take less time/ pain than a routine trip to the dentist.

I am not only elated by this, but also completely relaxed and relieved. Even if this cycle doesn't work (which I have a strong feeling it will) then all we have to do is re-implant in March, April, and so on. Insurance will cover me for 6 lifetime cycles so the odds are definitely in our favor for at least one more baby.

So that's that for now. We remove, implant, and then two weeks later (while we are in Fiji) I can take an at home pregnancy test and then when we get back confirm any results with a blood test. Clean and simple, just how baby making should be!

I must admit it is taking all of my willpower to resist naming them all. But...if I combine the Bradys with the Partridge family I think I can come up with thirteen names! Let's see there's Marsha...Jan...Cindy...Bobby. Hmmmm I may have just gone too far.