So happy for Candice and Megan!

I am over the moon for my friend Candice and her wife Megan. I was going to paraphrase their story but decided to (with their permission) to cut and paste. 

I am so excited to have this experience someday. :)


A student came up to me and told me that I looked different and that she and her friends were taking bets on something. 
She explained that her friends thought it was impossible for me to get pregnant, because I was a lesbian... so they think that I'd been eating too many hamburgers.

Then she said that she disagreed with them and thought I could be pregnant. She wanted to know who was right... 
When I told her that she was right, she got a huge smile on her face and cheered. "I knew you were pregnant!" 

Believe it or not, Lesbians can have babies... 
Lots of people have asked how we got pregnant and I made this blog to explain. Here is our story:

One of the main reasons Megan and I wanted to get married was because we wanted to start a family. Coming from LDS homes we both valued families and children and dreamed all our lives of being mothers. We talked about kids even before we talked about marriage. 

There are so many options. Megan considered getting me liquored up and throwing me into a bar and then picking me up in the morning and seeing what happened... but then we decided to look at other ideas.  ;)

We considered talking to close male friends of ours to have a known donor. We even had one of my best friend's husbands offer to donate for us, which was really sweet. Truth is, there are pros and cons to every option, and in the end we decided to look into cryobanks. 

Choosing our donor from the cryobank was really fun. Cryobanks are really particular. Not anyone can donate. Our cryobank recruits boys from Ivy league schools. Most families want someone who has a clean bill of health, good grades and achievements through school, and looks like their partners. We felt the same way.  Our cryobank has a strict selection process. of the boys they recruit, the only take 1% of the applicants. The family of the donor is also screened for health issues, birth defects, and disease. We looked through 300 donor profiles and baby pictures before narrowing it down to 9 boys we liked best.

We wanted someone with light eyes, like Megan, that would look like a combination of the two of us. Megan, hoping for an athlete, had a specific height she wanted and some mention of sports in their profile. It was easy to choose our donor from the nine. 
We don't know his name. We don't know what he looks like as an adult, but we know enough to know he was perfect for us. 

Here is what we know: Our donor has green eyes and brown hair. He has dimples, like Megan, and squinty eyes, like me. He looks like he belongs to us. He's currently 21 and goes to an IVY league school where he is on the tennis team. His whole life is tennis. He even drew a terrible crayon drawing of a tennis court for our future son or daughter. He plays the guitar and sings. He loves to skydive and did his first jump was when he was 19.
His ancestry in German. He is a Christian and his major is exercise science.  
His best friend is his father. His father and mother are teachers, like us. So are both of his aunts and an uncle. He has a younger sister. 
His favorite animal is a dog; favorite food is steak, burgers, and pasta; favorite subject is math, and he loves to run.
His entire family line has a clean bill of health.  

And to top it off, look how cute he was as a kid:

Using frozen sperm is not only expensive, but it is more difficult to get pregnant. The doctors say that it usually takes around 6 tries for a couple to get pregnant. In consideration of this, we bought 16 viles of sperm. We plan to take turns so that we both have an opportunity to bear at least one of our children.
We figured with 16 viles taking about 6 times each... we could plan for around 3 kids. We want them to have the same donor so they'll be biologically connected together.

I'm first because I'm older, and Megan is terrified of pregnancy.  

Tracking ovulation for three months before trying was a pain in the butt. It was nerve wracking and all consuming. We planned to start trying in February with a doctor's office, but through the stress of preparing, we had a random thought to do a simple ici procedure at home... Just to see. we knew that the procedure would be very unlikely compared to the iui they would do in the doctor's office. We only had a 6% chance of it working. 

The cryobank shipped us the sperm vile in a cryotank. The huge box arrived on Monday the 11th of December and we did the ici on Megan's birthday the 12th of December before school.

The Two week wait before you can do a pregnancy test is terrible. I didn't feel much and figured it didn't work. Coincidentally, our two week wait ended on Christmas day... a year to the day that Megan proposed to me. 
We tested at 2 in the morning and were shocked when we saw the tests:

Megan wouldn't believe it until I peed on every test we could find from every brand.

As soon as we knew, I couldn't wait and told my sister. She cried more than we did.  :)

We told my family on Christmas day and Megan's family as soon as we came home from Texas.
Everyone is super excited. None of us can believe that it worked on the first try. Now we have 15 viles left waiting for us in California... and we are not having 16 kids!

When I was 6 weeks pregnant we had our first ultra sound. Lucky for us, my mother was in town for grandma's birthday and she and Megan's mom were able to come- Anna too. 

I am 8 weeks and 5 days pregnant now. I've had to keep myself away from my Tumblr and Facebook pages because I don't trust myself to not tell people. I swear anyone who has looked at me cross-eyed now knows.

Yesterday, we got to hear the heartbeat on the doppler for the first time and I can't wait anymore.
Hearing that was the most exciting moment so far. 

I am so grateful to science, to New York City marriage laws, to our families, to Megan... I can't believe I get to be a mother. 

I haven't felt as sick as I thought I would from watching movies. Even still, Megan takes such good care of me. She makes me food and makes me comfortable and runs to the store. I can't imagine doing this without her. She is going to be the best mother.