lawyers...

20 weeks 3 days along, less than 18 weeks to go, wahoooooo!

But we must push aside the exciting talk and submerge our minds into a less exciting topic....lawyers. Argh they're just as bad as real estate agents; you hate using them but you need them and they chow down on your money like a seagull, no chewing - just straight down the throat!

Yes we need lawyers in this journey, they are the ones that sort all the paperwork out for the adoption process, well I thought that's what their sole intentions were but apparently unbeknownst to me I have other intentions. It seems their trained legal minds know me better than I know myself, even though I have known my own self character for the past 27 years and know fully well what I'm capable of, or in this case what I'm not capable of - to them I seem to be a walking talking potential baby stealer.
Apparently once baby is born all I have to do is look at him and I could change my mind and claim him as my own! ummmmm ....in the nicest possible way - I highly 100% doubt it, I already have my hands full, just meet my son Hunter and spend a few days with him, you'll come out of it exhausted and run screaming from my house never to return again...ok he's not that bad (lol), I'm just exaggerating a tad but honestly I do not want another baby in my house for another three years or so, Hunter is enough for now and there is no way I could put that extra effort in to raise him at this age and a newborn....no way!


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Oh sorry! My brain just shut down sleeping while writing that last bit! Was exhausting just thinking about it :-P
Oh and not to mention my husband will be sooooo incredibly supportive with me bringing a baby home that's not mine or his in the first place to raise alongside Hunter, we would live happily ever after! .....yes, that was said with a lot of sarcasm!

So the lawyer wanted to draw up a contract, basically an agreement that I wouldn't become a baby stealer....well I flat out refuse to sign anything of that nature, it disgusts me I can be thought of in that way, I have never received an insult through this surrogacy journey until that moment!!
Luckily Sara and Lance fully support my stubbornness not to sign anything like that, they also have refused any papers be drawn up in that nature.

I can fully agree to it if you were using a friend or if you were using a surrogate through an agency but c'mon! I'm Sara's twin sister, her own flesh and blood and best friend for the last 27 years!
I had to hand my own niece who was stillborn over to my sister who had just come out of surgery and had also lost her uterus and any chance of carrying another child, that was the worst experience of my life!!! no lawyer no matter how many books they've read or how many exams they've sat can ever know the trauma and hardship I went through that night and also the trauma and hardship I watched Sara and Lance go through, so why on earth would I even dare put them through any more heartache!?
Sometimes lawyers need to step out of their robotically trained minds and think a bit more on a realistic personal level.....I guess they are just doing their job, but that doesn't mean I'm not allowed to be offended by some of the things that have arisen from it.

20 weeks along!

Team blue or Team pink???

So because I am having an elective c-section at 39 weeks today I am officially half way!!! yippeeeeee!
19 weeks 3 days today which means I've had the anatomy/gender scan a couple of days ago, it went really well and Squirt was fully co-operative, actually so co-operative that the first thing that popped up on the screen was his boy bits....yes that's right people boy bits!!! This little dude isn't shy at all!!

I hate to say I told you so....okay...actually that's a big fat porky; I actually love to say I told you so!!!!! This belly is batting for Team Blue! It's very exciting and probably somewhat of a relief to Sara as she's been buying boy clothes since week 14 and it's also going to be less emotionally taxing for them at the birth as a girl would bring up so many memories....not to say that we wouldn't have been happy if it was a girl, that would have been just as great, it's just honest to say that yes it is easier because it's a boy.

I absolutely love the anatomy scans, seeing every little aspect of this tiny life that has grown in just a few weeks, the human body is absolutely amazing! seeing Squirt yawn and cuddling into the placenta, seeing him stretch out his legs and seeing those 10 little fingers and those 10 little toes is so magical and it doesn't matter how many pregnancies you've had, those scans simply aren't repeats of 'what you've done before' because this is a unique little life you are watching before your eyes, a completely different human being, a whole new beginning and an entire new addition to the family.
 

Squirts feet! so cute!!

The sonographer was amazingly nice (a huge contrast to the stone faced lady at our very first scan!) and even sneaked in a couple of 4D images for us! As soon as Squirts face came onto the screen the room was just filled with gushing parents (and Aunty of course!). He's very very cute and I actually think he looks a little like Daddy even though he hasn't started putting on much of his baby fat yet!

Looks like Daddy!

For Lance's parents this is going to be their first grandson and for me and Sara's parents it will be their 4th grandson (includes my baby boy Hudson whom I miscarried). I wonder what little personality he will have; will he be a motor head like his Daddy, Uncle and Grandad? or will he be an amazingly awesome bookworm like his surrogate Aunty or super smart like his Aunty Tasha? ...or the dreaded shopoholic like Mummy? maybe a bit of all?
What colour eyes and hair will he have? How tall is he going to be? A giant like Daddy's side of the family or a tiny little package like Mummy's side of the family? ooooo all of these questions add's so much excitement to his pending arrival! Babies are just so much fun, exhausting - oh yes indeed! but oh so much fun!

19 weeks and 3 more days of sleep till we meet this little man!!

Nearly half way!

I'm now 18 weeks 3 days along, only one more week and I'll be exactly half way through this journey! (since Squirt is coming a week early). Where on earth has all the time gone!? the weeks are just speeding by, It's true when they say your first pregnancy seems to feel like 9 years instead of 9 months and you count the weeks one by one painstakingly slow but I wasn't lying when I said in my last blog post that it's going by so fast that sometimes I actually have to sit there and calculate how far along I am, sometimes giving myself a shock that I'm that far along lol.

You know when they say you have one baby that's your dream baby? Well the same goes for pregnancies in my books because this is my dream pregnancy... I was constantly in hospital with my pregnancy with Hunter including a mad dash to the hospital in an ambulance on Christmas morning 2010 vomiting my poor little heart out! The following day, Boxing Day, I was getting pumped full of fluids, by 4pm I was on my 12th bag and had a constant stream of nausea medication....I was diagnosed with hyperemesis and spent the next 25 weeks on daily medication and my head hanging over a sink or the toilet (which ever one I reached first). I had constant bleeds including three sub chronic haematoma's, one of which was so bad it was like a bloody waterfall gushing out, I was plagued with migraines and gained 25kg by the end of it, I just had a very difficult time with it all....now 18 weeks on with this pregnancy I have had none of that *knock on wood!*, I had nausea which nearly sent me hurling into a bush on a few occasions but nothing that couldn't be managed.
I am really enjoying it all and because I've experienced pregnancy before I know exactly what to look out for  in regards to movements (not mistaking them for gas) and it just makes me smile every time I feel a kick or when the somersaults start (Squirts favourite thing at the moment). Just this weekend I saw my stomach move for the first time, seeing it instead of just feeling it adds even more "realness" to it all, it's all so exciting! Even Hunter loves sitting on my lap and taps my belly while saying "baaaaby baaaaaby!", He's becoming quite aware of mummy's growing belly!

Hunter playing with his cousin

One thing I absolutely love about subsequent pregnancies is how pre stretched everything is so you show much earlier! I love being able to show my belly off and it means a lot more opportunities to play with people's heads when they ask "Is this your second?" ....hehehehe

12 weeks                14 weeks                16 weeks                18 weeks

So the most exciting scan is approaching, only four more days until the anatomy scan where the gender will be confirmed, four more days!!!!!!! Well i'm already convinced it's a boy after our fabulous obstetrician made the boy bits find four weeks ago but it's Sara that needs the convincing and then she'll still need at least two more scans after that just to stop annoying me with her "ooooo I'm not really convinced" comments lol.

So that's the latest update from me, sorry it's a rather short update but there's only so much that happens within a week and I'll be sure to share the gender news in next Monday's blog so stay tuned for team blue news!...or in Sara's case maybe team blue news.

And as always if there is any aspect of this surrogacy journey you want me to talk about please just ask and I'll be more than happy to have a little blog chat about it!
xoxo

How the other half feels.

So last week I spoke quite openly about how I feel about the surrogacy and also how my mind deals with a lot of it so it should be only fitting that this week we jump ship to how my sister Sara and the husbands feel about all of this.
When people ask me about it all they seem to be quite serious and when they flip that same question onto Sara and the husbands they sort of have a comical tone in their voice....why? I really can't answer that but I think it's just people's natural way of trying to come across friendly while being curious at the same time.
Of course you have to have an intensely open sense of humour to be in an out of the ordinary situation but there are some very real feelings and raw thoughts that accompany Sara and the husbands.

I have many conversations to Sara about how she feels about it all, she vents to me often and a lot of the time it's like witnessing myself all those years ago when I was experiencing my infertile struggles and it makes me quite sad. I can see that "look" on her face I always had towards pregnant women, I hear the little remarks which are of course fuelled by jealousy....By looking at her in her "infertile state" I can now see how people perceived me which still pisses me off and she can now understand how I felt towards how people treated me. In a cruel twist of fate it's all somehow been flipped on the twins with being infertile and being a fertile myrtle.
When you are left with no option but to have intervention from other people to have a child (in my case it was IVF and in Sara's case it's using a surrogate) it does leave you a little bitter, jealous, mad, confused and you get an enormous sense of invasion that has been forced upon you, there is no privacy and there is no intimacy that so many other couples have when making life, you can't look at your husband with that naughty glint in your eye reminiscing the nights that led to the expansion of your family....in a nutshell, the entire experience is warped and stolen from you but in the end the dream that becomes a reality is so worth it....but still, all feelings and thoughts that led up to that should still be taken with a handful of sympathy and an armful of hugs.

Sara yearns to be treated like the pregnant one, to have all the TLC put upon her and to be quite honest I can see where she is coming from; I may be the pregnant one but she's the expecting mother, I guess she wants to make up what she can with everything that she is missing from expecting a baby.
But I don't want to make it sound like there is only a negative side to it all cause that's far from the truth, there's more positive feelings and happy expectations to waiting for this baby to come into the world, I don't really need to go in depth with those feelings as anyone who has been pregnant and had a baby knows all the happy warm fuzzy feelings that I'm talking about.
Sara still shops for her bun in the oven, she has a nursery theme picked out and constantly switches back and forth with baby names, sighing in frustration when Lance crosses off every suggestion she painstakingly thought over lol, she squeals with excitement when Squirt moves on the ultrasound machine and talks quite in depth with the obstetrician...

Now if we want to put some truth to the comical side of it then you need not go far. Turn to the husbands for all the sarcastic banter you want. My husband is the worst when it comes to talking about it, he needs to crack a joke at least every fifth sentence and takes a lot of joy in telling people his wife is pregnant to another man and is really happy about it, he needs to feed that comedic monster!
The only downside for Terry is dealing with my constant hormones and mood swings, he openly admits he hates me when I'm pregnant (in a nice joking way people!). He's now watching his wife in her fourth pregnancy and he can't wait for the day when my fifth and final time has come, he even goes as far as threatening to get "the snip" so he never has a chance to deal with pregnancy hormones again but I always threaten him that we still have three frozen embryo's and I'd happily raise them all hehehe, I can almost see him shudder and have a slight look of fear in his eyes at the thought of more pregnancies...now that feeds my comedic monster lol.
But seriously Terry is quite cruisy with the surrogacy decision, he just lets me do what needs to be done and just goes with the flow, he's never raised a fuss about it (except only to complain about my hormones) and is really supportive and loving towards me and my decision.

Sara's husband Lance, well I have to be honest and say I never really talk in depth with him about it all, in fact I think the only person he opens up to is Sara and there's nothing wrong with that, I do however know he's the same as Terry in his feelings - it doesn't phase him and he's very supportive and excited about it all.

So where am I at you may wonder? Well I'm now 17 weeks 3 days along, it feels like it's speeding by, maybe that's because I have a 14 month old I'm constantly chasing around after and trying to manage an entire household to keep my little family content; before I know it another week has passed and I actually have to think for a few seconds of how far along I actually am!
Movements are getting slightly stronger and the nightly womb parties have begun while I'm trying to sleep...trying being the key word in that sentence as I also toss and turn and can never get comfortable with the increasing weight of  my uterus and the constant trips to the bathroom but it's all apart of the magical world of pregnancy and it's all loved and laughed over.