Dear Potential Embryo Donor,

I’m sure your schedule is packed with life events and activities, so let us just first say thank you for taking the time to review our information. Hopefully this letter can provide you with a little more insight on who we are, and the life changing impact you could potentially make on our lives.

We met like a lot of couples do, at work. I think the unique aspect to the start of our relationship however may have been the fact that I worked as Human Resources for the company and he worked as an employee within the same location. Probably not my best career choice being my first role in Human Resources out of college…but id say it’s worked out pretty well in the long run.

Over the next few years our relationship progressed, us finding that in some ways we were total opposites that ended up being a great balance for each other. I can be a little over ambitious at times, wanting to make sure that we get to all the fun things around town on the weekends, see as much family and friends as possible, and believe that a bathroom renovation would just be a quick “weekend project”. He is a little more reserved, laid back, and made sure that we prioritized the time together as a couple to help build strength and stability in our relationship.

With a change for me to a new company, we also decided to move into our first apartment. The change in living together can definitely be a challenging one, but after a few months of adjustments, and me realizing there isn’t “one right way” to load the dishwasher, we settled into the next phase of our lives. One of our favorite traditions since the first year that we took on was hosting Thanksgiving Dinner for all our family. I think something that made it really special was it brings together every year both sides of our families. In addition to eating A LOT of this holiday (as there is with most of our family gatherings!) we love to play games that probably get more competitive than they should, look through black friday ads to admire all the things that we really don’t need to buy, and on occasion divide our house based on which football team you are cheering for.

After about 5 years we knew we were ready to buy our first house. We loved our current neighborhood, but at the time, there wasn’t much available on the market. We searched for months and must have looked at 50 different houses when our realtor randomly called us on a weekday and said “hey, this might be a stretch, but I just viewed this house today and I think you guys should look at it. It’s just a 15 minute drive south”. Based on our wishlist, we never thought that we would consider a 100 year old home that would need A LOT of work and renovations, but after walking through it once and standing outside staring at it from the front yard, we ultimately looked at each other and said “yep, this is our house”. It’s in a beautiful neighborhood with lots of families, a great school district and right across the street for a large park that has hiking trails, playgrounds and picnic areas. We knew instantly that this was the place that we wanted to start our family and watch our kids grow up.

I think we’ve always known that having a family was extremely important to us. Our fertility and family building journey started like many couples, trying the “old fashioned way”. When we weren’t successful after a few months, while completely well intended, you tend to get a lot of advice from people that had the same struggles and go down a bit of a dark rabbit hole about ovulation strips, different brands, different apps for timing, diet changes, different vitamins and medicines during ovulation. After about 2 years of trying resulting in no pregnancy, we ultimately decided that was time to work with a fertility clinic to better understand our challenges. I think it took us a bit of time to get to that point. We found it to be a tough mental mountain to overcome the fact that your bodies aren’t necessarily doing what they were technically “built to do”.

After extensive testing with our fertility clinic we received a diagnosis of Azoospermia. He had some health issues as a child that ultimately had an unexpected long term effect. As you can imagine, we were pretty devastated with this news. After talking with doctors it was our understanding that there were some things we could try, but nothing that ultimately guaranteed that we would reach our ultimate goal of becoming parents.

We took some time to process and sit with the diagnosis, but knew we had options, and this wasn’t the end of the road for us. We started to explore infant adoption and fostering as an option. We both have parents who are adopted, so the thought of adoption was pretty special for us. During one of our consultations with an adoption counselor, we were going over our history and reason for coming to this path and she mentioned embryo adoption. It wasn’t something we were super familiar with and not something we had ever considered. After more research and a better understanding over the overall process, we realized that this path was the piece that we knew we were missing.

To take a glimpse into our everyday lives you would see that we both currently work full-time and are lucky to be pretty successful in our careers. He works permanently from home, and travels on occasion to visit clients and for some conferences. I work out of the office everyday, with a quick 15 minute commute. While we haven’t been able to successfully have a child of our own yet, I’m fortunate enough to work in the world of education, and get to watch our students grow and develop as learners throughout their school career.

On the weekends we definitely spend a lot of time in the large park across the street, walking through the hiking trails and looking for wildlife. During the summer we make regular trips to the farmers market to pick up local produce and lots of baked goods from local shops. We are fortunate to live close to a lot of amazing friends who we try to see as often as we can. They are wonderful (and maybe a little bit brave) to always consider us a part of their families when it comes to birthday parties, zoo visits, and block parties.

We live within an hour of the majority of our family members on both sides. His parents live out on a farm, so we get to spend some time with our nephews running around playing football, climbing trees, and cooking on the campfire. My parents live out on a lake so every big holiday during the summer everyone gets together for boating, yard games, and barbecues.

We think a lot about what kind of parents we want to be, but also acknowledge that it’s hard to plan for something you’ve never experienced. While we can’t currently say exactly how we would handle potty training, telling a first lie, or how to clean up messes, we know that we want our child to know what it is to be kind, embrace others, be courageous and open to trying new experiences, stick up for the people that they care about the most, and feel loved by us and their family as much as possible.

We hope this letter has given you the opportunity to learn a little more about us. We appreciate you for not only taking the time to read this, but being open to even considering helping us create a family of our own. We know that you have probably had your own triumphs and heartaches when building your family, and we see your dedication to helping others as pretty special.