10/31/2015: Appointment with Claire the Therapist

Dr. K and her staff have developed a checklist that one must complete before they can be inseminated with donor sperm. One of the items on that checklist is an appointment with their in-house counselor to assess the relationship and the couple's level of understanding regarding the risks involved. Basically, they want to make sure J and I aren't totally crazy...at least that's our running joke!

So we met with Claire today. She's super nice and easy to talk to as I'm sure most therapists are. She asked each of us about our family history and other background questions about our mental and physical health history.

The appointment lasted about 45 minutes. At the end she told us that she felt comfortable clearing us to proceed through the process of IUI! Now we need to finalized a donor, continue to improve our fitness levels, and save up some more money!

10/12/2014: Back to the Donor Drawing Board

Today, J and I worked on narrowing down our stack of donor profiles! Unfortunately, some of the sperm banks' websites are more helpful than others so there weren't as many candidates as there appeared to be. We had a lot of profiles that we threw out right away merely because they didn't come close to meeting our search criteria in regards to ethnicity. Again, ethnicity is probably our biggest criteria followed closely by height, weight, hair, and eye color. It feels so odd to search for potential sperm donors. It's very Science Fiction-y.

We have a few donors we really are leaning towards pretty hard. Our Reproductive Endocrinologist only works with three sperm banks and we can only find suitable donors at one of them. Though it feels like our options are even more limited, it is a lot less overwhelming than having so many strong candidates it becomes hard to narrow it down.