Intended Parent Stories, Intended Parents, Surrogacy

Two Dads and a Toddler Ready to Grow their Family!

Hello All,

We are happy to share the story of one of our intended families!

Hope: Can you share a little about your 1^st surrogacy journey?

Ben: Having our 1st child, our daughter, was no easy feat.

Our journey began over four years ago. Tony and I met online, and we clicked pretty much right away. We ended up moving in together a few months later.

Not yet married, on Valentine’s Day 2018, I proposed to Tony knowing that children were high on his checklist for getting married.

By Labor Day that year, we had agreed to go the surrogacy route and started looking for clinics and surrogates. Thankfully we found a clinic with good success rates in Minneapolis and a family member willing to be our surrogate.

That winter, we began making trips to the clinic to get the process started. The first step was for all of us to go to get approved to move forward medically. With approvals complete and all physical tests passed we all (Tony, our surrogate, her partner, and I) had a consultation to make sure we all knew what we’re getting into and that we could handle it. Of course, we passed!

With all of our initial visits to our clinic 4+ hours away in Minneapolis and many of those trips happening in the winter, involved driving through blizzard conditions. Our driving skills on slick roads were tested more than once, for sure! With traffic, closed roads, roads with at least an inch of ice, and watching cars and trucks spin into a ditch, thankfully we all made it safely home and back each time.

Ben: We thought we were ready to prepare for the transfer but nope, just kidding, we had to get lawyers.

Though we all agreed to work together, it was important that we had our agreement professionally laid out, written down, and notarized. That itself took the rest of 2019.

Finally, in March 2020, we all went to Minneapolis (pretty sure it was snowing then, too) one last time for the transfer and to begin the typical 9-month pregnancy.

Ben: Covid 19 took hold in the US, forcing many to go into shutdowns and limiting social interactions.

Thankfully Tony and I are in a field that allowed us to quickly adjust by working from home so that we could continue to stay safe and finance this journey.

A short while later, we received a phone call from that clinic that forever changed our lives. The transfer was a success, and our surrogate was pregnant!

We had decided to hold off telling people about the pregnancy until the beginning of the second trimester. It was so hard those first 13 weeks, not able to be there to see that the baby and surrogate were healthy. We were worried that our surrogate (who still had to go into work) would come down with Covid. If things did go wrong, we wondered if the surrogate be able to get the care she needed.

On top of that, when we did get to attend the doctor visits, we had to follow all the new hospital rules that only allowed for one person to be there for ultrasounds, so Tony and I had to choose who got to be there and take turns between appointments.

Ben: We finally broke down and had to at least tell our parents.

They were overjoyed with our news!

Thankfully the rest of the journey was relatively normal. We all stayed healthy and safe. When it came time for delivery, our doctor was able to get hospital rules changed so we could be there. We were so thankful that we finally made it home with our sweet, little, impossible girl.

Hope: How do you spend your time?

Tony: Family is important to us.

Many of our weekends are spent making sure Chloe gets plenty of bonding time with her grandparents and cousins. Chloe enjoys playing outside, playing in her sandbox, or going to the nearby park.

Ben and I both enjoy playing board games and tabletop games like Dungeons and Dragons.

Being Software Engineers, we’re also interested in technology. We like to play around with stuff like 3D printers and our own personal cloud server to back up our precious family photos and memories.

Hope: What are your family traditions?

Tony: We have typical midwestern holiday traditions.

We love spending Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Easter with family.

Every Labor Day weekend, my family rents a couple big cabins in Wisconsin Dells. We spend the whole weekend with grandparents, great-grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. It’s basically a 3-day long family reunion in the Dells that’s always lots of fun.

When Chloe gets a little older, I would love to take her on vacations to see famous landmarks, popular amusement parks, and fishing trips with Grandma and Grandpa.

Hope: What is your vision for your family? One more baby?

Tony: Our dream family since we first talked about having kids has always been a family of four.

Our two kids would share a donor mother, while one child would genetically be linked to Ben and the other to me. We’ve already got our family of three. Now we need to find a surrogate who will help us complete our family of four!

If you have ever considered surrogacy and this story resonates with you, please reach out!! We would love to talk to you, give us a call at 608-514-9150 to see if you may qualify! You can also click this link to learn more!