Our story (part 1 of ?)

My husband (I'll call him Mr. P) and I have been married 6 1/2 years. I would say we started "trying" to get pregnant about a year after we were married. I say "trying" because basically I just stopped taking the pill. No taking temperatures, no ovulation predictor kits, nothing was timed, just a whole lotta lovin'. So that went on for several years. My OB/GYN at the time thought it was great that we weren't trying so hard to get pregnant, but just not using birth control. So after several years of that it dawned on me that maybe something could be wrong. Even more, maybe we could fix whatever was wrong! So we ordered some tests. They showed nothing. Then I changed jobs (and careers), lost insurance coverage for a few months (Mr. P didn't have any insurance coverage at the time) and another year went by.

I decided to skip over the OB/GYN since none of them seemed concerned (I had to switch to another one because of my insurance change) and found an RE. I loved the office. They were super helpful and very friendly. We went through another round of tests, since it had been more than a year since the last ones. Found nothing. I had an HSG (OUCH!!!). Found no problems. By this point I was on summer vacation (I am a school teacher) and we decided to do a medicated IUI. This was the summer of 2007. We did the IUI with injectibles late that summer. The cycle went fine (no problems with the medications), but we didn't get pregnant. Around the same time, I had signed up for an information session at a local adoption agency.

We went to the information session on domestic adoption at the beginning of September 2007. I can't remember if we had the negative beta results before or after the info session, but it was right around the same time. In any case, at some point during the information session, I just knew that this was the way to go. We didn't contact any other agencies or do tons of research on other places. This is kind of my MO (more on how we got engaged and married later....). If I feel it in my gut, that's good enough for me. Mr. P wasn't quite as convinced as me (he wanted to try IVF), but my mind was made up. Even though we had only tried one IUI, I was DONE with tracking my every sign of fertility, and the month after month of disappointment when I inevitably got my period. DONE. And the fact that our infertility was "unexplained" didn't help much either.

So after some discussion, we began working on the (very long) initial application. It was submitted in late September/early October. And thus began our journey with adoption!!