It hit me this weekend.  What do we do with our embryos that are sitting in the big old nitrogen tank at SDFC?  arghhhhhh another time to make some tough decisions.

When our donor, Jessica, went through the egg retrieval, we retrieved 12 eggs.  Not a huge amount when compared to some others but they were pretty good quality.  Of the 12 eggs they all fertilised and by day 5 we were down to 3 embryos each (with each day that passes it is normal for some embryos to stop developing).  I can't remember the quality but we implanted the best two, they both implanted and grew which is pretty obvious we have our twins ;-)

That means that for the maths gurus out there you know we have 4 that remain frozen.  So, one thing that we need to figure out is, what do we do with those embryos!  We basically have 4 choices:

1. use them and have more children (which I would do if we won the lottery but we haven't.... yet);
2. donate them to someone who is looking for donated embryos;
3. discard them, or basically, just throw them away;
4. let the clinic use them for science.

It's a tough one, we haven't made up our minds and we'll probably procrastinate for yet more time - they can stay frozen for many years more, 7 years and counting!  

BUT the one thing that we do have to do is to update our wills to reflect what our ultimate decision is because if anything were to happen to us then our children would have to make a decision for us and I'm not sure that's fair.

I have been a part of the Men Having Babies www.menhavingbabies.org organisation for a number of years.  It is an organisation that helps intended fathers from all over the US learn about the topic of surrogacy.  In recent years it expanded to Europe and now hosts a conference in Brussels in September and this past week it expanded in to Asia and hosted its first Asian gay men conference (and although the name suggest otherwise, we also had a few lesbian couples who wanted to talk about reciprocal IVF - where one provides the eggs and the other carries the embryo so it isn't discriminatory against same-sex women).

To be in a room of over 350 people all wanting to learn about family building options through surrogacy was amazing (we didn't touch on adoption or coparenting due to the  surrogacy focus).  To see how there are possibilities for others to now think about how to expand their family through a new route is exhilarating but most of all, to be a part of a positive change in society is humbling.

I've been doing educational seminars in Hong Kong since my first joint event with Todd Sears from the OutLeadership team outleadership.com 5 years ago and it is amazing how far things have changed. My great friends, Marty and Bess, who run Rainbow Families of Hong Kong @RainbowFamsHK and I have been friends for an number of years and this weekend Marty and I discussed at length how we continue to see the change in attitudes with increasing acceptance of alternative families around most of Asia.

This to  me was highlighted during the course of the weekend when one of my old clients, who is now a friend, said to me this weekend that his parents didn't accept him for years as a gay man and it was only when he came home with his baby that he became part of his family again.  That made me cry and smile, cry for the pain of being ostracised by people he loved but smile because he is back in his family fold and I had a little teeny part of making that happen.

I was thrilled when the amazing David from My Surrogate Mom asked me to be an expert advice giver on my one top tip for the surrogacy process.  It was very hard to come up with just one tip as they're all so important that I came up with this one.  I figured that the 23 other participants would cover the others and I was write.  Below is the published blog post that he put together.

I love how people within the surrogacy and IVF industry are always so open and helpful when trying to give options to intended parents.