Hi there! I’m so excited and thrilled to join Hellobee as Mrs. Starfish! Having loved the Weddingbee website when I was planning my wedding, I just knew that I would dive in to Hellobee as soon as we were expecting. I just had no idea it would take so long to become pregnant, and I certainly couldn’t have predicted the wild road it would entail…

But before I get to all that, let me tell you a little about me and Mr. Starfish. We’ve been together for over a dozen years and married for six. We met on a blind date in college and bonded over long study dates at the library. We live in Chicago with our two white cats, who we named after Nobel prize-winning scientists, Curie Marie and Einstein Albert, thereby showing our true nerd colors. We are personality contrasts, me being the quiet and determined introvert and Mr. Starfish the gregarious and goofy extrovert.

Italy coast

We spent over three long years trying to get pregnant, including working with three different infertility doctors. Following multiple failed IVF cycles, each one of those doctors eventually told us that I could never become pregnant – to put it simply, my uterus was uncooperative. With several embryos on ice, we were gently told that our best chance of seeing those embryos become babies was to use a gestational surrogate. We were crushed by this diagnosis.

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After several months coming to terms with this, we enlisted the help of a surrogacy agency to help us find a gestational surrogate. Our first surrogate became pregnant with one of our embryos following several months of false starts, but she immediately miscarried. She then cut out of our contract prematurely, leaving us even farther from our dreams of becoming parents. We were crushed again.

I’m still not sure how we managed to pick ourselves up again after that but we did. We were re-matched with a new surrogate and as we waited for her medical and legal clearance, we decided to try one last IVF cycle on me. We were shocked when the cycle resulted in my first positive pregnancy test ever! Still, given our terrible luck with pregnancy and the scary diagnoses that we had received from several doctors about my uterus, we were terrified that I would miscarry. So we crazily decided to proceed with the surrogate’s embryo transfer a few weeks later. As luck would have it, our surrogate became pregnant as well!

We are now expecting two babies in 2016, one being carried by me and one by our lovely surrogate! We cannot believe our wild changing luck, and we are bracing ourselves for the ride to come. Our babies are due exactly five weeks apart, this May and June, and the surrogate and I are sharing in one of the most unique pregnancy stories probably ever told. We are loving every minute, and I can’t wait to share my experiences with you about the ins and outs of surrogacy and our crazy set of circumstances.

Now, for the reason that I chose Mrs. Starfish as my moniker: mostly it’s because of the uniqueness of the sea creature. I wanted something to represent the strange and unique path I’m taking to parenthood. But also, did you know that some starfish can regenerate damaged parts of their bodies? It almost feels as though I’ve managed to do that with my uterus, so I feel a natural connection with these five-armed critters!