Thanksgiving day, we welcomed our daughter, Josephine Robin, into the world! I tried to take notes during labor and wrote up her birth story when it was fresh, but haven’t gotten a chance to post it (#newmomlife). This is going to be quite long, since Josie’s birth was anything but straightforward. Luckily, the birth was the hardest part and she’s an actual dream baby (so far!), but more on that later.

After our first IVF cycle failed, we met with our Reproductive Endocrinologist to follow up on how the cycle went and what our next steps were. We were very much on the same page, we were happy with how our cycle went right up until the negative pregnancy test. My response to the medication, egg retrieval, fertilization and maturation of the embryos was all pretty much textbook. We feel very lucky to have had such a positive experience.

Right after retrieval we were told that they had managed to collect 24 eggs. This seemed like a great number to me, and we expected to get a good haul as I was young and had responded to the medication well. Twenty-four seems like a huge number, and comparably it is, but during each stage of development, you can expect about 30% drop off. So from our 24 retrieved, not all would fertilize, and not all of those would develop, and not all of those would reach the 5-day blastocyst stage which is what’s required for transfer.