Who Is This Ivy F. Baby?

A couple of things have happened over the past week which have led me to ponder the question - To Tell or Not To Tell? The bigger question is are Bill and I going to tell Emma the answer to the question "Where did I come from?" Because as most of you know, our story is NOT the typical "Man and woman get married, want to have a baby, have a romantic night, 9 months later have a baby." I wish it were that easy, but it's not. It would be a much easier story to tell, with a lot of words that are a lot easier to pronounce.

Emma knows that she grew inside my belly. She loves to look at pictures of me from when I was pregnant and she has a great idea of what happened when she was born. According to her, one day she said "Get out! Get out!" So I went to the doctor and pushed and "There I was! there was Emma!" Nice, clean version of her birth. The other day though as she was looking at a picture of me from my baby shower, the big question came out of her little tiny mouth - How did I get in your belly? So I started to tell her about sperm analysis, blood work, clomid, vaginal ultrasounds, hysterosalpingograms, intrauterine insemination, progesterone injections, stimming medications and injections, egg retrievals, embryo transfers, ovarian hyper-stimulation syndrome, in-vitro fertilization, daily blood draws, reproductive endocrinologists, embryologists, mobility, motility, assisted hatching, intracytoplasmic sperm injection, and beta numbers but she just looked at me with a glazed look in her eyes and I started to think that there has got to be a better way to explain all of this.

Shortly after I began thinking about how to explain this all to Emma, someone else asked me if we were going to tell Emma the truth about how she was conceived. The truth? Why would I make up a lie about how she was conceived? I am not ashamed or embarrassed that we used medical means to start a family, a family that we would not have if it were not for those medical means. I responded to the person that yes, of course we would tell her the story and tell her all about Dr. H and J, the embryologist who helped make our dream of a family come true. This person looked at me like I had 6 heads. Really? Why not? It is what it is. The trick was to finding an easier way to tell her.

Enter the wonderful world of picture books and children's literature. I was fortunate enough to find online a few books that actually address IVF (and many other infertility issues) in a simple way and are written in a way to help young children understand the wonderful story of how they came to be part of the parent's family. Of course they are not published in the United States so I have to have them shipped from Australia and the UK, but I am looking forward to sharing them with Emma when we feel the time is right.