A & B's Lemons to Lemonade IVF Fund
Donation protected
About us: According to Bobby's grandmother, we met on Ebay. Bobby always likes to joke he found me in the clearance section.
We really met in 2005 on Eharmony. He agreed to meet me and 2 of my friends at a restaurant. Man was he brave! Its crazy, but he showed up. We had a great night, then as he was driving me home he looks at me and said "I have something to tell you" in a weird tone. Im thinking, great, I really like this guy and he is married, or a mass murder, or has 10 kids or he is going to chop me up in little pieces and throw me in his barn. Thank goodness my friends got his license plate number before he left.... Then he says "I don't have any feet" Then I thought to myself, Oh thank God. At least I will live to hear this story! And what a story it was.
It has been SUNSHINE ever since! We fell in love quickly and were married 2 years later. We soon found out that our family of 2 would be a lot harder to add to. Infertility became our lemons. We have been working hard to make LEMONADE ever since.
Our fertility journey: We always knew we wanted children. The sooner the better! After 3 years of not preventing it, we knew something may be up. We went to a fertility specialist in 2010 and went through the ringer with testing. Test after test after test with no results. Bobby was fine, Andrea was fine. We fell into the catagory of "unexplained infertility". A very hard diagnosis for us. Sometimes not knowing can be worse than a concrete answer that we can work with.
For the last 5 years, we have been through some major ups and downs. Tests, exploratory surgery, 7 inseminations and false hope, we are down to our last shot, IVF. The doctors seem to believe that this is the one option that will be our best bet and last hope to have our own biological children.
Other Options Explored: For the last 5 years Bobby and I have explored many different options for having children. Boy, did we get an education on what it takes to have children of your own! It's sometimes a hard pill to swollow when you realize not only the emotional toll this will take, but the financial one as well. So here are the options we consedered and why we chose or did not choose them: Private Domestic Adoption (Adopting a baby in the US) Cost $20-40k. Wait time, 1-5 years. International Adoption: Adopting a child from outside of the US. Cost: 15-40k. Wait time, 1-3 years. This options was a tad bit cheaper depending on where the child is from. Public Adoption from foster care. Cost- Free! Well minus the $38.00 you have to pay for the background check. Wait time, 9-12 months to complete classes. So these are our immediate options. Private adotion was just way too expensive and you never know if you will be picked by a mom doing the hardest thing of her life, and giving up her child. This option was just not in the cards for us. So we weighed the benefits of international adoption vs IVF due to it being somewhat similar in cost on the low end.
In the end we chose our best chances to have our own family, IVF and Public adoption! We would like to start to pave the way for a public adoption from foster care by taking all of the classes and completing a home study. This will take the next 6 months or so to complete. During that 6 months we hope to have had at least 1 IVF cycle completed and know more about our chances for a biological child. This does NOT mean that adopting a child is our second choice! Public adotion is wonderful but also very challenging. The average age of a child waiting to be adopted is 11 years old and they have been through more trauma than any one person should have to. Even if the IVF results in a child for us, adoption is still an option for us, we just have to find the right child/children to match our family!
Our commitment: Although the last 5 years have been full of ups and downs with little predictablility, Bobby and I are ready to make the commitment to save for IVF. The total cost for the proceedure and medications are right at $15,000. Although we have great insurance through Tricare, they do not pay anything towards IVF. We will have to pay out of pocket for this. Bobby and I have come up with a financial plan that makes sense for our family. We have commited to save towards IVF this year. And we will continue to save next year if we need to. But we would like to start the IVF proceedure as soon as possible because it has been 8 long years already. With Bobby turning 42 and I am turning 35, we are ready to try our one last shot at becoming biological parents.
Along with this Go Fund Me page, we will be holding at least one fundraiser in Columbus in the next few months. I see a spiked lemonade stand and a 50/50 raffel in our future! So check out my facebook page for those updates if you would like to do that as opposed to this page.
Thank you so much for listening to our story and we are ready to turn these lemons into lemonade!
We really met in 2005 on Eharmony. He agreed to meet me and 2 of my friends at a restaurant. Man was he brave! Its crazy, but he showed up. We had a great night, then as he was driving me home he looks at me and said "I have something to tell you" in a weird tone. Im thinking, great, I really like this guy and he is married, or a mass murder, or has 10 kids or he is going to chop me up in little pieces and throw me in his barn. Thank goodness my friends got his license plate number before he left.... Then he says "I don't have any feet" Then I thought to myself, Oh thank God. At least I will live to hear this story! And what a story it was.
It has been SUNSHINE ever since! We fell in love quickly and were married 2 years later. We soon found out that our family of 2 would be a lot harder to add to. Infertility became our lemons. We have been working hard to make LEMONADE ever since.
Our fertility journey: We always knew we wanted children. The sooner the better! After 3 years of not preventing it, we knew something may be up. We went to a fertility specialist in 2010 and went through the ringer with testing. Test after test after test with no results. Bobby was fine, Andrea was fine. We fell into the catagory of "unexplained infertility". A very hard diagnosis for us. Sometimes not knowing can be worse than a concrete answer that we can work with.
For the last 5 years, we have been through some major ups and downs. Tests, exploratory surgery, 7 inseminations and false hope, we are down to our last shot, IVF. The doctors seem to believe that this is the one option that will be our best bet and last hope to have our own biological children.
Other Options Explored: For the last 5 years Bobby and I have explored many different options for having children. Boy, did we get an education on what it takes to have children of your own! It's sometimes a hard pill to swollow when you realize not only the emotional toll this will take, but the financial one as well. So here are the options we consedered and why we chose or did not choose them: Private Domestic Adoption (Adopting a baby in the US) Cost $20-40k. Wait time, 1-5 years. International Adoption: Adopting a child from outside of the US. Cost: 15-40k. Wait time, 1-3 years. This options was a tad bit cheaper depending on where the child is from. Public Adoption from foster care. Cost- Free! Well minus the $38.00 you have to pay for the background check. Wait time, 9-12 months to complete classes. So these are our immediate options. Private adotion was just way too expensive and you never know if you will be picked by a mom doing the hardest thing of her life, and giving up her child. This option was just not in the cards for us. So we weighed the benefits of international adoption vs IVF due to it being somewhat similar in cost on the low end.
In the end we chose our best chances to have our own family, IVF and Public adoption! We would like to start to pave the way for a public adoption from foster care by taking all of the classes and completing a home study. This will take the next 6 months or so to complete. During that 6 months we hope to have had at least 1 IVF cycle completed and know more about our chances for a biological child. This does NOT mean that adopting a child is our second choice! Public adotion is wonderful but also very challenging. The average age of a child waiting to be adopted is 11 years old and they have been through more trauma than any one person should have to. Even if the IVF results in a child for us, adoption is still an option for us, we just have to find the right child/children to match our family!
Our commitment: Although the last 5 years have been full of ups and downs with little predictablility, Bobby and I are ready to make the commitment to save for IVF. The total cost for the proceedure and medications are right at $15,000. Although we have great insurance through Tricare, they do not pay anything towards IVF. We will have to pay out of pocket for this. Bobby and I have come up with a financial plan that makes sense for our family. We have commited to save towards IVF this year. And we will continue to save next year if we need to. But we would like to start the IVF proceedure as soon as possible because it has been 8 long years already. With Bobby turning 42 and I am turning 35, we are ready to try our one last shot at becoming biological parents.
Along with this Go Fund Me page, we will be holding at least one fundraiser in Columbus in the next few months. I see a spiked lemonade stand and a 50/50 raffel in our future! So check out my facebook page for those updates if you would like to do that as opposed to this page.
Thank you so much for listening to our story and we are ready to turn these lemons into lemonade!
Organizer
Andrea Hay Puckett
Organizer
Columbus, OH