Teeny tiny baby report card

Well, IVF #1 (and hopefully only) is coming to an end!  I'm nearly fully recovered from the egg retrieval and we are anxiously waiting the embryo transfer this coming Sunday. 

At 9:00 this morning I got a Day 3 report from the nurse on how our pitri dish bambinos are doing.  Good news, they are doing great!  The doctor had retrieved 24 eggs and tried to fertilize all of them.  The next morning after my retrieval, there were 17 eggs that had fertilized and were official embryos!  As of this morning, that number was down to 13, which is completely normal.  They receive a grade on a scale of 1-5 (1 being "excellent", 5 being "poor").  The size, symmetry and appearance (or lack) of fragmentation on the shell.  Six of the embryos were "excellent", 4 were "above average" and 3 were "average". 

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that come Sunday, we will still have the 6 Grade 1 embryos to choose from.  The rest will be frozen in case this cycle doesn't work and we have to try again.  If it does happen to work, we will donate the remaining embryos to people who can't conceive on their own and are interested in embryo adoption.  Yes, people adopt embryos!  I only heard of this about a year ago, but understandably, alot of women want to carry a baby and actually give birth.  I loved every minute of being pregnant, so I can absolutely relate to this. 

I've said it before, but this process really does amaze me.  People always argue "science" or "God".  Why does it have to be one or the other??  I have truly seen that God allows science to work in miraculous ways. 

By Sunday, our embryos will be anywhere from 100-200 cells big.  I don't know exactly how big that is, but to put it in perspective, I read that a single egg is equivalent in size to one grain of sand.  At this size, they are considered "blastocytes" and under a microscope it can be determined which part of the blastocyte is baby, and which part is placenta.  Seriously, how cool? 

So we are trucking down the home stretch....December 14th is our tentative beta.  I really hope to start posting about some more positive things soon!!