Scrapbook Introduction
Sara Ruedger was born July 6th, 1977 in Detroit, Michigan. Trenton Thompson (who is writing this) was born November 19th, 1983 in Wichita Falls, Texas. Through some miracle, our life paths weaved a pattern such that we met online while both living in Colorado in October, 2015 and very quickly agreed to meet in person at a Starbucks. It didn’t take long for both of us to realize that we had something special. We got married November 18th, 2016 in a small ceremony at home surrounded by family and friends.
We knew from the start that we wanted to have a child. This is something we talked about before we even got married. The thing is, we knew we couldn’t go a strictly traditional route, as I’m lacking sperm (as a man who is transgender) and Sara is lacking ovaries, due to surgical complications from when she was younger.
It didn’t take me long to come up with a suggestions: I would carry our future child, conceived with donor sperm. I have working ovaries & a uterus (affectionately called my ‘duterus’ in our household, courtesy of Tina from the show Bob’s Burgers), so why not make use of them! I think it’s awesome that I can experience something that few guys have the opportunity to experience – pregnancy.
We wanted to wait until Sara graduated with her undergraduate degree to begin trying to conceive – she completed classes in the summer, 2017 and walked to get her diploma in the Winter, 2017 ceremony. We’d hoped to start trying in 2017, but I have a thyroid condition that needed some attention before we could start trying. Thyroid levels are important for conception and pregnancy, so we didn’t want to start off on the wrong food. It was May, 2018 when my thyroid levels were finally normal & we were ready to start trying for a baby!
Because neither of us were able to provide sperm, we had to turn to a sperm bank so that we could conceived. We went through NW Cryobank online and chose a donor with a similar heritage as Sara, brown hair (like Sara), and whose interests seemed to align with ours.
We tried 3 months in a row to conceive at home, July-Sept 2018, none of which worked out. At that point, we decided to seek the input of a fertility specialist, since the donor sperm vials were expensive. We spent 3 months completing tests with the fertility specialist and it was determined I have PCOS (Poly-Cystic Ovarian Syndrome), which could’ve been impeding our attempts to get pregnant. We addressed this by putting me on a medication and by working to arrange future conception attempts with the fertility clinic so that they could help us time everything better.
We completed 3 in-clinic conception attempts, January 2019, February 2019, and April 2019. We found out we were pregnant Friday, April 26th, 2019. Our due-date is January 3rd, 2020 and we are SO EXCITED to welcome our child into this world. Between now and then, we will be documenting the pregnancy via this scrapbook, which picks up Week 5 of pregnancy. (Weeks 1-2 are pre-conception, and Weeks 3-4 were our two-week wait period following insemination.)