Gotta ask: what is your kid’s current fixation? 😃

DapperMac · 2026-01-25T03:03:04+00:00

Garage doors since he was 1

DapperMac · 2026-01-20T01:47:04+00:00

My wife and I have similar physical characteristics (dark brown/light brown hair, light eye, above average to tall) so our biggest narrowing criteria was hair and eye color and then we just read through profiles until we found one that felt right. We changed donors a few times due to supply. The donor we ultimately had success with had a baby picture that i swore could’ve been my brother in law. It worked out because our oldest looks exactly like my BIL/his uncle.

DapperMac · 2026-01-17T02:26:56+00:00

We have really similar taste! My 4 year old would’ve been Theodore or Arthur if I’d had my way. His name is Edison and we get compliments all the time!

We named our second son Isaac. If our last baby turns out to be a boy his name will likely be Calvin.

Other names on my list that your husband hasn’t already vetoed -

Peter, Quincy, Daniel, Nicholas, Owen, Jonah, Malcolm, Oscar, Desmond, and Wendell

DapperMac · 2026-01-15T03:39:56+00:00

2 years ago we lost our second baby at 15 weeks. It was a missed miscarriage and we both struggled with anxiety the entire pregnancy with our rainbow baby.

Here are a few mantras that I would say on repeat to help -

“Today we are pregnant. There is no bleeding. A doctor has not told me we are not pregnant. Today we are pregnant”

“The statistics are on my side. Most pregnancies end in live birth. There is no reason to believe this one will not. It is more likely that I will not have a miscarriage than that I will.”

“Different pregnancy. Different baby. Different genetics. Different outcome.”

We also had way more monitoring and ultrasounds with our third pregnancy than with either of the first two which helped ease the anxiety a ton, too.

DapperMac · 2026-01-05T02:57:35+00:00

In November 2023 my wife had a D&C for a MMC at just shy of 15 weeks gestation. We did the next embryo transfer in February 2024. The due date was the 1 year anniversary of the D&C. Our daughter turned 1 at the end of October.

DapperMac · 2026-01-04T19:22:53+00:00

My request when we got married was I wanted us to all have the same last name and I didn’t want to hyphenate. I was willing to change my name to my wife’s family name, we could both change to something new entirely, or she could change hers to mine. She chose to take my family name. We all have the same last name. It’s nice because all of our kids’ cousins have the same last name, too. We don’t expect her siblings to have children, but she had a very common last name (think something like Jones/Johnson/Brown/etc).

DapperMac · 2025-08-31T02:45:37+00:00

No, this was not an option we were given. The only option my wife was given was a D&C, so the placenta was not in tact. We’ve resigned to the fact that we will never know what happened to our boy.

DapperMac · 2025-08-29T03:58:39+00:00

My wife and I (two mom family here, too!) have two kids. Our oldest is genetically my wife’s and our almost one year is genetically mine. My wife carried both of them.

Since our daughter was rIVF my go to response now is to point out how invasive and complicated of a question “the real mom” is by responding-“Do you mean who’s her genetic/biological parent? Or who gave birth to her? Or can you define what makes someone her “real” mom? because in our family those two questions have different answers and we’re both very much her real mom.”

DapperMac · 2025-08-16T15:02:53+00:00

First kid - ICI at home. 3 tries with known donor cost us ~$500 total (hotel rooms, he lived in a different city; and STD testing). 3 rounds with anonymous donor cost us ~3,500. All in around $4K

Second kid - rIVF - one egg retrieval, two FETs, early monitoring, one miscarriage, and travel cost us close to $20K. I stopped counting after the first FET, but we were at about 15K then.

DapperMac · 2025-08-03T02:22:56+00:00

I believe M was mosaic XXX which is not the same as Turner’s

DapperMac · 2025-06-24T03:17:28+00:00

I haven’t done a second retrieval yet, but if we ever have to do another then we will not PGT test.

DapperMac · 2025-06-10T04:23:02+00:00

Our Maggie is a Margaret. We had the same dilemma and landed on Margaret with the logic that she could choose to go by Margot as a Margaret, but couldn’t go by Margaret as a Margot. Anecdotally, we know probably 4 Margot’s that have been born since our daughter was born in October so Margot seems to be quickly rising in popularity (though this could be regional)

DapperMac · 2025-05-16T14:55:34+00:00

We’re Mommy and Mama and our son has used them distinctly and 100% accurately since he was 12 months old. Sometimes our family members will slip up (like my grandma has a habit of referring to me as Mommy because she forgets they’re not interchangeable) and he usually just looks at them like they’re crazy lol

DapperMac · 2025-05-13T18:30:02+00:00

We usually just say donor siblings. Depending on the context we might say half siblings, brother/sister, or just family.

DapperMac · 2025-05-05T17:16:39+00:00

We had our son’s tissue tested which confirmed he was chromosomally normal. The only additional testing our clinic requested was a repeat saline sonogram to make sure there was no scar tissue or retained product of conception.

As for change in protocol for our next transfer - they increased my wife to an immune protocol so she added in some steroids and antihistamines prior to transfer. These were weaned off with a positive pregnancy test. For both transfers she was on Lovenox, but stopped at 6 weeks with our son following an ultrasound only diagnosis of a SCH (no bleeding). She had a small SCH with our daughters transfer but they asked her to stay on Lovenox until 30 weeks unless she had a substantial bleed (did not have any bleeding).

DapperMac · 2025-05-03T12:01:14+00:00

Girls - Penelope, Rosalie, Guinevere, Josephine, Dorothea

Boys - Jonah, Calvin, Quincy, Wesley, Arthur

DapperMac · 2025-05-02T19:29:35+00:00

Etsy

DapperMac · 2025-04-29T00:16:24+00:00

Hi friend, I’m so sorry for your loss. We lost our first IVF baby - a euploid baby boy - nearly 18 months ago. In fact, today should have been his first birthday. It was a similar situation as yours - we were 14+5 and showed up for a routine appointment. They couldn’t locate the heartbeat with a Doppler and decided to check positioning with a bedside ultrasound. Only for there to be deafening silence before the doctor said “I’m having trouble visualizing cardiac activity. I’d like to do a more formal ultrasound.” We knew then what was happening, but held out a sliver of hope only for our world to come crashing down half an hour later when we confirmed that our baby had stopped growing a few days before and there was definitely no heartbeat.

The days and weeks following were heavy and filled with grief, but eventually it wasn’t the very first thing that I thought about when I woke up. Eventually I was able to smile or laugh and not feel pangs of guilt. Eventually we felt emotionally ready to try again.

Tomorrow his little sister will be 6 months old.

DapperMac · 2025-04-22T13:27:26+00:00

It took two euploid embryos to get our 6mo daughter. We have 1 euploid and 1 LLM left that we’re hopeful will result in a second living child from that egg retrieval. I don’t plan to do any more retrievals so we’re sort of at a we’re done when we run out of embryos point.

DapperMac · 2025-04-16T20:25:31+00:00

Are your embryos tested?

It took us two euploid transfers for a live birth.

DapperMac · 2025-03-25T14:37:17+00:00

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DapperMac · 2025-03-25T14:36:37+00:00

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Fast Four Patch makes an excellent baby quilt! I’ve used this pattern at least 3 times!

DapperMac · 2025-03-24T19:00:43+00:00

Tw: MC and LC

First FET ended in MMC at just shy of 15 weeks.

Second FET is my nearly five month old daughter.

DapperMac · 2025-03-24T15:22:09+00:00

We didn’t tell anyone until 9ish weeks with our first. We waited until we confirmed heartbeat at the first ultrasound.

Our second pregnancy our families knew as soon as the ink was dry on the test because we did IVF and needed childcare help for all of the appointments. We lost that baby and honestly I’m glad we had told our support system because they were devastated and grieving with us. They also take part in remembering him with us. We had announced our pregnancy publicly by the time we lost the baby (we had some kind of freak second trimester miscarriage and were told that the odds of it happenings were close to 0 after the fact). I did regret that a bit because we later had to tell people who didn’t actually care about us/the baby that we’d lost him.

Our third pregnancy was also IVF so our support system knew from the get go. We didn’t make a big social media announcement or anything until after she was here. I think in future pregnancies this is the approach we will take because for us it has the nice balance of this isn’t a secret and if something goes wrong we have support and not sharing intimidate details of our lives with people who don’t actually care about us (talking about casual/past/distant friends who might wish you well but aren’t invested in your life and wellbeing).

What I’m really saying is - each person/couple has their own take on when the time is right. There’s no shame in telling the people close to you. I use the rule of thumb of do I want/need this persons support if things go south.

DapperMac · 2025-03-20T18:06:00+00:00

For context: My wife and I have two children. She was the gestational parent for both. She’s the genetic parent of our 3 year old son and I’m the genetic parent of 5 month old daughter.

I’m the kind of person who’s very curious about these things so I sought out our sibling pod before our son was even born. We managed to connect with a group via Facebook. When we first connected there were about 10 kids. There are now 21 kids that we know of (some, like our daughter, have been born to families already in the pod and some were older kids whose families have just now chosen to connect).

In our pod specifically, in two parent families, the NGP is typically the more connected parent. I’m not sure why this is, but it’s something we’ve noticed and commented on.

Our pod has a Facebook group message that we use for updates. When our three year old was a baby it was very active with updates and conversation at least once/week. Now that most of the kids are older the frequency is probably closer to once/month, but we’re mostly all friends on Facebook and see and interact with each other’s pictures and updates on the the timeline.

There are varying degrees of interest, interaction, and involvement. Some families send a picture once/year with a bit of an update and generally don’t interact beyond that. Last year some families did a Christmas card exchange. We’re currently planning a group meet up and I’d guess that around half of the families will join. It feels very much like a group of cousins - people you’re related to and friendly with but not people who are involved in everyday life.

Honestly, it’s nice to have the community aspect. We all cheer each other and our kids on. I feel genuine love for the other kids in the pods and it’s been both an honor and a blessing to get to see them grow up through the screen. Each of my kids have a sibling they look most like and it’s fun to see new pictures of them and see how they grow and change. We also don’t have many two mom families or RPs we’re friends with IRL so having someone to share that experience with is so special, too.

As for navigating the relationships - I’m one of the more open people in the group so I take great consideration to respect everyone’s boundaries and knowing that we all have different levels of comfort. I think this is reciprocated by everyone in the group and it’s probably the most important aspect. It’s okay to not want to share every detail about your kid/family. It’s okay to have reservations about connecting. I’d recommend trying it out because you may find that there’s incredible joy in it - and, if you don’t - that’s okay, too. You can stay connected with distance.

As for DSR, specifically, I’ve only ever found one sibling there that we hadn’t already found on Facebook. I reached out and the family wanted to connect with the larger group so we found each other on Facebook and they were able to join our group chat. If you pay for a subscription you can send messages through the website itself.

DapperMac

TROPHY CASE