To Adopt or Spend Thousands of Dollars? That is the Question...

When Brett and I got married almost 3 years ago, we knew we wanted to start a family right away. Of course, we thought we would get pregnant right away and pop out a few of our own kids. We had also discussed adopting sometime in the future. Brett's best friend growing up had several brothers and sisters who had been adopted and he always felt that one day he would like to adopt as well. I had always wanted a largish family, so the idea appealed to me as well.

When we started to realize that we weren't going to conceive on our own, we started to seriously discuss adoption. We knew that there was always the chance that we would not be able to get pregnant using cheaper methods of infertility treatments and we felt we needed to discuss what our options would be at that point. We both knew that infertility treatments can be addictive in a way. You get your hopes up and visualize getting pregnant and having a child that looks just like the two of you and then you don't get pregnant. So then you decide to take it just one step more and you still don't get pregnant. Before long you have spent thousands of dollars and you are still not pregnant. What do you do then? Do you spend tens of thousands more on IVF or do you decide to let that dream go and adopt?

In the beginning, I felt deep in my heart that God was trying to tell us that we should adopt. I spent days upon days doing research on adoption and we knew that, if it came down to it, we wanted to adopt an older sibling group. We both agreed that we would rather spend a large amount of money on children who needed a family than on the possibility that it would all go to waste for nothing.

Then we started IUIs with injectibles. We were able to actually see that I was producing a large number of eggs each month. It was visible right there on the ultrasound screen. I think that is when I started to become addicted to fertility treatments. I could see the medications working and it only solidified my desire to have my own child. When it came down to that last appointment in the doctor's office where I was given the choice of either IVF or adoption, I knew without a doubt that I wanted to do IVF. I think we both knew our decision before I even hung up the phone that afternoon. How could we pass up the chance of having children who looked just like us?

To be continued...