I was beyond honored to work with Liz again for her Maternity Session & hear about her Denver Surrogacy.
“I’m really excited to work with Blue Flame Studio Co. again, this time for maternity photos. Mackenzie asked me to share a little about my Denver surrogacy experience so here we go! This is the second time I have carried a baby as a gestational surrogate; and this is my 5th pregnancy including my own 3 kids. I work with a local agency (Colorado Surrogacy) that not only handles all the legal and financial aspects, they support both the surrogates and the parents from the screening and matching process through to delivery. Honestly, the agency has been invaluable to me, but also the relationships that I have with the parents of the babies are unique and have developed naturally over time into lasting friendships.
Surrogacy is something I learned about as a teenager watching A Baby Story on TLC and it always just stuck with me. After I had my first daughter in 2003, I realized how much I enjoy being pregnant. There are parts that I don’t enjoy, like the whole first trimester but overall pregnancy is easy for me. I know that it’s not something that is easy or enjoyable for every woman.
I kinda feel like this is my super power. Something that is special about me that I can use to make a positive impact to the world.
I truly enjoy growing a human and feeling the baby kick and tumble. I love watching my body transform into looking like I swallowed a watermelon. And being a surrogate allows me to make a dream come true for someone else.
That being said, going through IVF is a very difficult process. And I feel like you can’t talk about surrogacy without mentioning this piece. Every clinic and doctor is different and has their own approach to IVF. In my own experience, however, the protocols for the 5 IVF cycles it took to successfully get pregnant twice were all basically the same. First there were small sub Q shots to suppress my own hormones, then replacing the estrogen in a very controlled way with pills and patches and finally replacing the progesterone with big intermuscular (IM) shots. By the last IVF cycle I had learned to give myself the IM shots which go in the back of your hip/upper butt area, but before that my husband actually gave me those shots. If the embryo transfer is successful, you get to continue those shots throughout the first trimester. In total, I’ve injected 170 shots of progesterone into my rear end. But looking back, even those difficult times are just a blip, just a few short weeks in the grand scheme of things.
After that, the rest of pregnancy is very much like being pregnant with my own babies. I go to the regular doctor appointments; I take my prenatal vitamin and wait. Of course, nesting looks different because I have no nursery to fuss over, but the rest of my house gets a nice make over! And once the baby is born, I get to go immediately back to sleeping a full 8 hours at night without having to wake up once to feed a newborn.”
