Here's my hope - squish it in your doctorly hands!

Okay, that is probably a bit melodramatic, but we're out of the baby-making game again for this month.

Yes, our clinic does allow you to take home frozen sperm for an at-home insem;
yes, they understand that trying again is a huge part of our emotional recovery;
yes, there would be enough sperm...
But no, you can't have it, because in order to use sperm for a take-home insem, the donor must have specifically consented to that at the time of donating.... Which in our case, was 2007, in Sydney, at a clinic with different policies where no such question was ever asked. So, no, we can't take our long-suffering sperm home for any insems this cycle. All the clinic options are out because they would only want to do a 'controlled' cycle so that they could trigger ovulation, because of our thawed sperm motility issues.

The 'good' news is that the doctors are happy to agree that I'm medically sub-fertile (rather than just willfully socially infertile in a lesbian way) - meaning we can claim a medicare rebate bringing the cost of IVF down from astronomical to just painfully extortionate. But before we're allowed to do IVF we need another counselling appointment and another appointment with a nurse who can tell us how babies are made. Just what we need. In a very different context, last week I met the CEO of the local qango which decides who is allowed to make babies without having sex and I had to restrain myself from breaking into the crazy-lady voice and ranting, "How many hoops exactly do you want us to jump through? How many?!"

But given that our donor, J, will be in the country next month, and is happy to make the interstate trip for a fresh donation, we're going to give that a go first. Dear Universe, it happened once. Please let it happen again. I just want that feeling of small knees and elbows tapping out a message, that warmth and potential. And I'd really like to finish the story this time - not with a memorial service, and condolence cards and a small amount of ashes falling through our hands, but with a new little voice crying and baby eyes which open and move. I have this sense that somewhere, Z has found her little sibling soul, and is whispering in their ear, giving them kisses and just waiting for us to get organised with all this fertility stuff. We're nearly there, my darling, nearly there.