Where the story begins...

We both thought that we wanted to be together forever about month 3 or so, and a horrendous medical emergency that had me racing home from a conference during the early part of month 7 simply sealed the deal. There is nothing like seeing someone you care about in a hospital bed with an oxygen tube in her nose, and EKG electrodes strapped to her chest to put your relationship into perspective.

After she recuperated from her "vascular episode", as the nurse so euphemistically referred to it (though we felt it really wasn't an episode per se, as it was more like a mini-series) there was still a major surgery, the purchasing of a house, and an engagement to be accomplished before babymaking even made it to the list.

I have always known I wanted to use a known donor for creating my children. In my fantasy world, it has always been the brother of my partner. Of course, since Dyke Two's brothers don't carry the personality traits/accomplishments we are looking for, they were out. We spent about one day contemplating using anonymous sperm from a bank, but quickly ruled it out for three reasons:

1. it is really expensive
2. it is much harder to get pregnant from
3. there were like 5 African-American men listed on all of the sperm bank catalogues who had given up the juice for women like us to buy.

That one day foray into sperm-buying led us to some interesting discussions, since the sperm is often graded by the "quality" of the donor. I'm not talking motility or sperm count here, I mean education level, health/medical background and other fairly subjective characteristics. This got us into a whole debate about genetically engineering our children. While we both agreed that we thought the whole thing was silly, we were also concerned that when our future children asked, "Why did you pick the donor you chose?" our answer needed to be better than, "it was the cheapest sperm we could find."

After that one day of insanity, we decided to go back to plan A: Using a Known Donor.