We try our best not to overshare personal issues on the farm blog… but here we are, blending cute critters with real life once again.
For the past few years, we’ve been riding the emotional rollercoaster that is fertility treatment. This week, our doctor told us that if we want to give our three frozen little embryos a decent chance at life, we’ll need the help of a gestational carrier (surrogate). We’re still wrapping our heads around everything – emotionally, medically, and especially financially.
We’re sharing this because we really wish someone had talked openly about these things when we were younger. In our case, doctors suspect that years of uninterrupted hormonal birth control via back-to-back IUDs contributed to the issues we’re facing now. It’s something we had no idea could happen, and we wish we’d known to take breaks or check in periodically.
Through our whole journey, we’ve felt let down by medical professionals – first when some pushed those IUDs, then when others ignored our lining concerns, then when another performed a hack-job D&C with zero follow-up, then when more ignored our lining concerns & stuck to basic, cookie-cutter IVF cycles, and now when they’re giving up and leaving us scrambling to figure out what to do.
So if you might want kids someday, please be your own advocate – ask questions, get your reproductive health evaluated occasionally, and make sure long-term medications (including/especially hormonal birth control) are still the right fit for your body. Not everyone will have our outcome, but we wish we had known this much sooner.
Because of all this, in 2026, we’ll likely be downsizing the goat herd even more than originally planned, and maybe dropping another chicken breed or two.
(Tasty, our little shadow, pictured, is absolutely NOT leaving)
Thank you for being here through the fun, the chaos, and the life updates we never expected to post. We appreciate you all more than you know.
