The plan for confirming genetics

For those of you who have followed my story, you know that we transferred two embryos on transfer day back in November. And each of those two embryos came from a different family's batch. But only one stuck around and grew into our singleton baby girl, Samantha. That means that currently, we don't know which genetic family she came from. It's a fun mystery, but one that does need to be solved eventually.

I did some preliminary research with my OB to see if there's a way to find out before birth. But just as I suspected, the only two ways prebirth come with a risk of loss - which is something we will in no way consider. Our only options pre-birth are to do an amnio or CVS. Nope.

We can certainly be patient and wait until birth. There's not even a 0.0000000000000000001% chance of loss that is worth finding out before birth.

But we do have a testing plan. Vicky's four year old son, who is a sibling to her batch of donor embryos, will get his cheek swabbed with a q-tip type device and sent in to a lab. And upon the birth of miss Samantha, we will do the same with her. The results will either show they are either a genetic sibling match or they are not. And if they are not, we know she came from Libby's batch. I'm surprised how readily available these types of DNA tests are available on a consumer level. And they are very affordable too! There's a big market for paternity testing and whatnot due to child support cases. So that has driven the availability and price down for people like us. No complaints here!

Vicky's little boy is such a helper for doing this for us. And I'm so glad it's noninvasive for a four year old to go through. And I'm also very relieved that we won't need to even ask Libby to do anything at all seeing how she's going through so much right now.

I think it will take a bit of time after Sammy's birth for the genetic results to come back. But I've seen baby pictures from both families and these precious little newborns are very different from one another. Both families have beautiful children, and we are excited and blessed no matter which genetic family it turns out to be. But I have a feeling that photos of Samantha may be pretty obvious as to which family she came from from looks alone, even before the genetic results come back. We will just have to wait and see!

We love both of our donor families and the genetic results won't change any of that. But we know it's important to know the genetic link - not just for us, but to Samantha.

So there's the plan in case anyone was wondering!