00:00How does that work exactly?
00:01And pardon my ignorance on this.
00:03No, that's OK.
00:04When you have the baby through the surrogate,
00:07does your husband visit her in a motel room?
00:11No, no.
00:12Medically, Chris Ivory has to do what he has to do
00:15and provide what he has to provide.
00:18Right.
00:19And then I had to provide something as well.
00:22OK, I get it.
00:23I had to do something as well.
00:24OK, that makes sense.
00:25They have to retrieve the egg.
00:26And then they put it together in a dish, the lab technicians.
00:31And then they make the embryo.
00:33And then they insert the embryo into the woman
00:36who will carry the child.
00:37So we had a surrogate.
00:40And it's just we tried before we told people.
00:43And then it didn't happen.
00:44And it's just really depressing.
00:45It's really hard.
00:47Everybody tried for a long time.
00:49I mean, for five years.
00:51And I know people have tried much longer.
00:52But if there's anyone out there who is trying
00:55and are just losing hope, and just hang in there.
00:58Try every avenue.
00:59Try anything you can do, because you'll get there.
01:02You'll end up with a family.
01:04And it's so worth it.
01:05It is the most worth it thing.
01:07I'm just so happy right now.
01:08I'm freaking out.
01:09One of the biggest gifts of surrogacy in our experience
01:12was that we really had the opportunity
01:13and the space around us to have the conversations
01:17that needed to be had, how we're going to raise her,
01:19what expectations we did or didn't have for her as a person,
01:23as a being that was coming into the world.
01:25Surrogacy, it's a very private thing.
01:28You know, it was the right, it was frankly the only way
01:31that my husband and I, who've been together for nearly 20 years,
01:34could have a child that was half him and half me.
01:37And so for us, it was absolutely the way to go.
01:40And it was an amazing experience inviting someone truly wonderful
01:45into our lives to help us do it.
01:47And I'm so sorry to hear about the surrogate and the miscarriage.
01:51What can you tell us about that?
01:52I've had a miscarriage myself that I talked about a few years ago before we had Duke.
01:56And then our surrogate had one, and we were just devastated, obviously.
02:02Sure.
02:02Our priority at the time, once we were able to take the emotion out of it a little bit,
02:07we wanted to make sure that our surrogate, who carried Duke for us, that she knew this
02:11was not her fault, that this is something that is so common, it happens all the time,
02:16it's happened to me.
02:17And I was there with her when they inseminated her, we held hands, and I looked into the microscope,
02:23and I saw the embryo, I saw the baby, and then they put it in a, you know, a thingy,
02:31and then they inseminate her, and then we held hands, and we prayed, and we talked to God,
02:39and if she was meant to be.
02:41What did he say about this?
02:41What did he say about this?
