Saturday, February 6, 2016

Something Traditional for the Nontraditional Family





If you haven't already figured this out, I am a bit of a control freak.  Just a tiny bit of a typical Type A ambitious, rigidly organized, impatient, take on more than I can handle, want other people to get to the point, anxious, high-achieving "workaholic".

Like most Type A's I love lists.  I love making them and I REALLY love checking items off of them.

One of the items on my "getting ready for baby" checklist was to get a baby memory book.

I looked online for a while and found a book that I thought was really cute.  It was gray, had a spot for a picture and a baby footprint on the front.  It was preprinted with pages such as "coming home" and "1st birthday" so it would be easy to fill out an not miss any of the important things and dates.  It was also pretty reasonably priced so I ordered it.

(I also absolutely love online shopping and think that Amazon Prime is pretty much the best thing ever.  I may never actually "go shopping" ever again).

I watch the front porch and see a box from Amazon.  Yay!

I cut open the box and start flipping through the baby book.

But, as I looked through the pages, my glee started to fade in sadness and disappointment.

A very large portion of the book was set aside for my pregnancy memories.  Page after page of my pregnancy memories.  That would be pretty awesome if I had pregnancy memories.

I thought for a moment that I could have our GC fill out those pages with her pregnancy memories..... but that really was not the same thing.  I feared it would just remind me of the pregnancy that I was unable to have and make me sad every time I looked through the book.

I sadly closed the book, put it back in the box, and went on Amazon to get a shipping label for a return. Boo!

Now what was I going to do?  Yes I am fairly creative and can put together some decent vacation Shutterfly books, but I am not "do it yourself" scrapbooker material.  (Which I feared may be my only option).

Now, I know that there are only 1,000 or so surrogate births in the US each year, but surely that is enough that someone before me also sadly flipped through a baby memory book and found a way to make a traditional book for a nontraditional family.

Indeed I was correct.

I googled "surrogacy memory books" and found a web post from an intended mother who found herself in a similar situation.  She worked with a company that makes customizable memory books to have them create a series of insert pages for surrogacy.

Hallelujah!

In addition to a surrogacy insert series they have inserts for IVF, multiples, adoption, foreign adoption, two moms and two dads.

How awesome is that?

Our family that started out in a nontraditional way can still have the traditional memory book.

In case you are interested - here is a link to the company:

http://tesserapublishing.com/

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