We're on the board

Just a week away from egg retrieval round two and we finally got the score from the first round. It's official: we're on the board with one healthy embryo in the bank. It's kind of all sorts of miraculous and somehow a little disappointing at the same time.

I'd been so busy preparing myself emotionally for the euploid (chromosomally normal) versus aneuploid (not compatible with life) outcome that I hadn't spent a moment worrying about whether we'd get a boy or a girl (the latter having just one fourth the risk of autism compared to the prior). Nicolas and I had no problem agreeing on our preferred biological sex, so to me that question was closed: we'd be having a girl. Either I was going to be a girl-mom or not. My brain simply hadn't inserted boy-mom as another possible outcome. Now this is incredibly stupid, but my brain only has so much space and the Neuralink clinical trials have been eating up a lot of it. The rest has been consumed by "oh my God, is this going to work??" and "can you believe we're even doing this??" without having a moment to ever fathom the most normal of becoming-a-parent questions: girl or boy?

I'd assumed there'd be more emotion, but I just feel like a box was checked - no more, no less. Maybe it's because I know I'm not yet half-way through the IVF slog. Maybe it's because I spent the day battling some gnarly software bugs that were essential for our implant manufacturing. Maybe it's because passing this hurdle still leaves some tough odds: an embryo with this guy's score has only got a 50% chance of a successful implantation and a 42% chance of live birth. With those numbers, I don't know how much I have to wrap my head around just yet. But this is good. I just didn't think I'd have to be telling myself that.