Back in late May, I, Rachael, went to New York to transfer the last 3 embryos of the set of 5 we adopted. It was a fun trip! Yes, we lost all 3 of these babies, but the trip itself was still fun. I traveled with a friend who is a professional philosopher out of the same program that Pete graduated from. We had some good conversations and we explored more of the island than Pete and I had last time we were there. Of course, in Dec of 2015, we had 4 yr old Little Man with us and that creates its own set of limits. This time, with just 2 adult women, we ate Thai food, street food, drank over- priced coffee and saw more of Manhattan Island than I thought possible in 2 days.
Doing the Tourist thing
We went down to China town, and to find the best “jiaozi” (Chinese dumplings), I pulled out all the Chinese I had and asked a shop owner where he thought the best jiaozi was. 1. I don’t have that much Chinese, but I can ask where the best jiaozi are to be found. 2. My ability to understand his response was limited, so he wrote down the name of the restaurant for us. And it was great jiaozi.
Since Little Italy is just down from China town, we had to stop in for some cannoli. Oh, my were these good!
The whole reason for the trip….
I didn’t get all I’d hoped for out of this. But the main thing was kept the main thing: give these babies a chance at life. And we did that. I’m sad we don’t get to hold and raise any of those 3 babies, but that was a possible outcome, not the primary reason we went into embryo adoption. Having kids entails risk of some kind, nothing is sure; and the risk in embryo adoption is that you might not end up with any children to raise. Its a big risk and you gotta go into it knowing and accepting the risk. All that said, we still mourned the lost of those babies.
