Eight Cells and a Prayer

For those of you who don't know the IVF process, I'll spare you the gritty details. Here's the briefest of summaries:
+ The wife gets pumped full of drugs (lots of syringes used in at-home injections, woo hoo!) so there are lots of eggs to harvest;
+ The doctors extract the eggs surgically, and mix them with some of the husband's contribution in a "petri dish party";
+ A few days later, they surgically implant an 8-cell embryo back into the wife
+ Then you wait--for what seems like forever, but is really just about a week or so, I recall--you pray a lot and ask for lots of prayer from others, and you find out if it "took" (then, if it does and you're pregnant, everything else for the remainder of the pregnancy works just as if it had happened with no interventions).

It's a mercilessly "medical" process.

The most amusing part of the process (and there was really only one amusing part) was at the very end when we received a "good luck" card from the Northwestern IVF team. In the card were wishes for good luck and a photo of the 8-cell embryo that they'd implanted. Talk about overachieving, we ended up with the earliest baby photo we'd every seen!

Well, that's how the little guy first arrived on the scene in late August 2007. And now some photos:


The Northwestern IVF Team card, and the photo of the little guy when he was only 8 cells:

And the ultrasound taken within about 30 seconds of implantation. Earliest pregnancy ultrasound possible, cool!