Ann is pregnant with another man's child!

Actually, she's pregnant with another woman's child, too.

This is just my dramatic way of announcing that Ann and I are "expecting".  She was 21 weeks along last week and everything has been going swimmingly.  The doctors have given us a very high percentage chance of a successful birth.  The due date is April 1 (no, really!).

We have been trying to conceive for a number of years.  Although the trying has been quite fun, we have not had any success.  Ann has been participating on an internet forum for older women who want to have children.  One of her friends on the forum arranged to obtain donor eggs, created embryos via IVF, and then successfully delivered three boys (first a singleton and then twins).  Earlier this year, the friend and her husband decided they had all the children they wanted, so they offered the remaining three embryos to an interested party.  Ann and I stuck our hand up, were selected, and gratefully received the embryos.

In July, we travelled to the USA (where the embryos were) and arranged to have one transferred to Ann.  The first embryo the clinic thawed was determined to be insufficiently viable and had to be discarded.  But the second one was a success and has just kept going.  The third one is still frozen, waiting for us to decide at some future point what use we will make of it.

So, effectively, we are adopting a child at a very, very young age.  And that's how Ann came to be pregnant with another man's (and woman's) child.

I like to think of it as a "cuckoo", since that bird tends to put its eggs in another bird's nest so that it will be raised by the other bird - lazy, efficient parenting!  (There's also a nasty bit where the baby cuckoo kills its siblings so that it will obtain a greater share of the parental care, but let's ignore that part for my use of the metaphor.)  Ah, but the joke is on the cuckoo this time, since it really just fell into the trap we laid for it!

(If you would like some geek references to cuckoos, read John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos or see the film based on it, Village of the Damned; and/or, read Neil Gaiman's graphic novel The Sandman: A Game of You.)

I'm amazed at the technology of all this.  A man and a woman never meet, but conceive a child.  That child is carried to term and then raised by yet another woman (and another man).  Incredible, miraculous, and commonplace.  Neat stuff.

Twenty weeks is an important milestone in a pregnancy.  It's around the halfway point (slightly more, in many cases) and the baby moves to a more "real"/viable stage.  (A major problem before 20 weeks is called a spontaneous abortion, or miscarriage, whereas after that time it becomes a pre-term delivery and every day increases the chances of the baby surviving outside of the womb.)

It's also around this time that a morphology ultrasound is done, which checks for signs of genetic or developmental problems.  In ours, everything looked great.  It was amazing to see our child looking just like a little person!

The morphology ultrasound also revealed the gender and...it's a boy!  We had generally used the pronoun "he" when making a reference, but we were not set on either gender and were going to be thrilled with either.

As for a name, Ann and I refer to this as Project Zuperfliegen, since for a number of years we have joked about naming our child-to-be Zuperfliegen Baadasssss O'Brien.  The name comes from my fondness for "blaxploitation" films  - and their funky soundtracks - of the 1970s (like Shaft and Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song), as well a playful attitude toward the German language ("Zuperfliegen" is not-really-German for "Super Fly", which is another classic blaxploitation film).  I thought there was still some question as to whether Ann was going to actually let me put that on the birth certificate; but she has recently let me know that such a thing is NOT going to happen...  But, c'mon!  Who doesn't want to be a Badass (or Baadasssss)?!

So his name is actually going to be James Steven O'Brien.  "James" has been the first name of the first son of the first son for at least three generations in my family.  However, my brother - James, of course - has two girls.  So I've decided to carry on the tradition, even though I'm actually the second son of my biological father.  And there have been a LOT of "Steves" in my life - and they all get a little credit - but we're mostly honouring my long-time close friend, Steven Brey.

I think I'm still going to call him Zuperfliegen, though.

One final note:  As Ann and I are both citizens of Australia and the United States, our child will also have dual citizenship (and without all the time, effort and money we had to put into it).  I guess that means that he can grow up to be President (although perhaps not without controversy).