Pulling back

We now have more information to work with and apparently, going all in right now isn't as smart as I had originally thought.

It turns out that on the plan we prepurchased, we have one frozen transfer already paid for (the clinic fees anyway).  What I didn't know is that's a limited time offer.  If we do a frozen transfer before May, it will cost us about half of what that same transfer will cost June and beyond.  And that we will have a bunch of storage fees after that.

The other thing we didn't know is that all of those packages that allow you to purchase 2 or 3 fresh+frozen cycles, well, as soon as you bring home a child, whatever you haven't used to get that first child are no longer available.  AND they don't allow you to do fresh cycles back to back.  You have to do your fresh cycle, then use up your frozens before you can do another fresh cycle.

Since my medical history has proven that it's very likely that I will get pregnant in one of the early attempts, it doesn't make sense to prepurchase several attempts if I can't keep those attempts available for a second child.

And the single purchase options are changing at the end of this month because my clinic just merged with another clinic.  So the option to prepurchase a single fresh+frozen cycle at a discounted rate will disappear if we don't have the deal in place prior to March 1.

So here's the plan, according to this moment, subject to change of course.

We're going to prepurchase that next fresh + frozen cycle today.  Get that deal in place and locked in.

Next month, we will do a frozen cycle.  We are still going to have to invest in the medications so it will still have some cost associated with it, but it's kind of like buying a lottery ticket today while still investing in a retirement plan.  The frozen cycle today is the $2 lottery ticket but we're still going to put our real money into the retirement plan.  Now how many embryos we transfer is still up for debate.  The doctors would probably recommend we use up 2 of the 3 embryos.  I'm kind of thinking of playing it really conservative and only transferring 1 and see if we get lucky with that 1 while keeping the other 2 in the bank for the future.

If that 1 pays off, we'll still be investing in that fresh + frozen cycle at todays discounted rate that we can use to try to get our second child a few years from now.

If that 1 doesn't pay off, then we'll do the fresh round this summer.  Hopefully, that will yield our first child, plus another young embryo or two to add to that bank account.

If the fresh round doesn't pay off, we're pretty much back to where we are now, with one frozen attempt half paid for to be used up a few months later but with the best possible embryos in the bank.  At that time, we do just like we're doing now and decide to use up some embryos in a frozen transfer or losing out on that discounted frozen transfer and reinvesting in another fresh round.

Now if this first frozen transfer pays off, and a few years down the road we decide that we're happy with one child, we can get a refund on what we're prepurchasing today because we won't have used up any of those purchased services yet.

So it doesn't make sense to commit all of our financial avenues to prepurchasing several attempts when I'm not allowed to bank those attempts anyway and it's very likely we won't use more than one or two of them.

Instead, we've committed to digging this financial hole as deep as it needs to go to get to the gold we're seeking.  But it makes more sense to use a shovel and hope to find gold before the hole is too deep than to come in with power tools that will dig that hole to the bottom regardless of whether or not the gold is on the top layer of dirt.

So everyone, cross your fingers that our first frozen attempt sees us bringing home twins so we can put back some of that dirt that we're going to dig out today.