The Beginning

Welcome to our blog for our journey to becoming parents. ouryeladim.net was created to share our expereinces, our highs and lows, and finally the celebration of our yeladim (children) coming home.

Our journey to becoming parents began on our one year anniversary in January of 2004. Little did we know that there was no worry over not having enough married time before children arrived. Within 7 months of unsuccessful attempts to get pregnant... the one time in your life that caution goes out the window and you realize it was never really needed...we knew that something was not right. One month shy of our 2nd anniversary we were diagnosed with severe male infertility. Low sperm count, low motility, and low morphology.

After the shock wore off we got into action and began researching on the internet, scouring bookstores, and finding RESOLVE. We decided to try acupuncture, vitamins, and change in our eating habits (as much organic as possible) in order to see what we could do to alter those numbers. Within 3 months we saw dramatic changes and our hopes rose as the numbers did!

Yiftach (my heroic husband) was found to be a bone marrow match for an unrelated woman. He gave of himself unselfishly knowing that it could impact our ability to have our own biological child. Sure enough, his numbers dipped and dropped and we had to wait four seasons (an entire year) before he was totally healed and his numbers came back stronger and better than before. It was also at the one year anniversary of his donation that we found out that the recipient had survived and wanted to be in touch with us. Saving her life was worth every moment we had dealt with in our struggle to get his numbers better.

This took us 6 months past our 3 year anniversary and 5 months into the adoption process. We had decided that we would pursue adoption because we had always wanted to expand our family in that way. We just hadn't thought that this would be the process we would follow first.

Adopting through the county allowed us a way to move forward with creating our family and finding our yeladim without the financial strains attached to adoption. We finished all the classes and paperwork and homestudy March 30, 2006 and now are just waiting for a phone call.

It has taken us months to get to this point of blogging our story and feeling that it was worthy of being read. We appreciate the encouragement of friends, the support of Cookies and Fortune Cookies, and the love of our family as we have walked this scary, long, often tough, sometimes funny, path to becoming parents. We look forward to sharing the rest of the journey with you.