Kate's surrogacy story

Two weeks after my doctor told me that I was totally infertile and could never carry a child, an incredible woman telephoned me and offered to be my surrogate mother.  She was a friend of my mothers, and ... what a great lady!  She and her husband and their two sons will always remain in our hearts because of the long, strange trip that we took together, which involved four IVF's for our surrogate mother, a pregnancy, a fetus that died the day before we went up to hear the heartbeat, a scary "procedure" to remove the fetus, and, three weeks later, my surprise pregnancy.

Well, it's been three years and it's no surprise to us that we haven't gotten pregnant again.  We have just started looking for another surrogate mother and it's terrifying!  I'll log some of the information on where to find surrogate mothers here, together with some comments and suggestions.  There is one caution, though, which is that I'm just really not impressed with agencies.  In my life, I look to myself to create and handle relationships.  I am competent, honest, and hopefully relatively savvy.  When we started working with our first surrogate mother, we hired a lawyer for us and a lawyer for them, then we got our surrogate mom the requisite psych test (she said that every third question was "do you want to kill yourself.,"  and all of her blood tests.  We sat down face to face and talked with them about every issue and decided it together.  As far as we were concerned, if we were waaaaaay far apart on issues, then we probably shouldn't work together (I mean heck, this works for everybody that makes babies, right?)    They were funny, wonderful, fun, smart, had great kids of their own, and were extremely decent people.    I'd call it a very successful relationship!  (Well, we didn't exactly get a baby out of it, but then again, in a way we did!)

At any rate, I have been wandering around waiting for another surrogate mother to fall out of the heavens and hit me on the head (Well, if you had the first baby-making experience that we did, you'd feel much the same way, I'm sure.) but it hasn't happened, so I'll keep you posted.