The dollars and $ense of MY family’s creation

So, I'm a little late to this party, but that's typical. This post, inspired by the blog hop at Write Mind, Open Heart, addresses the costs of building my family.

We are in the enviable position of having insurance coverage, having issues that could be discovered and addressed, and being extremely frugal. So, while we hate to spend any money on anything, the costs of building our family seemed very much worth it to us...until they didn't tell us anything or didn't work.

I don't have any idea of what our family building efforts cost, but most of it was testing and medication copays. Some of the testing was not covered by insurance, and it amounted to a few hundred dollars. All of the medication had copays, so I would estimate those costs at around $500. The unfortunate/fortunate thing was that all the testing I had to pay for revealed nothing. The testing covered by my insurance gave my full story...but that couldn't be taken for granted.

If my child were to ask me how much she cost, I'd tell her I didn't know...but whatever it was wouldn't match her value. No matter how many times a day her father threatens to sell her on eBay. And then I might tell her that I wish I'd been able to pay whatever emotional cost it took to provide her with a sibling. I do have a file of most of that information, but I've never actually reviewed all of the data.

In some ways, our finances did determine the extent of our family building efforts. Because we are older parents and savers, we had enough resources to say that our secondary infertility was something we could throw money at to see if we could solve it. We did not succeed, and while we could try again, the emotional cost far outweighs the monetary cost.

Going outside the country would not solve the problem that I'm old and my eggs are...past their sell-by date. Spending more money wouldn't help that either.

All in all, we have been extremely lucky to not have money be our main consideration in our family planning efforts. We were more focused on finding the problem and finding a solution.

Language differences

I was reading some work-related articles the other day and came across one from This Is Hampshire.net

The story is interesting enough, but what really caught my eye was the phrase at the end:

"He denies rape, attempted buggery and aggravated burglary."

I'm still wondering what attempted buggery is...