The Miracle of the Mason Jar

I don't know what made me think of this, but it came to mind recently and I thought I would share it.

We get some questions from people about how we went about creating our family, but Apa gets many more.  When he tells people about our arrangement, they are inevitably fascinated and want to hear all about it.  One question that he gets all the time and that we never get (although I'm sure people wonder) is whether he had, um, relations with us in order to conceive the kids.  The answer to that one is a resounding no!

In fact, when we were trying for Mateo, we made several attempts that involved FedEx, a fancy kit that kept sperm alive for 36 hours, a centrifuge, and Sacha learning how to do an IUI at home.  We had quite the little laboratory going for a few months there!  We did all this because Apa lived across the country and we were saving the possibility of flying him out here for if things didn't work out the FedEx way.  However, after about six months, nothing had happened, and so we made arrangements for him to visit the next time I would be ovulating.

This is where the Miracle of the Mason Jar story starts.  Apa arrived in Portland and found us ready and waiting with every sterile thing we might possibly need.  We had a sealed sterile cup, a sterile syringe, and that's all I can remember, but I'm sure there were other things.  We were taking things very seriously and wanted everything to be perfect.  As it turned out, we only had to fly Apa to us one time, because I got pregnant on that cycle and Mateo was born the next fall.

In the fullness of time, as my dad would say, and not very much time at that, we decided that we should start trying for child #2.  This was when Mateo was about ten months old.  We knew Sacha had irregular cycles and we thought it might take awhile for her to get pregnant, so we wanted to give ourselves plenty of time.  As it happened, Sacha got pregnant right away and we ended up with kids 19 months apart!  But, the funny part of it was how we handled the inseminations the second time around.  We had decided to start off by having him visit us in person and then thought we would figure things out from there, depending on how long the process took.

As Apa likes to tell the story, he got off the plane, met me at the car, and I drove him to our house.  Sacha was ovulating right then, so we needed to get things going that night.  We didn't have any of the sterile equipment from the first time, and we were both sleep-deprived and much more experienced by that point anyway, so I had run the dishwasher through its sterilizing cycle and had left it open to dry while I went to the airport.

When we got home, I just handed Apa a mason jar out of the dishwasher and left him to do what he needed to do.  He thought the whole thing was hilarious (sterile routine for the first time, mason jar out of the dishwasher for the second) and we have been laughing about it ever since.  And, luckily for us, Tali was born just over nine months later.  He told this whole story to my aunt one Christmas Eve and offhandedly dubbed the whole process "The Miracle of the Mason Jar," which we have been calling it ever since. 

I think the funniest part of the whole thing is how we conceived Rosa, which took the Miracle of the Mason Jar to a whole new level.  She was conceived on Orcas Island in the San Juans, where we were at camp and where Apa visited for the weekend to help conceive a baby, going totally above and beyond the call of duty!  We brought the requisite mason jar, but had no dishwasher, no sterilizing, just hand soap from Apa's hotel and good, old-fashioned water to clean it with.  By this time, we all knew quite well that this would be more than fine, and, in fact, our Rosie arrived just about nine months later, keeping The Miracle of the Mason Jar alive and well!

Now that we have our three kids, we'll have to retire the mason jar routine, but it served us extremely well and will remain a part of our family lore for many years to come.