Daddy and Papa's Missing Piece

Our Surrogacy Journey: From the Beginning

Our journey to parenthood through surrogacy began in the fall of 2020, shortly after we got engaged. As we planned our future together, we knew having children was a priority. We explored various options and ultimately decided that surrogacy was the right path for us.

We reached out to Canadian Fertility Consulting, a trusted surrogacy agency, to help us navigate the process. With their guidance, we took our first steps toward making our dream a reality. The next step was finding an egg donor, which led us to Egg Helpers, where we carefully reviewed potential donors before finding the perfect match.

After choosing Create Fertility Centre as our clinic, we moved forward by providing our samples and closely following our donor’s journey to egg retrieval. Our egg donor, with whom we agreed on an anonymous donation, successfully retrieved 36 eggs. Half were fertilized by Tanner and half by Michael, and after full testing, we had 11 perfect embryos stored at the clinic.

A few months later, we matched with our surrogate and began the medical and legal process. It took several months from matching to our transfer day on July 2, 2022, which Tanner attended in Toronto. To our joy, our first transfer worked, and our surrogate soon shared the incredible news—she was pregnant!

We slowly shared the exciting news with our families, who were overjoyed. We were fortunate to have a Winnipeg-based surrogate, which allowed us to attend all her appointments. Though looking back, the pregnancy was relatively smooth, it felt incredibly nerve-wracking at the time. Our surrogate experienced some early bleeding, which scared us, but everything turned out fine. One particularly long night in the ER due to a bad flu and dehydration was another scary moment, but we made it through together.

We reached our scheduled C-section date (our surrogate’s choice, as she had previously had two C-sections), and our son was born! It was the most incredible moment of our lives.

From the beginning, our surrogate had been clear about only wanting to do this once, so after adjusting to parenthood, we began discussing surrogacy again in January 2024. We re-entered the matching process, hoping to grow our family once more. Now, well into 2025, we are still searching for the right match. The wait has been difficult, but we remain hopeful and determined.

We continue sharing our journey in hopes of connecting with another incredible woman and spreading awareness about the surrogacy process. There are many technical aspects of the surrogacy process that we will detail out in a later post. If you’d like to follow along or support us, we invite you to visit our surrogacy Instagram account @our.missing.piece. We are excited for what the future holds and can’t wait to complete our family!