Process and embryo selection

I have been asked by several people lately about how we are deciding on which embryos we wanna try for and also how the whole process works, so I'm gonna try the best I can to explain it all.

Embryo selection
As far as which embryos we are deciding to try to get and which we aren't, it's pretty much a personal family decision. There are 3 main criteria we are looking for. 1 is age of both the biological donors, 2 is the race of both of the biological donors, and 3 is if there were children born out of the same embryo batch.

Just like in a "natural" pregnany, the age of the donors (more specifically the egg donor) makes a difference in the chances of the prgnancy taking and going full term. A woman's egg of an older age would have a smaller chance of making it than an egg of a younger woman.

We know that in adoption we would be fine with a child of mixed race, but as far as us choosing the embryos to hopefully become our children, we are trying to stay closer to our family backgrounds and stay with caucasian. I am Italian (and a small mix of others) and Nick has German and some others in him, so we are trying to stay along those lines. The agency currently doesn't have that many that fit our criteria. Many have hispanic or Asian sperm or egg donors as part of the make-up.

If there are known children born out of the same batch, then it's also more likely a child will be born again.

Also, the number of embryos available in the batch makes a difference too. 4 is better than 1.

I hope none of this offends anyone, this is just our personal choice.

The process
I will try to do this the best I can, but also in the most simple form I can so it's not too confusing.
1. We go through the donor list with the embryo agency and find ones that meet our criteria. (These are fertilized embryos, so we are looking at both the bio-mom and bio-dad together, not separate as we would be with donor sperm and donor egg separate)

2. When we find a batch we like, we request the embryo report sent to our fertility clinic.

3. If the Dr gives the thumbs up, we ask the agency to show our profile information to the donor who is responsible for the embryos (ususally the bio-mom)

4. If the donor approves us, then we do some more paperwork and then have the embryos shipped to our clinic. If they deny us, we start again.

5. After the clinic receives them, our surrogate goes in for her calendar. This will tell her what meds she will be taking what days to shut down her own system, and when the planned transfer date is. (She is currently on birth control pills until we get this calendar)

6. She will take the meds for about 4 weeks, and then on the day of the planned transfer, the embryologist at the clinic will thaw 2 embryos to start. This takes about 2 hours. If they survived the thaw super well, then the surro goes in and has them transfered to her uterus. If not, they thaw the next 2 and just have her come in later. This is why more is better, also we could save any remaining for a sibling later.

7. After the transfer we wait for what we hope to be a positive pregnancy test, and you know the rest from there! If it's negative and we have embryos left, we decide if we wanna do it again.

8. And then at delivery, the baby (or babies!) are placed in our arms and we have full and legal custody.

Hope that kinda explains it better. Feel free to ask any questions, and I'll try to do the best I can to answer them