We hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving! Ours was lovely. Obviously, the two things we are most grateful for are our wonderful baby girls and all the miracles we’ve experienced to bring them here. This whole blog expresses our thankfulness for that, so for our season of gratitude post, today we’ll share how we showed our thanks to our fertility clinic when we graduated from their care onto regular OB care. I know reading different blogs and Pinterest was helpful to me so maybe this well help for anyone looking for ideas!

Each person is different and obviously thank you gifts are not required to give to your doctor, but Jason and I really wanted to give the clinic something tangible to show our gratitude. We included detailed, personalized thank you cards with each gift, which I’m sure they would’ve enjoyed on its own, but  we really wanted to go the extra mile for these people who changed our world by making our dreams come true!

For the general staff, we brought a few dozen fresh bagels from Einstein. My sister is a nurse and when I asked her for ideas, she mentioned that while cookies and sweets are still super nice, muffins or breads were a little less common. The full staff at UFC is large enough that we couldn’t really afford something personalized for each person, but literally every person we worked with was amazing and knew us by name from the receptionist down to the lab techs. We didn’t want to exclude them because we are grateful to every person who played a role in our journey.

Four of the staff were especially amazing to us.  We decided to get more personalized items for them.

For Ammon, the embryologist who spent hours and hours going through Jason’s tissue samples looking for sperm, we found him items more on the silly side. He is a fun guy with a great sense of humor.  Remember his sperm shaped flash drive? We knew he’d get a huge kick out of these!

A delightful little coffee mug, because who couldn’t use  a mug to keep at the office? And not just any mug, but a mug that fits both Ammon’s optimistic attitude and shows off his profession. If you’re interested, the mug can be purchased here.

And since embryologists spend so many hours in the lab peering into microscopes, Jason thought that some sort of stress ball would be nice to use to help keep concentration up. But we couldn’t just get any stress balls…

…a bouquet of sperm stress balls was much more fitting! 😀 You can find those here. He loooooved them!

These gifts spawned (hee hee!) another Things-You-Don’t-Expect-To-Hear-Your-Wife-Say moment for Jason: “Can you hold the sperm while I tie a bow on it?”

We also had to thank Tonya, one of the IVF nurse coordinators who we started working with on day one at UFC. Tonya wrote recommendation letters for us for a couple of fertility grant donors, got our medications started and found us rebates and coupons, answered countless questions for us, and was our nurse for our embryo transfer. Such a sweet lady, we adore her! She’s very classy and timeless so we wanted to get her a necklace that fit that style. Here is what we got:

Isn’t it gorgeous? This necklace features rose quartz, moonstone, and fresh water pearls. These materials are pretty symbolic for those trying to conceive, as they are believed to bring the wearer higher fertility and good luck. A common thing in the TTC (trying to conceive) world is to wish each other “baby dust” –positive thoughts to help little embryos stick, a wish for magic to come your way, and just a general way to show infertiles your support. We consider Tonya to have been some baby dust to us and we thought that if she choses to wear this necklace around the office, it would be another dose of baby dust for her patients that she cares about so dearly. This particular necklace is no longer available but the Etsy shop has an entire section dedicated to infertility jewelry that is just as inspiring.

Another person who was baby dust to us was our wonderful nurse coordinator, Chelsee. We LOVE Chelsee! We’ve mentioned her a few times in our blog. She set our cycle schedule and was our angel during our procedures. She was behind coordinating things with Dr. Hotaling’s office, our go-to contact for any and all questions, and she just went above and beyond in every way, not just our nurse but a true friend. One day when I finally get around to posting about how UFC let us know we were positive for pregnancy ;), Chelsee is featured in it quite a bit. Basically, even though she was out of the office when our test results came in, she still called us herself off the clock because we were such a personal and dear case to her. Chelsee has more of a cute, trendy vibe and we found this beauty for her:

We love the lettering and the way it gets straight to the point. We figured that this was also something that Chelsee could potentially wear to work to show her patient’s that she’s wishing them luck and doing everything she can for them. If nothing else, we wanted her to know that we truly do consider her and all she did for us as monumental contributions to our baby dust supply! This is also an Etsy purchase, but seems to be a regular item readily available in the shop.

And finally, of course we wanted to do something special for Dr. Foulk! Without his talent, dedication, and generosity we wouldn’t be here. This man is a miracle worker, no exaggeration. Many other doctors may have turned our case away or given up on us when things got even more complicated. Dr. Foulk never gave up on us; he was realistic and upfront with us about our chances from the beginning, but he knew that somehow he could make our dreams come true.He was God-sent  and in our story, the stork who brought our bundle of joy will be named Russell.  And here’s the little Russell we got for him:

We got the plush stork here and one of our sweet friends added the hand embroidered “Dr. Foulk” for us.

It’s definitely more of a sentimental gift and not exactly practical, but we thought he’d like it nonetheless. He has an area in his office with items dedicated to his occupation and we thought maybe this could become an addition to that.

We hope this can be of use to someone! We loved working with UFC and seriously can’t stop singing their praises. Without them, we wouldn’t be having these beautiful little girls or the option for four more chances. Thank you again, Utah Fertility Center!