In September 2010, we were discussing the importance of a support network on this website -- and how flexible we sometimes need to be about who we think we can count on. I featured this post from a woman who, accidents of timing, lost most of her support... after she found out she was pregnant with twins... shortly before she lost her job. Let's revisit her story now.

For many of us, simply having sex with someone we love to produce a child is a great idea. But life being what it is today, women like us, busy with goals and options, have many more choices than we used to. We can delay child-bearing a few more years, generally into our 30s, sometimes into our early 40s. But when things don't go as easily as we would like, and we see the many options to motherhood available to us, how do we choose?

I just returned from Orlando, where hundreds of specialists in reproductive medicine gathered for their annual convention -- largely focused on helping women get pregnant with up-to-date research and technology. Here is some of what I learned, and people I talked to.

One of the most exciting developments I see for Choice Moms in the coming years is the opening up of the relatively new embryo donation frontier for those women whose own eggs aren't working. New players in the field are working with single women.

Choice Moms has recently started conversation with Embryo Donation International, which actively works with single women and lesbians who have neither viable eggs or sperm with which to start a family.

As we continue our look this month into alternatives to the "traditional" IUI route for Choice Moms, here are some great resources.

Back in August 2010, two wonderful colleagues talked with each other in a radio show about moving beyond the "simple" conception options to surrogacy, adoption, embryo donation, egg donation and more. Here are highlights, and a direct link to the show.

We've been busy assembling new fertility resources for our large community in the Trying: Fertility stage. Use this link to our new page of medications involved in fertility treatment.

Thanks to some great referrals, San Francisco-based Alta Bates IVF is now part of the Choice Mom family of recommended fertility specialists.

As I begin exploring the area of embryo adoption for the Choice Mom community, I am finding partners in the area who can talk us through the wide open frontier it seems to be right now. Here are my notes from one recent conversation.

If you have used eggs and sperm to create embryos outside of your body, as a growing number of families have done because of fertility challenges, the question naturally arises about what to do with the frozen embryos remaining in storage.

More Choice Moms are looking into embryo donation these days, perhaps because international adoption doors once open to single women seem closed right now because of protracted governmental regulatory issues. Here are a few things you should know about this growing family-building option:

As I've mentioned, one news source that I follow faithfully is BioNews, which publishes information about fertility and genetics out of the United Kingdom. Here are some of their latest reports of interest to the Choice Mom community.

This collection of journal entries during the 2ww process was submitted by Jenn.
Day 1
This is the first day of my third 2ww. My first two IVF cycles failed. The first one was with my then husband, and I was so stressed out. I got OHSS. It was the summer of 2006. I got upset at him for every little thing, some things littler than others, and the schedule was difficult because we needed to move 1000 miles away between the retrieval and the transfer.