Hi:
When we adopted our daughter, she was already 4 months old and had been on the bottle the whole time. I only had 10 days to prepare and used the lact-aid supplementer to help her switch. She was pretty adamant about her bottle nipple and after 10 days of trying, I gave up.

The nice thing about our surrogacy is that I have months to prepare and I will be trying with baby from birth. I'm so looking forward to the experience.

With not being able to experience a pregnancy, it's a true blessing to be able to experience breastfeeding.

take care,

For me, one unexpected side effect of looking into abf has been how much I have learnt about surrogacy, hearing the stories of so many women who have gone down that road.

Must confess I was really, really ignorant there - I am not sure GS is even legally possible in Germany and you only ever seem to hear the horror stories...

In practical terms it is not an option in our particular situation, but I am very happy I was able to shed some of the prejudice I had + become a more open-minded person.

Hi:
I understand what you mean. It's a new concept for the modern world but, of course, has been around since the biblical times. (Abraham's wife's handmaid carried their first son, Ishmael.)

I know of a couple in Germany that came to San Diego, California to have a baby through Surrogacy. I believe they had to keep it as a legal adoption. I hope Germany can be socially liberalized to allow Surrogacy. It's such a beautiful option for us infertile couples.

How did you get to Brazil?
Tschus,

I always understood it to be that Sarah gave Hagar to Abraham (as a wife). When she conceived and had Ishmael she rubbed it in her face and Sarah was jealous. She didn't raise Ishmael, Hagar did. So he wasn't considered to be Sarah and Abraham's son, he was not the promised one from God, Isaac was. I don't mean to be knit picky, there were lots of instances in the Bible where a man took more than one wife or was given the hand maid to have children with. (Jacob, Rachel, Leah and both their hand maids,is how he had 12 sons, another example)
One thing that has been around for ages is nursing a child that is not from your womb. They used to call it wet nursing. Happened all the time in the past. The thing that intrigues me about surrogacy is that it can be TS or GS. Modern medical technology has come so far. I didn't even know most of this was possible until starting my journey into ABF. I have learned so much from all these wonderful ladies.

Hey,

I guess we have a bit of a cultural problem in Germany - we just love to make things more problematic than they are and tend to be really suspicious of any new ideas. But things are changing, slowly but they are. That German couple must have been brave people.

I came to Brazil just over four years ago - I was offered a job here, at that time I really wasn't planning to move to South America but I was a bit stuck professionally and decided to just take it up and go for maybe six months to clear my head a little and maybe learn Portuguese.

In the end we just stayed on (with intermediate stints in Venezuela and Peru) and it's been a great experience.

Much as I have come to love Brazil we probably will move back to Europe at some stage as Sao Paulo is really not the place where I want my kids to grow up.

Love,
Chris