#2 The Danes; Roskilde, Tuborg and baby making

Denmark; our neighbour approx. 7-9 hrs south by car from Stockholm.
In my youth Denmark meant the Roskilde festival, beer and the odd class trip in high school. Despite Roskilde, Denmark and Copenhagen has never been a place I long to visit. Perhaps it's too many days spent being exhausted, hungover and muddy, desperately killing time until your train leaves after the festival. Maybe it was all those time you ate that bad pizza buffét after living off of red wine, Matilda chocolate milk and chili nuts for a week at Roskilde. I don't know how many times I've gone to the movies in Copenhagen, just to have somewhere to nap until the train leaves.

Or perhaps it was that boring school trip, having to walk around in a group with all those classmates you had nothing in common with. Yes, you know, those who got drunk and fell asleep in the shower with their clothes on later the same night at the youth hostel.
While you chain-smoked Marlboro red's, read Herman Hesse and rolled your eyes at how childish they were with your best friend.

Now that Denmark was our option to make our baby-dream come true - I really had to do something about my attitude.

We talked to a friend who'd spent a lot of time in Copenhagen, and got tips on cosy cafés, fantastic brunch venues and nice neighbourhoods for evening strolls. The first time we went, to look at the clinic, we actually both got stomach flu, and I did an old refuge to the movie theather to have somewhere to sit in the dark w my eyes closed until it was time to go to the airport.
What a nightmare that trip was!
The second time we opted for a romantic weekend, since one of us were working in town prior to that. We stayed at the hotel God forgot and payed a fortune for a ridiculous room with stained furniture and shaggy carpets with spots, where the bed broke the last night.
So much for romance.
The two times we inseminated we had our car; thank God! And just got out of there afterwards.
I'm still not crazy about the town, but it does have a closer place to my heart after being the place where baby was concieved.

In Denmark there are a lot of private clinics for babymaking, both very well known, and some not so well known.
We did our research and called around. We chose the clinic where they actually spoke English on the phone (despite what you might think, Sthlm Swedes and Danes do not automatically understand eachother, and you don't want any misunderstandings while embarking on a process that will cost you your lifesavings).

Since we wanted a donor with extensive background information (more on this later in the "chosing a donor" post), a European donor was out of the question.

The clinic we chose had experience of importing semen before, so we felt we were in good hands.

This is a tip if you have certain requirements about your donor/the process; call around! As I mentioned earlier there are different regulations at different clinics depending on if the clinic has medical doctors in their staff or not.
Now, this is not clear, and nothing you get information about. We were very confused at first as to why one clinc was not allowed to help us with a certain donor, but another one could.

So don't get disheartened if the clinic you talk to can't accomodate your wishes; call someone else!

After you've found a clinic that feels right, the first step in the process is a "journal samtal"; an interview where the midwife at the clinic ask you basic questions about your health and you can ask questions about the insemination process.
Since we'd found a donor we really wanted and was under a bit of time pressure to buy the semen and have it delivered to the clinic; we chose to go there in person to have the interview. We were going to invest a lot of money if we chose to have our semen delivered to the clinic and stored there, and there was no sending it back, or to some other place after that.
It felt better to meet with them in person, to make sure it felt right before we decided this was were we, hopefully, would have Baby, and her siblings.

Otherwise it is also possible to have this conversation over the phone, which a lot of people do.

The interview, or rather; conversation, was very pleasant. We were met and respected as a family and as two parents to be, not as a mother and her partner.
There was no standard protocol with discriminatory questions they just HAD to ask (like how many times we'd had intercourse to produce a child, or whatever it is they ask in Sweden).

We also talked about donors, having a donor child and how our thought process was in chosing the one we've chosen.

If you prefer, you don't have to chose yourself, the clinic can chose a donor for you.

All the paper work for our semen and storing it at the clinic was handled via e-mail and was very unproblematic.

The next step was timing your ovulation and try the IUI, which I've written about in earlier blogpost.

Voila!
And now we have baby, our little night owl and early bird. She dances energetically at bedtime and in the morning when she wakes me. She is probably training me for when she'll be with us in the outside world, keeping us up all hours of the night.