Schedules, Lawyers and Google Calendars

One of our cats has lost her marbles this morning. She jumped up into the bathroom sink and was chewing on a hair elastic, and now she's having way too much fun chasing a tiny bit of paper around. Oh dear.

The lawyer part has been much less complicated than I anticipated. It is as expensive as I anticipated, though, but children are expensive, and it's worth it to give them as much legal protection as possible.

So here's a breakdown of the process, such as it occurs in BC:
-Find a known donor.
-Ask known donor to get tested for everything, plus sperm count.
-Make decision regarding whether you will keep this donor, based on medical tests and sperm counts, or if you want to try interventions to make the sperm count higher (ie, wearing boxers instead of briefs).
-Find a lawyer. Preferably one who has a clue about Queer Families. We are using barbara findlay, as she is a queer lawyer with a lot of experience in making contracts between parents and known donors. This was important to us!
-Find a laywer to represent your known donor (you need another one so that your donor is unable to use the excuse of "I didn't know what I was signing" in the event of a custody battle later on).
-We filled out a questionnaire about us and our donor and why we wanted a known donor and blah blah blah. From this, the lawyer makes a draft contract, which we will then go and see. If we are happy, it will go to BD's lawyer, where they will go over it. He will sign 5 copies of it, and then send all of them back to our lawyer, where we will sign all 5 copies, and then each person gets one (J and I each get one too).
-Once the contract is signed, it's a done deal, and we can start anytime.

The kicker is always schedules. Thank god for iPeriod (iPhone app!) and google calendars. By some miracle all three of us use Google Calendar, so J's cycle will get it's own google calendar, and thus everyone will know.

The huge bummer is that BD is away at the end of June visiting family, so we'll be missing a cycle. The following cycle, J and I are at camp with a bagillion people. We may not be ready in May, since it's already the end of April and we haven't finished with the lawyer stuff yet (in fact, I've hardly touched most of it because I'm so incredibly overwhelmed with everything else right now).

So, we're looking at August. Which is far away, and makes me want to whine, but I have to just suck it up and be an adult. Patience is a virtue, or something, right?