Erin Farquhar and Kristi Waite’s path to parenthood started at Pride.

It was 2017, and many of their friends were starting families. Erin, a pediatric nurse at Seattle Children’s Hospital, had wanted children of her own as long as she could remember. And Kristi, who worked in local media at the time, was starting to feel it too.

“I’m adopted, so I’ve always been aware of nontraditional family building even from a very young age,” says Kristi. “Families are made in a lot of different ways, and the more that people are open and talking about it, the better.”

So after learning that a friend at their Pride party was doing fertility treatment at PNWF, Erin and Kristi decided it was time to build a family of their own. After their first consultation with Dr. Julie Lamb, they started IVF right away. The couple envisioned two boys, created with Kristi’s eggs and donor sperm, which Erin would carry. They assumed the process would take about one year at the most.

“Our plan got blown up. Every part of it,” Erin says.

They learned that Kristi would be the better candidate to carry the pregnancy, and all their ideas about their timeline changed when her first retrieval cycle was unsuccessful.

“I’ll never forget Dr. Lamb telling me that we had to start over,” Kristi says. “But I trusted her implicitly. I knew she would never send us down a path that wasn’t the right thing for our family.”

After one more retrieval cycle and transfer, the couple was overjoyed to finally be pregnant. But their journey still wasn’t over—during Pride month in 2018, one year after that fateful first conversation, Kristi had a miscarriage.

They were devastated, but they weren’t alone. “We were supported and cared for in a way that I’ve never experienced in medicine before,” Kristi says.

That winter, Erin and Kristi’s dreams came true when they least expected. They’d planned a trip to Italy, and decided to do one more transfer first. There was no time for testing, so they had low expectations.

After returning home, they found out that Kristi was pregnant with a girl. Their story looked nothing like they expected, but they wouldn’t change a thing.

“I would trade nothing in this world for Hazel. She’s who was supposed to be in our family,” Kristi says.

In 2021 the family returned to PNWF to have their another child, this time using Erin’s eggs and sperm from the same donor. Conceiving was quick and easy this time around, and Erin gave birth to their second daughter, Olive, in February of this year.

Though IVF isn’t easy, they say, it’s worth it. “Build a good network and be kind to yourself,” Kristi says. “And sleep as much as possible while you still can!”