After three daughters in a row, Jon and Kacie Dawe hoped that MicroSort could increase their chances of having a boy.
Their first MicroSort attempt, however, proved to be unsuccessful. Jon flew to Fairfax, Virginia, to provide a sperm sample, which was sorted using the MicroSort procedure to increase the percentage of Y-sperm. The sample was frozen, then shipped home where it was used to artificially inseminate Kacie, who did not become pregnant.
"... it would be nice to have a boy. If it ends up being a girl, it is a girl," Kacie said in July 2004 before the couple tried MicroSort for the second time. "I don't think I would have done anything that required me to choose between embryos. When you go through all this you realize how precious life is."
For their second attempt, the couple travelled to MicroSort for IVF, combining their quest for a son with a family vacation in Washington, DC. Three embryos were implanted, and Kacie and Jon surely rejoiced to learn that she was pregnant. At 16 weeks pregnancy, an ultrasound showed that Kacie was carrying twins, a boy and a girl.
Kacie recalled thinking as the ultrasound got under way, "Please, please, please let there be a boy in there."
Joseph Maxwell and Sophie Rose were born on April 27, weighing 7 pounds, 10 ounces and 6 pounds, 7 ounces.
Their family of 7 children now includes Hannah, 10, and Grant, 9, from Kacie's previous marriage; Gabrielle, 5, and twin girls, Jacqueline and Jordan, 3; and now little twins Max and Sophia.
This is the first case of boy/girl MicroSort twins I've come across, besides my own. (Like Kacie, I also didn't find out I was having twins until well into pregnancy -- 20 weeks, in fact!) Perhaps they wonder, like me, whether having boy/girl twins was just a statistical chance, or whether there was such a strong predisposition to having one gender, overwhelming odds were needed to overcome it to have just one baby of the opposite gender. We'll never know. ;-)
Happy 4-month-birthday to twins Sophia and Max, and best wishes to all of the Dawe family!