AllisonWonderland

Holy shit, I made the mistake of looking up Jake's Instagram and... whooooooboy, it is..... NOT GOOD! Like, every single post I watched was a clip from his podcast, I guess?, railing against the "gay agenda", trans people, immigrants, "boys in tutus" (complete with clip from the animated toddler show, Cocomelon), and that's as far as I got. He was wearing a shirt that said OnlyGuns, and man, I can rarely think of a time I've disliked someone so much. He seemed like your typical alpha-Chad military boi on the show, which is not really for me but I can allow it; his off-show public persona, however, is hate-filled and anti-"woke" and just plain gross. Kick rocks, Sir. Be gone forever.

So, I have an 11 wk old baby born via IVF in New York City. I did it myself, via a sperm donor, with help from a very good private clinic in Midtown. I had worked with NYU Fertility before I found my awesome new clinic and jumped ship on NYU to go with the smaller private group. Regarding the embryo debate, I can say from personal experience that I was NEVER pressured to name a donor. The egg freezing process was its own thing; many women decide to freeze their eggs as a safety net for the future, and have no idea what or who that future might include. The decision to freeze eggs is largely a "Hey, I'm single and contemplating the future. Maybe this would be a good insurance policy in case I don't meet The One before it gets too late!" kind of thing. My own partners never ended up including anyone I'd feel confident parenting a child with, but it was super important to me to be a mother. So, I went for it with the help of a donor from a sperm bank. My daughter is beautiful and healthy and thriving, and while the concept of creating embryos from the jump was acknowledged, it was only presented as an option. I think the majority of women who show up for their consultation appointments alone are understood to be Single Mothers By Choice, and there is a sensitivity provided to them and an understanding that they are probably going it alone and might be using a donor in at some point the future. If either NYU or my eventual chosen clinic had made me feel like a partner/donor was implicit to the process, I would have left. Because I was largely where Brynn purports to have been, which was doing a "safety net" mission to ensure that I had things secured for the future, however that ended up taking shape. Freezing eggs when you know you want kids at some point does not require a partner at the time of retrieval, and to (allegedly) shame someone into giving a donor's name at that juncture would be an unfair and unorthodox practice, if true. All that to say, either Brynn went to a ridiculous and shamefully managed practice, or she's BS'ing. The option to create embryos from the jump was certainly floated to me, but never pressed. I would have been shocked for them to have held me to a future decision of dedicating a donor from the beginning when I was completely unsure where my life would be in the coming years.

Ugh, pic isn't working. Dang it.

Ok, so I think Rebecca (is that the filter one?) is totally adorable even without the filters, especially for 46! I think she's done herself a serious disservice by digging in on the "Wook at me, I just a sweet baby foxy woxy!" thing, because where he very likely *wouldn't* have been disappointed before, now he very possibly will be. Sucks, bruh* *bruh = both of them.

So, Dr. Lola was deeeeeefinitely flirting with ol' LB, right?

Oh fantastic! My next step is DHT blocking shampoo that my endocrinologist recommended: https://www.amazon.com/PURA-DOR-Prevention-Premium-Packaging/dp/B0079R6BD2 There's a, like, all-botanical-y version.....? of this same brand that doesn't have the DHT blockers in it, but this one actually has the magic crap that is supposed to treat the follicles rather than just "creating a healthy scalp environment" or whatever. The bullet points on the back label will include "DHT Blocking" in the top item if it's the right stuff.

Ooof, I am hella sorry to hear that. Mine is just vanity but yours is actually related to a real illness. Sending positive, healthy thoughts over to you, friend.

Yuuuuuup. I just lost 60 pounds, and about half of my thick, gorgeous hair. I've been binging on Viviscal and biotin trying to get it to start thickening back up again but nothing is really happening yet and I'm starting to get despondent :(

We did it a weird way--we were long distance for the duration of our "courting" relationship and changed our plan at the very last second. He lived in the UK and I was finishing college in the US, and every school break I'd go there for a few weeks or he'd come over to stay with me. When we decided to get married, he had originally applied for a K1 visa to come to the US, but the process was taking So! Long! and I was all ready to graduate and we still hadn't been approved, so we applied for visa with the UK as well, just in case. We decided we'd make a little race out of it--if the UK came through first, we'd get married here and pick up and move to London, and if the K1 came through first, we'd carry on with the original plan. Well, lo and behold, the UK one got approved almost immediately, so he flew over with his mother, we got married at the courthouse, sent my passport off for my visa processing, and packed up all of my crap and sent it off to London! We lived there together for a few years, so by the time we decided to come back to the US, we were well established as spouses, so it was a piece of cake to get him all set up with his paperwork--and you're probably right, that was probably a huge factor in his staying, because he came over as a spouse, not as a finance. As someone who has been through it as well, though, I'm sure you go through the same annoyances that I do about how the people on this show seem to understand the 90 days as a continued "trying on" period, when that is NOT the intention. The point of the 90 days is to give couples a teeny bit of leeway with wedding planning so they don't have to get straight off the plane and run right down the aisle! It isn't an extended trial to make sure you really want to go through with it, friends; you should have absolutely 500% decided that well before you've filed the paperwork and done all of the interviews and begun the 90 days. The three months is a little wiggle room to allow for things like sleeping off jetlag, getting acclimated to your new home country, final wedding arrangements, etc, before one of the biggest days of your lives. It also gives the couple adequate notice to provide friends and family who may be travelling to attend the wedding; can you imagine if they got their approval and then had a week to get married? That would be insane, just logistically speaking. It makes perfect sense that there is a little time built in before the deadline, but the purpose is being misconstrued by this show. The way these people treat the process--like this is one last chance to feel things out and decide if they want to bail--really rubs me wrong because it just shows a fundamental (and possibly willful) misunderstanding of the way it is intended to work, and their abuse of the system is what made things take so freakin' long for the rest of us who were doing it right. Grumble grumble.

My ex husband is British and we separated not long after we moved back to the US. We remain good friends and he was able to stay because we filed a no-fault divorce (or something to that effect, I forgot what the exact terminology is) and proved that it was a marriage made in good faith with the expectation of full life together when we moved. Maybe it was easier because he wasn't from a typically scammy country, but it does happen and he's still here 7 years later!

I wonder if their shared religious/cultural heritage has something to do with that. They and their families will already "speak the same language" in a lot of ways, more than, say, a Muslim man from Tunisia and a divorced mother of 4 (?) from Ohio. There was probably a lot less "in MY culture..." to have to explain between Loren and Alexi, and even when differences were present, I imagine it was less of an obstacle because the differences were not as foreign and overwhelming as the differences that Nicole and Azan would have encountered, for instance.

Hey, I went to high school with Liberty! I barely knew her as I was two or so years older, but I recognized her right from the "coming up on..." bit before she introduced herself. She, independent of our hometown connection, was one of the loveliest people who has ever been on this show and I wish that everyone was as sweet, knowledgeable, and just *normal* as she was. She's just a pretty, good-natured, regular girl who healed badly from a previous revision surgery, who wasn't trying to be a bikini model or human Barbie but just someone that was trying to get back to her normal life. She seemed like a great patient, and you could tell that she'd done her homework, answering the doctors' little quiz questions with the correct answers--it's so nice to see someone who not only ISN'T undoing an "I got greedy!" boob job but actually has done research, and studied, and who clearly really values the procedure as more than just a way to be "like, totally hottttt!!!!" Sure the disasters and the heartwarming drama cases are fun to watch, but segments like Liberty's are a really nice palate (sorry) cleanser every now and again. More like this, please! :D

So wait, y'all said that this is the season finale, but I thought we were getting a follow-up ep about the twins....? I am going to be super disappointed if we don't see what's going on with them!!

As soon as Chay said "I decided Lola wasn't right for me so I went back to Chay", the mod posted to say that it was totally cool to use Chay as it was her preferred name, because using her preferred nomenclature and pronouns is what was most important. I don't think that is an unreasonable ask ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Ew, really? Good riddance.