Two weeks ago, I said goodbye to CCRM. Thanks for the memories — and I meant it, even the hard ones.

Not everything about nearly a decade in that building was dark. I met nurses who made me feel seen on my worst days. I met Rosie, a phlebotomist so skilled she made needles feel like a rumor — and who told me she was manifesting boy/girl twins the whole time she was drawing my blood. Spoiler: it worked. Max and Annie turn seven in April. Most importantly, I met Sara. Dr. Barton to most people, but to Sean and me, she was the woman who stood at our side for almost a decade, helping us carefully, painstakingly, lovingly craft the family of our dreams. We tell fertility patients all day, every day how important the lab is to success rates — so also, thank you, CCRM lab.

Things I will not miss: the shots. (I built an entire business, partially, out of how much I hate the shots.) The financing. The monthly payments that felt like a mortgage on hope — and still carry on. And I will carry in my bones forever — forever — the devastation of miscarrying at a baby shower. The infertility community is the worst club to belong to, but I mean it when I say it has the absolute best members. I won't miss the heartbreak of being in it — but I'll never stop being grateful for the people it gave me. I also wasn't always nice to the phone tree — sorry, bots.

But here's what I'll always have: the quiet thrill of telling anyone about to inject me with something, Don't worry — I've got this. I have three IVF babies. I think it's genuinely cool that Mia spent five years frozen in what looks like a mammoth milk jar before we transferred her. (The day one of her siblings breaks that news to her? A day I am not rushing toward. But all that matters is she's here, in human form, and oh-so-loved.) I'm glad I found a passion in trying to fix a couple small things in an industry that really pissed me off out-of-the-gates — and now feels like my home. I'm glad I've been on TODAY talking about Sean's broken sperm because of how passionately I feel about access to the amazing science that is IVF, in a country where 1 in 6 has infertility.

And above all, those three IVF babies. I love them so fiercely that words actually fail me — and if you know me, words never fail me. Those kiddos are my life. My world. Every single thing I do, I do for them. I watch them with awe every day — even through tantrums, through attitude, through the toddler phase of needing to be held approximately always. Especially when they look adults in the eye, try their hardest, and learn to say "night!" to their big siblings, then waddle-run into their nursery.

We said goodbye to CCRM with fanfare. If you know me, you knew we would.

Four embryos total. Three live births. And one — one last embryo — we kept on ice for years while life kept moving around it.

I try not to think about that last one. But I do. How could I not? What if? What would they be like? What would life look like with them in it? As the CEO of a women's health media platform, I'll be honest with you: we haven't scratched the surface of IVF's aftermath. But aftermath, there is. It lives in the quiet moments.

I always thought I'd do a compassionate transfer — transferring that embryo at a time in my cycle where it simply wouldn't implant. Dissolving into my body. Becoming part of me in a different way. That felt right. That felt beautiful. When I asked Sara about it, she told me none of her patients had ever requested one. That surprised me! But I love being the first at anything — so we started looking at the costs. In a two-entrepreneur household, three growing kids, and an insurance history that has covered exactly zero dollars of anything fertility-related: we couldn't justify it.

So I did the next best thing: I turned to Etsy.

I bought a small silver box engraved with our last name. We hatched a plan: bring our little embryo to Vail — the place that's woven into the fabric of who we are as a family, the place where we got married — and send that silver box down Gore Creek, right behind the church. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. And on a planet that's only 20% land, in bodies that are made up of 60% H₂O — water to water.

And that we did (and I can still hear Kristyn, my IVF bestie, sliding into her Long Island accent — the one that only comes out when she's being funny, which is always — making fun of me for "pitching my box of embryos into the rivah").

The most surprising thing? When we went to pick up the embryo, we learned it wasn't alone. It had been frozen alongside four other non-viable embryos. You know what we said? Tomato, tomahto. Viable, non-viable. They're all in it together. Something about knowing five Mercado embryos were going into that little silver box made the whole thing feel less like a loss and more like a send-off. From the five of us to the five of you.

So here we are, March 2026. Embryo-less. And so, so full.

CCRM, I won't miss you (or my embryo storage bill). But I thank you — sincerely, deeply, with my whole complicated heart — for the memories. And for growing my life until it was bursting at the seams.