Baby bump por Vida

Tiffany and Ana Alvarez-Thurman spent a year trying to get pregnant.

The couple, married in California in 2008, went through three rounds of intrauterine insemination, all unsuccessful.

“We decided to take a break for physical and emotional reasons,” says Tiffany, a teacher.

Once they regrouped, they decided to be more aggressive and go for in vitro fertilization, which is more expensive and invasive than the previous method.

But first, they tried another doctor, who diagnosed a vitamin deficiency in Tiffany and tried the less invasive procedure once more. The very first attempt was successful.

“We were very excited,” Tiffany says.

Once her pregnancy started to show, Tiffany wanted professional photos, “instead of just iPhone pictures,” she says.

They hired their friend and L.O. Daniel neighbor Robert Bittle for the shoot at the Dallas Arboretum.

“It captures how we feel about each other,” Tiffany says of the photo. “The happiness in being able to create this new life I just thought it was a nice little picture of the three of us before she was actually here, and I think we look really happy because we were.”

Their baby was born in October, and they named her Vida, which is Spanish for “life.” Ana, an architect, is from Puerto Rico and a native Spanish-speaker.

Tiffany says the birth of Vida brought her family closer in ways that she hadn’t expected.

“Being gay, I think it was a little bit more difficult for my family than it was for Ana’s,” she says. “But once we began the process of starting a family, it brought everyone together. It brought everyone together, and it made our relationship OK in a way that maybe it hadn’t been thought of before. It felt like it changed things in the eyes of the rest of my family.”