Celebrating IVF Milestones: Why Every Step of Your Journey Deserves to Be Marked

The IVF journey is measured in milestones - some enormous, some quietly significant, all of them earned through courage, patience, and hope. In the medical world, these milestones are clinical data points: follicle counts, fertilisation rates, blast rates, beta hCG values. But to the people living them, they are so much more.

This post is a case for celebrating every stage - not just the positive pregnancy test or the live birth, but the retrieval, the fertilisation call, the grading report, the transfer day. Because every step took something from you, and every step forward deserves to be acknowledged.

The Milestones That Matter

Here is a map of the IVF milestones that our community most often wants to mark - and why each one is significant.

Egg Retrieval Day

Egg retrieval is a day that often gets overlooked in the retrospective narrative of an IVF journey, but for the person who lived it - the preparation, the anxiety, the anaesthetic, the recovery - it is a landmark. The number of eggs retrieved becomes its own emotionally weighted figure: a number you will carry for a long time.

• Mark this day with a gentle self-care ritual.
• Have your partner or support person acknowledge what you physically went through.
• Journal the number and your feelings - you will want to remember this.

The Fertilisation Call

When the embryologist calls with the fertilisation report, many people describe it as one of the most emotionally intense phone calls of their lives. For the first time, there are embryos - real, biological beginnings - and the fragility of those early hours is almost unbearable.

Blastocyst Day (Day 5–6)

If fertilised embryos survive to blastocyst stage, they are photographed, graded, and either transferred or frozen. This is the moment from which embryo art is created - the image of your embryo at its most developed laboratory state. Many people receive this image and feel an immediate, profound connection.

Our watercolour embryo paintings are created directly from the blastocyst image provided by your fertility clinic. Each painting is hand-painted and unique, preserving this fleeting image in a form that will last a lifetime.

Transfer Day

Embryo transfer day is sacred territory. The image of an embryo being placed into a uterus - tiny, luminous on the ultrasound screen - is one of the most emotionally charged moments in the entire IVF process. Many clinics provide the transfer image, and it is an image worth preserving.

Consider having your transfer ultrasound image made into a custom ultrasound pendant - a piece of jewellery you can wear through the two-week wait and beyond, whatever the outcome.

Positive Beta - The First Number

A positive beta hCG result is the first confirmation of pregnancy after IVF. It is a moment of extraordinary emotion - joy, disbelief, terror, and sometimes a grief-tinged relief that can be hard to name. This moment deserves to be marked. Not just screenshotted on a phone, but genuinely commemorated.

Why Physical Keepsakes Matter at Each Stage

The IVF journey is lived so largely in medical settings, on phone screens, and in the private rooms of the heart that it can feel unanchored from the physical world. A keepsake - an artwork, a piece of jewellery, a framed print - does something important: it makes the invisible visible. It says: this happened. It was real. It mattered.

→  Explore IVF Milestone Keepsakes & Embryo Artwork →

Whatever milestone you are approaching or have recently passed - you have done something extraordinary. It deserves to be remembered.