Meet Tal & Tal

Location: Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel

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Hi there!

We’re Tal & Tal. Yeah we have the same first name – easy 🙂

We’re from Israel, currently living in Tel-Aviv. We met in May 2018 after chatting a bit on one of the dating apps, and once we met – it was a match right from the start and we’ve been together ever since.

One of the first things we did together, only 2 months after we’ve met was go on a 10-day hike in the French Alps. Big Tal (that’s how we tell ourselves apart since we have the same name haha) loves hiking and outdoors, and Little Tal agreed although he never went for more than a day hike. But it just felt right, he went along and it was a greaaaaaat adventure. We went on a few more hiking trips since then, and Little Tal is now a fellow mountain lover (as long as the climate is nice and cool).

Big Tal also discovered new hobbies like baking and cooking which we now love to do together. We also love going out to the theatre (musicals!), watching Disney movies (yeah!) and even doing grocery shopping. It’s fun.

Big Tal met Little Tal’s family almost right from the start – 6 months after we met Tal’s brother got married, so that was the time to do it. Little Tal has an older brother, and he now has 2 kids. We met Big Tal’s family about 6 months later. Big Tal is the oldest of 5 children, and three of them already have kids. By now that we’ve celebrated 6 wonderful years together – both families have become an integral part of each other’s lives. We meet almost every week and do holiday dinners and picnics together. Naturally both our families are aware of our surrogacy journey and eager for new nephews 🙂 So we have a strong loving support system to help us raise our family. Hey, Little Tal’s mom is even a kindergarten teacher – could you ask for more…

A little bit about our journey – we started talking about having kids since our first date. Seriously 🙂 We felt we were ready to start in January 2021, about 2.5 years into our relationship. We did a lot of research and decided on Canada because of a few factors – the fact that surrogacy is altruistic there, the fact that the process is very well regulated and that the medical insurance and services in Canada are of the highest standard. We had to go with an international journey because at the time, surrogacy for gay couples in Israel was not an option yet. Amazingly, it only passed legislation in 2022 when we had already begun our journey. This is unfortunately a sad thing about Israel – it’s a highly Western country with a high standard of living and gay couples are accepted without issues, but we are a bit behind on LGBQ legislation because of a high number of religious conservative people that live here. Anyway, even now that it’s possible to do this at home, we’ve decided to continue our journey in Canada as we feel more comfortable doing this in a country where the process is well-established and regulated.
We created our embryos in 2021, at the Create Fertility clinic in Toronto and we now have 7 of them, PGS/PGD tested, waiting for our surrogate fairy to come along and help us complete the journey.

We KNOW we’ll make great parents. Both of us love kids, love playing and being playful, learning, exploring and laughing. We also fortunately share core values about raising kids – letting them be themselves and not what we “want them” to be, but still provide them with good values, kindness, good education and a loving family. While we’re waiting for a match (we’ve been on the list for 2.5 years now…) we’re already practicing these values on our nephews and enjoying every minute of it. We also stocked up on children’s books, got an infant seat for our car so we can drive them around and got very good at climbing up and down stuff at children’s playgrounds. Every time we come back from an activity with one of our nephews, we are filled with joy but also with this feeling of “when will we finally have one of our own…”. I (Big Tal writing here..) think that Little Tal’s destiny is to open a kindergarten one day, he is so good with kids. I’m sure it’s something he inherited from his mom.

A little bit more about us – Little Tal is a chemical engineer and works as a consultant in the field of environmental impact management for organizations and local councils. His favorite hobbies include art, sewing, baking and cooking (he is VERY good at this), theatre, music, Disney classics and exploring cities around the world (especially their supermarkets!). Big Tal is a software engineer and works for a cloud security company. He’s a big outdoors fan and loves hiking, camping, kayaking (he’s even a volunteer guide in a local kayak outfit) and mountain biking. It’s funny because writing this it seems we love totally different things but we get along really well and even partake in each other’s activities and have fun.

Regarding how we envision our journey together with our surrogate – we believe that first we need to have good chemistry and a good connection. We know these journeys are not easy especially internationally, so having good open honest communication is a key thing for us. We are thinking of something like setting up a WhatsApp group and sharing updates on how things are going. We don’t have a “required” frequency in mind (many agencies ask if we would like daily/weekly communication etc) – we think we’ll eventually end up chatting more when important milestones are coming (for example around the transfer, major checkups, around birth) and maybe a little less frequently in other times (maybe just some photos from a Friday night dinner, asking how everyone is doing, etc). We definitely plan on coming to Canada physically at least once, maybe for one of the ultrasound checks, and obviously for the birth (we’ll spend around 1-2 months in Canada then). After birth, we think we’ll be updating more frequently in the beginning – photos of how they are settling in, growing up, introducing them to their new extended families, etc… And as they grow up perhaps a little less frequently – birthdays, holidays, etc. We do hope to keep in touch, but we totally accept it if our surrogate prefers not to. We’d also love to get updates from our surrogate on how she is doing, good stuff (“just felt them kick”) and bad (“ooh major backache today”). Essentially as you can see we are very flexible about communications and we believe we need to adapt to what works out best for our surrogate. We are a very chilled and easy couple 🙂 We’ll definitely want our child to know, when they are old enough to understand, how they came to this world and who helped make it happen.

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