When I was thinking about how to launch this blog into outer-cyber-space, I guessed it would be with my birth stories. But then I realised that it all began way before then.
If I’m completely honest I hadn’t thought much about having children when I was younger. I was married just a couple of weeks after my 21st birthday. People told us we were insane to get married so young, but this didn’t bother us one bit.Not long into our marriage there was a wee ‘scare’ and we fell into manic mode. Surely we were too young to be parents!? I didn’t turn out to be pregnant and its interesting to look back and know that, for us, deciding to have kids was not just a passive, automatic thing.
There was a distinct switch from the idea of being pregnant making me panic, to thinking it would be really quite wonderful. I figured it was nothing to do with age, you just know when you were ready. Suddenly I saw Pushchairs everywhere. Where did they all come from because they weren’t there before…?
We had group of close friends around us that had been married a little longer than The Husband and I. Maybe they were part of the switch, bringing the idea to the forefronts of our minds. I remember,we’d been married for one year, and we were sitting on the beach, talking seriously about having a baby. We were excited and petrified in equal measures.
If I do something I like to do it properly. Nothing’s done by half in our home. So when I say we prepared ourselves, I mean we really prepared ourselves. We walked from the beach over to WHSmiths and boought Zita West’s Fertility and Conception book. I didn’t realise how much we didn’t know until we opened that book…! Between our new baby-making encyclopedia and the whole load of resources available online, together we decided what was useful for us and what seemed non-sensical. We knew we lead a pretty healthy lifestyle and so didnt see the need to suddenly become gym bunnies or stock up with oily fish (oily fish is so healthy, but neither of us like it!). The Husband did decide to cut out on caffeine because we read that it caused sperm to become genetically mutated. We didn’t really like the thought of that and thought it wasn’t worth the risk (!) – so he went through the headaches of caffeine-withdrawal to do all he could to make nicely shaped sperm 🙂
We read that it can be very ‘normal’ to take up to a year to conceive. So we were really surprised when, three weeks later, the first pregnancy test we ever took, sitting on our bathroom floor, showed two pink lines…
All Things Momma Bear 