About Us

This is a fairly new blog (started in July 2013) although posts go back to the start of our adoption process and trace the journey from there. All started with a visit to the LA information evening in Dec 2011. I have back-posted a fair amount from my private blog but not everything as there is some stuff in there I do not want in a public environment. Anyway I am hoping to keep posting as we move through the process using the Adoption  Social Weekly Adoption Shoutout as an impetus if nothing else. All about approval process in earlier posts but we were approved for one boy aged 0 - 3 on 29th July 2013. Now changed to talking about linking & matching. Blogs will probably be mainly written by me (rh) but my husband may contribute from time to time.

A little about us: I am a late 30-something university lecturer in electronic engineering married to T who is a community pharmacist. Following fertility investigations we were basically told that all the health service could do for us was IVF, so we decided to go down the adoption route that had always been at the back of our minds since we got married in 2007.

I was diagnosed with endometriosis in my 20s (before we met) following years of severe debilitating period pain. I am apparently one of the unlucky women with only a small number of spots of endometrial growth outside my womb, but who gets severe pain because of it. It got to the stage of not being able to work for at least 1 day every 24 days. I was successfully treated first time with forced menopause (via Gonadotropin releasing hormone - Lupron), but the second time they tried this in 2006 I ended up with really bad issues - particularly classic migraines (with aura) where I am a common migraine (without aura) sufferer. So it was decided that I now react badly to hormone medication, hence one of the reasons we did not go near IVF (there are others as well). These days I have found Cerazette (mini-pill variant where side effect is amenorrhoea) a live-saver as I no longer get the painful periods or mid-cycle pain. However I was told at 26 that the likelihood of me being able to have children after 30 would most likely decrease rapidly.

We met in 2006 via mutual friends - although we had been on the opposite side of the same circle of friends since 2000. He knew about my endo from early on as I felt it was only fair to tell him. So adoption has always been there in our relationship as an option for becoming parents. We waited for a few years before trying as T was still fairly young (he is 5 years younger than me) plus I had undiagnosed mild sleep apnoea & hypothyroidism which combined caused me to be extremely tired all the time. These days everything is well controlled and my occurrence of migraines is down from 1/2 a week to 1 every 2/3 months which is a side bonus of all the medical stuff that has happened.

There will be no recognisable photos of myself, T or our future son posted as I am paranoid about security - partly because of our jobs. However as I mainly take photos of inanimate things there will be pictures posted - and at times non-recognisable pictures of us.