Yes, I do really want to have children, really, I do

I was away with Brownies last night, the only leader for our group - and one girl with a chest infection and asthma kept me awake coughing (I was awake longer than she was!) for almost the whole night. While sitting on her bed at 3am surfing on my PDA I was desperately longing for someone else to take a shift...

Other news from the Spousehold (and I promise not to use that again): we went to the open evening from the private (charity) adoption agency and both of us came away feeling more positive: they did not, like the local authority, seem to totally rule us out because of Mr. Spouse’s age - both of our ages would be taken into account, I am plenty young to be approved for under-5s, and although we might lose out in a “competition” for a child or children because of our age, we could also have something to give that others could not – I suspect my experience would help, but if we were willing to take a sibling group, that would also help a lot.

Under 5s are definitely around, and if you take two siblings at once, it has the advantage that a) they will have each other (with my family’s emphasis on biological kinship, this would be a positive thing, too) and b) the younger one will definitely be quite young, and the older one could be fairly young too as not everyone will take siblings. And Mr. Spouse, after hearing about the adoption process (which sounds a lot like our very intensive marriage preparation weekend, but more drawn out) and that one would have to go through some of it again for a second adoption, seemed to also become more positive about the idea of going for siblings. He is the one feeling the clock ticking on adoption, and doesn’t want to do the whole process once aged Old and then again aged Old Plus 3; he is an only child, sees no problem with having just the one, but is open to the idea of more than one.

I was predictably moist-eyed over Children Who Wait and Be My Parent; these were old issues, but one not so old that I can’t help wondering if one pair would still be in there if we started the process later this year, and also one set was very appealing in a car-crash kind of way, to be honest; six lovely sisters, from the same town where my mother used to do home tuition for children who had been excluded from school, and who my mother no doubt would be able to identify at least by reputation, as it’s one of those kinds of towns.

Mr. Spouse is very keen for me to cancel the IVF open evening. I haven’t yet, unfortunately the one we have booked is the day before my next gynae appointment or I would wait for that to make a decision. The next one we are away, I have cancelled one already, but I guess if we decided to go for it we could just book a (moderately expensive) initial appointment rather than go to the (free) open day, but not have to wait. He is more convinced it would be pointless, I wonder about balanced translocations and PGS. But the former is very rare and the latter doesn’t seem to lower the miscarriage rate to a major degree.

A bit of a long post, but we are going to see the gynae in a couple of weeks’ time, before she’ll refer me to the recurrent miscarriage clinic. I probably have the choice of clinics, one of which seems to have more of an emphasis on clotting problems, as they do more tests, and which is further away, but which does not believe in NK cells, and one of which is closer and is doing a clinical trial on NK cells, but I might not be eligible for the trial anyway being a little overweight and it involving steroids. So that’s a dilemma… the first one has a very good reputation, but the word on the street (or rather, on the babydust-infested but UK-system-oriented message boards) is that the second is pretty friendly and welcoming, too.