I’d like to start off by saying that I haven’t intentionally kept this from you, but from something that was meant to be pretty quick and straightforward things have spiralled and I never knew when was the right time to tell you.

I hope that you’ll see this as the exciting news it’s meant to be, and not a questionable decision that I know some people will think it is.

I initially approached mum and dad with this plan in early 2017, though it had been in the back of my mind for a couple of years before that. Mum and dad have supported me the whole way and loaned me the money and I have used the £10,000 they gave each of us, I have now paid back most of the remaining money.

So when me and Stefan first split up a major consideration for me was always that I wanted Jackson to have a sibling, and one relatively close in age. I always knew finding someone else was going to be hard and even harder with Jackson around, and the longer I was single and the more failed dates and false starts I had the more I knew my chances of having a small age gap were fading, so I started looking at my options. To cut what was a long and very well considered process (in which I briefly considered friends and one night stands) short, I ended up contacting Bourn hall, a fertility clinic who as well as helping couples have children, also help single women.

I initially planned to have IUI where a few drugs are taken to make sure your eggs are ready at the right time and the donor sperm is then put in. 2 weeks later, you test. We naïvely expected it to work first time (November 2017) and I’d tell you all what I had done by announcing I was pregnant. But no. So in January I tried again, no point telling you guys until I was pregnant, after all it would happen this time! No.

Back to discussing with the clinic and we decided that IVF was probably the sensible next step. This was a massive shock cost wise, we had only discussed a maximum of 3 IUIs which was around the £6k mark, one round of IVF on its own was around that!

After a cancelled cycle of IVF in June because my eggs weren’t growing I had another round in September and collected 37 eggs, of which 23 fertilised and 16 made it to blastocyst and have been frozen.

This is currently where we are in this journey and I am looking at having a frozen embryo implanted in December/January. There’s a 50% chance of success and if not then I guess I have 15 more tries…!

I understand this will be a shock to you all, but I’m at a point where I think Jackson would enjoy having a sibling… I know he can be a handful at times and that I struggle sometimes, but most of the time it’s great and I actually think he might benefit from having another child around him at home… and I want to be a mum again… and mum and dad enjoy being grandparents. I also know that if I leave it much longer now then mum and dad perhaps won’t be able to help out with childcare as much as they do, meaning that it might not even be a possibility for me in the future.

Trust me this has been very well thought out and discussed and a lot of tears and sleepless nights over it all.

I haven’t given up on finding a partner, however this almost takes the pressure off finding someone in the near future and making a wrong decision…. again! If someone comes into my life then great, if not then I have a life with everything I want by myself.