Hello!

My name is Ash, welcome to my blog. I’m so glad that you found me here!

I suppose you would like to know a bit about me.

Well for starters I am really good at procrastinating. I’ve been putting things off for years and I’ve really got it down to a fine art.

One of the things I’ve been procrastinating is starting a blog. As an avid blog reader myself, I can see how much inspiration and enjoyment all the web authors out there have brought me over the years, and I have yearned to contribute to the blogging world myself.

I toyed with the idea for many years, daydreaming about all the things I would write about in my imaginary blog. I am creative and love anything design related. I’m also very interested in alternative therapies and healing the body with food. I love making things and I’m actually an amateur potter, I hope to be a very good potter one day.

In the end, it wasn’t any of these passions that prompted this blog. It was something bigger, something that I never thought would happen to me and by far the most difficult journey I’ve experienced.

It was infertility (unexplained infertility to be precise).

My partner Scott and I have been trying to have a baby for over 5 years now. I am 31 and he is 37.

Infertility is worse than I could have ever imagined. It chips away and changes you over time. It makes you doubt yourself, slowly eating away at your relationship with your own body and your self esteem. Every pregnancy announcement makes you envy others like crazy. You feel alone and desperate. It can break you at times, with full blown grief. It is incredibly frustrating and upsetting for both you and your partner.

After much consideration and years of trying every piece of random advice thrown at us we decided that 2016 will be the year that we throw everything at. We decided to do IVF and commenced our cycle in February 2016. I decided to document it here.

Through my fertility journey so far, I have found it really helpful reading about other women’s experiences. Knowing that I am not alone has given me hope, and knowing that there are so many women out there with tragic stories has reminded me that I am actually luckier than most.

I aim for my writing to be kept raw and as honest as possible. I hope to throw in some humour and a huge dose of positivity (hence the title) to survive this wild ride. If this blog manages to give just one reader hope, then my work here is done.

I thought 2016 would be our year, but I was wrong.

2016 was the hardest year of my life.

We did three disastrous IVF cycles and they nearly broke us.

2017 was a year of rebuilding everything that IVF had taken from us; finances, emotional strength, physical health and hope.

But I have found that hope again, and even if it is reduced to a slither, it is still there.

Maybe 2018 will be our year, the year of fist pumps in the air, happy dancing, tears of joy.

To all my IVF sisters out there, hang in there with me – We got this!