Amelia’s Conception!

Rebecca Roskell-Thomas - 10 Feb 17

Most people we meet ask us the question ‘So how did you do it?’ or ‘Did you go to a clinic?’.  I’m sure if you are reading this blog you will be curious about how we went about it so I’ll explain the process we went through.

Before Kelly and I got together officially, we talked about children.  Kelly never thought she would be a parent and I had always seen myself with children.  Kelly was worried how having two mums would impact a child but we talked a lot about it and realised that it is more common now and we would give our child the tools to be able to deal with any negativity they face.  I had always wanted to carry a child and experience birth (god knows why!) and Kelly was the opposite so we decided I would be the birth mother.

We did some research, and more research, and more research…it was a mine field!  We found out that in order for both of us to be on our child’s birth certificate we had to be married before conception if we did it ourselves.  If we conceived via a clinic we didn’t have to be married.  This sped up our wedding as we didn’t want to wait much longer and our plan was to try it at home first as it doesn’t cost, apart from the equipment.

Kelly and I decided we would like to know the donor.  We wanted to know about the person that would be giving our child half of their DNA.  We started to look for donors online.  We signed up to multiple sites and started messaging donors that we liked the profiles of. There was a common issue with these sites.  Most of the donors wanted to remain anonymous.  They wanted paying for their donation plus travel costs.  This isn’t what we wanted so the search continued.

Eventually we found one we liked and started chatting to him regularly.  I thought it would be a good idea to meet in person to talk over how we all wanted this to work and arranged to meet in Birmingham.  We traveled down and waited for him to arrive.  We waited some more, and some more but he never showed up.  He ignored all of my messages and calls.  It was so disheartening and we were both pretty angry and upset.

When we got home I carried on searching but I then didn’t trust anyone and had no enthusiasm to keep looking.  Our friend came to visit us for the day and we were explaining all of this to him and he asked us if we would use him.  We couldn’t believe what he was offering to do for us.  We talked about it over the new few weeks, we wanted the same things out of it so decided to accept his very kind offer.  Our friend got the ball rolling quickly and went for an STI, HIV and sperm count test which all came back clear.  We decided we would start trying in January after our wedding.

After doing some research we decided what equipment we wanted to use.  We bought some sample pots, some 10ml syringes, preseed lubricant and softcups.  I had been tracking my cycle for months and I was very regular so I knew the ideal time to try.  In January we were ready to try and then I ovulated early which was really odd.  We gave it a go anyway but I knew it wasn’t going to work.  In February I tracked my ovulation closely and on February 14th 2015 we conceived!  It was possibly the most unromantic Valentines ever!

I don’t want to go into too much detail on here in case anyone young reads it but if you want more information about what we actually did get in touch.

Rebecca Roskell-Thomas

We have set up this blog to document our lives as a lesbian family. Here you will find diary style entries about what we all get up to as a family of three! You can look back at our life before Amelia on this blog including getting together, our engagement, our Icelandic wedding and getting pregnant.

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