How did you arrive at a decision to have a baby?

[Lizita]

Might sound like an odd question, but my dd was a complete accident and I had never intended to have children either. (So glad it happened now though, of course )

I can't imagine having the courage to decide to have a baby. Even now I've already got one, I can't imagine it, I just can't imagine wanting to go through it all again, for starters! Plus, none of my close friends have children or plan to have them in the near future, they all seem to be hanging for dear life onto their freedom, jobs etc etc, not to mention relationships!!

when planning your first baby, did you have a rosy view of what it would be like (and I'm talking about pregnancy/labour/first few months now - that in itself was enough to put me off, before I got pregnant!)?
Trying to think of other questions to clarify what I mean but I can't, just let me know how you arrived at the decision and how you overcame any trepidation ...

we didn't - we just lost the rhythm

I think like most I always thought I would have children.
After dh and I got engaged I became really broody and stupidly (well, maybe not!) I discovered those baby programmes on Discovery Health. I was hooked and it made my broodiness worse!

To top it all off I ended up working in a Mothercare store for a while which completly finished me off and after that I was desperate to have a baby!

Having said all that dd wasn't planned but we weren't preventing it IYKWIM. Needless to say we were shocked but very very happy.
Before conceiving I must have worn red tinted or almost blacked out glasses, never mind rose tinted. I saw myself as a glowing, glamourous pregnant mummy who would be able to anything and everything not a pale, ill mummy who could barely walk and lived in smelly tracksuit pants for 9 months.

But looking back I cherised every minute of the pregnancy and early days with dd as I know I can never ever get that back.

I think I was about 13 when I knew I always wanted children. In some ways, I guess that's why I've ended up with a H, rather than a dh, but my girls are my life.

I think I'm a bit unusual here. I have definitely made a conscious decision to have children.

All my time growing up and through my twenties, I didn't want kids. Not just didn't want them but couldn't stand them. I didn't know how to interact with kids, couldn't bear to be near a screaming baby, was very very anti.

DH always wanted kids, and from watching him with them I could tell he would make an excellent father.

People told me that my hormones would kick in at 30, and I'd start wanting kids. 30 came and went, and I still didn't want them.

But then some of our close friends started having kids, and I started spending more time around pregnant women and young babies. I found it hard at first, but I gradually learnt how to interact with children. And they gradually started to not be so scary.

At the start of this year, I sat down with DH and had a long chat. He said that we should not have our own kids unless both of us wanted them, which I agreed with. But I said we should be sure to do our research, and make sure that the decision to not have kids was the right one for us, rather than it just being the default choice. So we've been really making the effort to see our friends with young kids more and more.

Then in May this year DH's father died. Watching the way the family came together to look after my Mother-in-Law (DH has one sister) made me really value the family a whole lot more, and I changed from "I could probably live with having children" to "I actually would quite like them".

So I've bought some of the books, I've done a load of research on the web. I hate hospitals and pain, but I don't think I'm going in to this with rose-tinted spectacles at all. With my best friend due to have her first in a couple of weeks time, and my sister in law due before Christmas I'm getting a lot of exposure to the good and bad things about pregnancy, and I'll shortly be learning a whole lot more about small babies too...

Now I'm just hoping that our fertility is OK, and we haven't left it too late to start our family.

Hugs to all,
Artoo.

i fell pregnant by accident but we decided to keep it

I had a whole year where every fibre of my being wanted a child. Once dh agreed we got onto it and ds was conceived immediately.

Half way through my pregnancy I started to wonder what on earth I was doing, and had to remind myself that if I hadn't got pregnant I would still be walking around yearning for a child.