Having children is hard. But it’s made even harder when that child is not biological. When I was 24 years old I married my husband. We decided we wanted kids and started trying at 25 and got pregnant really quickly with our first son. When my husband and I discussed kids we decided that we would stop having kids when we got one of each. When our son was 2 years old we decided to try for another, again it happened really quickly and we had another healthy baby boy. However when my eldest son was 3 and our younger boy was 1 we started trying for a third baby…this time it didn’t happen as we hoped and we struggled to conceive for a year. We spoke to our doctor and he said that because we were both young and healthy (I was 29 and my husband was 30) it was entirely possible for me to get pregnant again but it may take a while if it even happens at all. Eventually our sons were 5 and 3 and we still didn’t have the little girl we were dreaming of. And so we started looking into adoption. Eventually we went all the way to France where we fell in love with the most gorgeous 2 year old girl we had ever laid eyes on. She had little freckles dotted across her nose which reminded me of myself, she also had a LOT of curly black hair that would go on to cause me a lot of annoyance when doing her hair every morning before school but the thing that sucked me in…her eyes, they were the most mesmerising shade of blue that our other two children didn’t possess as I have very dark brown eyes. She wasn’t too happy about the adoption as we were ripping her away from the people, country and language she had been surrounded by for the last 2 years. We took her on the plane back to London and it was HELL she screamed, cried, wiggled relentlessly and I even had to show a woman the adoption papers to prove that we weren’t kidnapping her, which looking back I understand as I had brown straight hair and my husband had blonde straight hair. It didn’t get a lot better as we got home because her brothers didn’t understand or speak french at all and neither did my husband and my french abilities only amounted to a D in school. The tantrums continued and she would push the boys when they came near her and there were times I just though “my god! What have I done?!” But we carry on, we adored being a family of 5, our daughter Claudette eventually learned English, our two boys and I speak it fluently but my husband still struggles. She still knows french and we’re so glad because it was so important to us. She went on to do amazing things with her life and career and is even a foster mother now. We still love our cheeky, blue eyed, wild haired little girl just as much as our boys and all our kids love eachother and have a great bond: our eldest is now 27, our youngest is now 25 and Claudette is 24. I did regret it at first but I wouldn’t change a single thing about my story.