La Famille

Our eldest daughter Sophie Elizabeth was born in 2004 - I call her First Sister for the purposes of this blog! Second Sister, Imogen Louise arrived 19 months later. Rebecca Mary, Third Sister, came along in 2010. We are amazingly blessed with these children. Parenting is hard work but a true joy. 

We're not expecting to raise seven sisters like the ones in this book (and we are 'white British', not Chinese) but it's a favourite and I thought I would 'borrow' the naming device.

My husband and I have been a couple since 1996. We married in 2000 when we lived in Medomsley, County Durham, UK, when I was studying for my PhD and my husband worked as a web programmer in the dot.com boom years. In 2002 we relocated back to Nottinghamshire, the area where we grew up, to live and work, and here we still reside. (I probably won't talk much about my husband - we're pretty private about our relationship - but he will appear in the occasional anecdote, probably as 'Daddy'.)

As an aside, I would like to say that we are very family and child-oriented but this has not always been the case. We hoped for children early on in our marriage, but took a while to get pregnant. The interim years seemed like an interminable wait to me, and after fertility tests we decided at the time that if we did not conceive, we would not pursue medical intervention. Shortly after, we became pregnant without medical intervention. (I'm not saying we would not have reconsidered medical attention, but it was not the plan for us think about that.) During those difficult years I began to love and trust in God, and learn that I was experiencing the possibilities he had available for me not possible for me to comprehend faithfulness, humility, servitude and understanding without referring back to the (comparatively short) time I had to wait to have a baby. I know it can happen the other way about for some people whose faith gets shaken at times like these; I am holding too many people, it seems, in prayer because of fertility issues. I've recently been exploring how a number of saints including Saint Anthony can also be petitioned on this topic (I hope to explore this in a later post.)