Welcome to my world!

So where do I start? When I was thinking about doing a blog, I wasn't sure whether to focus on adoption or autism - they're both such an integral part of our lives. But then I realised that any blog that was to truly represent who we are as a family has to include both - for they are equally responsible for shaping our family and have brought us into contact with some truly remarkable people, none of whom we would have met if we hadn't travelled on these paths.

When Mr Taz and I got married, we had our future all mapped out - our "plan" as we called it. We would enjoy married life for a year or so, babies would follow and life would be rosy! Well, they say that man plans and God laughs, and that certainly seemed to be the case for us! When it became clear, that having babies wasn't going to be as straightforward as we had anticipated, we very early on decided that we would rather go down the adoption route than try IVF. My body had had 2 years of fertility drugs, I was exhausted and stressed, and it just seemed that with adoption we would have a guarantee of a healthy, happy baby.

Much has been written about the gruelling nature of the adoption process, but other than the time it took, we found the whole experience very positive. Never having been one who was reluctant to talk about myself, I took to it like a duck to water - yes, of course, there were a few intrusive, personal questions, but to Mr Taz and I it was like free therapy! We decided that our future son or daughter would come from Thailand, a country that has well established procedures for inter-country adoptions, and the wait began.

After a year or so of waiting we started phoning Bangkok every 6 weeks to see if there was any news. This would involve me laying awake all night imagining all sorts of outcomes, then phoning at about 4 am. Invariably our lovely Thai Social Worker would say "Soon, soon. Baby soon" Until one morning, she said the words I had waited 4 years to hear - "You have been matched with baby boy". I was simply gobsmacked. I asked how old he was and she said "he is under 2 - oh no, under 1" To get a baby so young was nearly unheard of in Thai adoptions - all our prayers had been answered. I was a Mommy.

About 2 weeks later we were called into the Adoption Board to collect a photo of our son. Obviously, I'm completely biased, but he really was the most beautiful baby i had ever seen - he had these huge brown eyes and his little fists were clenched as if he was a prize fighter (a sign of things to come maybe?) We could hardly contain our excitement, our son was coming home.