As promised here is Part 2 to the Love Story we brought you last week detailing their engagement. Now we bring you their gorgeous wedding, beautiful honeymoon.. and very exciting additions to that family... Yes I said plural!!
Love Stories ♥ Laura & Laura Part 2
The Wedding
Straight away we started planning the
wedding. We chose and booked our venue
within a couple of weeks. We had drawn
up our guest list and realised that our priorities actually included a rather
large guest list. This meant that we had
to deal with a rather large projected budget.
We took a deep breath and worked out how much we could afford to
save. I went spreadsheet mad, but that
meant that we had a clear idea of what we had already saved, what we could
continue to save, deposits we had already paid, and balances yet to come. I highly recommend using a spreadsheet or
budget planner when it comes to thinking about costs for your wedding as it
really helped us a lot.
We spent each of the school holidays
crossing different wedding related jobs off a checklist. We bought our dresses, booked a florist,
picked a photographer… we were pretty
busy, but it was all fun and we agreed on everything from the colour scheme to
the table names (famous lesbians – we like to educate as well as entertain our
guests!).
Sadly, that summer, Heston died at only
just over a year old. We got Rocky
fairly soon afterwards, from a different breeder, as we felt we needed to get
another friend for Hercules – he was so lost after Heston died.
However, when we then told Heston’s breeder
what had happened – feeling we should let her know in case whatever caused
Heston’s early death affected the other kittens from the litter – she
immediately offered us a free replacement.
We could hardly say no, even though three cats was utter madness!
So we got Barney.
Our house was crazy, but – for the time
being at least – our little family was complete. We continued planning the wedding and then,
that winter, decided to make some enquiries into IVF.
We have a friend who had tried to get
pregnant for years, using different clinics and different donors and spending
thousands of pounds. In the end, she
decided on IVF and got pregnant first time.
Because I was almost 30, we thought that we would rather pay out a few
grand on IVF and have a better chance of conceiving than try insemination and
potentially spend the same amount to have much worse odds.
Still, we didn’t know all the ins and the
outs – although having our friend’s experience to go on was really helpful – so
we called up the Assisted Conception Unit at Guy’s Hospital in London and made
some enquiries. We knew we didn’t want
to try to have a baby before the wedding – which was still 8 months away, but
we did want to be able to get on with it as soon as we were married, so we
thought it was best we checked everything out early in case there was a waiting
list.
The meeting we had with a doctor at Guy’s
was really useful and we got ourselves on their books, without having to worry
about really doing anything until we were back from honeymoon.
We both turned 30 in 2011 and we had our
hen night.
We had many debates about what to do for
the hen night. We wanted to have a joint
one mostly because through working together we have a lot of the same
friends. We didn’t want to make our
friends have to pay out twice for separate nights out – plus we didn’t want
that awkwardness of one hen night being much more fun than the other!
We went for a cocktail making session in
Soho, which I can highly recommend. My
wife-to-be was on some fairly strong painkillers at the time, which meant that,
unfortunately, she was on the floor (literally) by 8pm and had to be taken home
by one of our bridesmaids. But I stayed
out and had a wicked time with my girlies.
Before we knew it, our wedding day had
come. It was so amazing and literally
the best day of both our lives. I won’t
clog this page up with too many pictures, but if you want to see more photos of
our wedding day, you can do so on my blog or on my Flickr page
The day was perfect from beginning to
end. As I stood by the gazebo where we
were to have our ceremony and watched Laura walk down the aisle towards me, I
couldn’t help but get choked up – she looked so beautiful.
Our venue was amazing too. I had wondered at the wisdom of booking an
outdoor ceremony, but the sun came out and our photographer discovered some
fabulous locations for photos out behind the hotel that we’d had no idea were
there!
We had a brilliant time, but we knew we
would, after all, we were each marrying our best friend. Even better, all our guests had a brilliant
time and really enjoyed themselves, which was what we’d hoped for.
After the wedding, we had a couple of days
to relive the day and get ourselves ready before we jetted off on our honeymoon
to Mexico. We had booked ourselves two
weeks all-inclusive and it was SO worth it!
We basically spent our days lazing by the pool, drinking (free)
cocktails and our evenings eating in the many restaurants and… er… drinking
more (free) cocktails!
It was the holiday of a lifetime and we
were treated just the same as all the other honeymooning couples. We had rose petals scattered on our bed,
champagne in our room on arrival, a free massage in the spa and a romantic
dinner on the beach. It was such a
wonderful experience.
Once we were back from honeymoon, we knew
we wanted to get straight on with trying to have a baby. It may seem crazy that we didn’t want to
enjoy married life first, but we’d already been living together for two years,
so fundamentally nothing had changed and we just wanted our family to feel
complete.
We had some appointments at Guy’s Hospital
and I started taking the hormone medication that would first stop my periods
and then stimulate my body to produce lots of eggs.
This all went pretty well – and
surprisingly I didn’t turn into a crazy hormone-monster – and on the 8th
November I had 21 eggs collected from my ovaries! Of those 21 eggs, 15 were fertilised and only
two went on to thrive, so after 5 days, we had both put back in. We knew this would create a risk of having
twins, but having spent close to £8,000 on the whole thing, we decided that two
babies was better than no babies and we would rather increase our chances by having
both put back in. Plus, our donor hadn’t
given consent for any fertilised embryos to be frozen, so they would have just
thrown the other one away if we hadn’t decided to risk it.
Shortly after this, I became very ill. The hormones that cause you to produce extra
eggs can actually cause your ovaries to be hyper-stimulated – and that’s what
happened to me. I was really bloated,
which caused me to throw up and feel dizzy and I could barely walk because of
the pain in my swollen belly. The staff
at Guy’s decided to admit me to the ward at St Thomas’ (their sister hospital)
and I spent eight days in there having fluid drained out of my stomach (yuck!).
Whilst I was there I had to have regular
blood tests and one of the things they checked was my level of hCG (the hormone
used to stimulate my ovaries; also the hormone your body produces when you are
pregnant). The doctors were able to
confirm that I had hCG in my blood, which meant I was pregnant – however, I was
too ill to really take this in and didn’t really believe it until I got home and
peed on a stick.
A couple of weeks later we went back to
Guy’s so they could check how my ovaries were doing and also to check the
pregnancy.
The first thing the doctor was able to
identify was the fact there were TWO amniotic sacs – we were having twins! (You
can just about make out one of the babies in the picture – it’s the little
shrimpy thing in the top of the left-hand black blob!)
I’m now almost 19 weeks pregnant and we’re
trying to move out of our second floor flat into a proper family home with a
garden and everything. The twins are
growing and growing and I’m starting to feel very subtle movement in my
belly. Our 20-week scan is still a week
and half away, but here is what the twins looked like at 13 weeks:
Obviously having twins is going to be a
major upheaval – not to mention the extra cost (how ironic that our wedding was
extra expensive because we had two brides, and now we are going to have to buy
double everything baby-related for the twins!) – but we are so, so, SO excited
to meet our children. We have decided
not to find out the sexes of the babies so it will be an extra surprise on the
day.
They are due in early July (my official due
date is 31/7/12, but twins usually come at 37 or 38 weeks instead of the full
40) and before then we have to move house and buy a whole load of baby stuff,
but it’s all part of the next chapter of our lives together and we really just
can’t wait!