Starting tomorrow, Adoption-net will be carrying a weekly account of what it is like to go through the adoption process by publishing the diary of a would-be adopter. Here, the writer Ann introduces herself and her husband and tells how and why they are pursuing adoption in the hope of ending their 17-year quest to become parents.

Hello, my name is Ann and my husband is Rob. We have been married since 1983, and from day one, we have been trying to have a family.

I have always had a problem with my ovaries: they have never produced eggs. We have had every test that was invented done to us, also I have taken every kind of medication offered.

In the end, there was no more medication the doctors could give us. So we had to accept that. We did try to, for four long years we tried, but it was always there, at the back of our minds.

So, at the time, we thought adoption was the way forward for us.

But after making initial enquiries, we decided we were doing it for the wrong reasons, we still had options open to us.

There was one thing we had not tried, and that was IVF treatment. But, I knew that without an egg donor, that was beyond our reach.

That was until my best friend offered to donate her eggs. She asked us. I would never have dreamed of asking her, it was a far too personal thing for me to ask anyone.

Anyway, we accepted and we had our IVF. The first cycle worked - I got pregnant with twins.

But, at seven weeks, I lost our longed-for babies. We tried again and again I got pregnant. But the same thing happened. We lost the baby after seven weeks.

We did not want to try any more IVF. It was to painful to go through it again. But, as any infertile woman will say, you have to try ever single thing before you decide you can go no futher.

So, we decided to use the frozen embryos that were in storage. We had two more cycles but they both failed.

It was then the doctors told us that was the end, there was nothing they could now do to help us have a family.

We were devastated. It took along time to accept it. I have since learnt that you do not get over being childless, (it is not like a cough, it does not get better). You do learn to accept it, deal with it, and get on with your life the best you can. And this is what we did.

That was in 1997. We have now 'moved on'. Hard as it may be, we had to otherwise infertility wins, and there was no way I was going to let it win.

It had beat us into the ground for 17 years, and now it was our turn, We were in charge, and we had our whole lives to live, and we owed it to ourselves to make the most of it.

As I mentioned before, we had always wanted to adopt, but knew we had to take 'time out' for ourselves before we came to a decision about adoption, we had to do it when the time was right and for the right reasons.

So we waited until now before we made our application to be adoptive parents.

The following diary will be my account, week by week, of everything we will experience in an effort to make our dream come true. To become parents. To become a family. To be complete.

See also:

Week 1 - The social worker is coming