This is the diary of Melanie, 40, and Tim who is 39. They have been married for 6 years and despite three IVF attempts have been unable to have children naturally.

Tim and Melanie were approved for adoption for one child up to the age of three in June 2002.

The diary begins after the couple were approved.

Week 1 .... The big wait?

We had our review meeting with Susan this week. It had now been two months since we were approved and she was just coming on a visit to have a chat and catch up with everything.

She came in, sat down and we had a good old chat like we normally do. Then she dropped the bombshell! She told us that although she had said she was only coming for a bit of a review, she had got details of a little boy we might be interested in.

I felt like my heart had stopped. It was the strangest feeling in the world. She also then told us that there was a little girl too, but she hadn't got the details yet but would probably get them next week.

Tim and I were absolutely floored - we just looked at one another and felt completely numb! We didn't know what to say. This was not what we'd expected!

Two days before we'd been talking about a buying a new sofa and doing a bit of re-decorating before Christmas and suddenly everything paled into insignificance!

It was like that moment in the Jaws film when the sheriff sat on the beach and suddenly sees Jaws swimming in the ocean, and the camera zooms in on his face and all the background fades out!

Susan passed over a brown envelope containing the little boy's Form E. She told us to have a read, let her know what we thought, and she'd be in touch the following week about the little girl.

When she went, Tim pounced on the envelope and took charge. "Right" he said, "We're going to sit down and have something to eat and then we'll relax and read this together".

We opened a bottle of wine (for courage!), had something to eat, then sat down. I pulled out the Form E and we read.... and read.... and read. It was difficult - even more than we'd imagined.

Since then we can't stop talking about the contents of that form. It's strange that you hear of backgrounds children come from, but then when you read about it with your own eyes, it really hits home.

We decided that we needed to know more before we went any further, so we told Susan this and she said she would get back to us with the details of the little girl she'd told us about.

Since then that's all we seem to have talked about. We're still really shocked, and are just trying to tell ourselves that this might not happen and not to get too excited about it, but in the back of our minds we're really excited.

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