Cindy

 Lucinda or Cindy is my second child. We had moved to Ballarat and I had forecast it was going to take some time to conceive her, just as it had done for her brother.

We went to see the local IVF clinic to ask about artificial insemination again. He was hellbent on me having IVF (probably because it meant more income) and I had to insist that I only wanted low grade fertility treatment.

At the same time I had been reading about a product called PreSeed, which was a sperm friendly lubricant created for couples trying to conceive. I ordered some and it arrived just as I put the vials of hormone in our fridge waiting for the next cycle.

I never needed to use those vials, the PreSeed worked straight away and I knew almost immediately because I had to race out the back door and be violently morning sick in front of a stunned dog.

Lucinda grew inside me while I was working at Mars. Every month my womb measured bigger than I should have been for the stage I was supposed to be in. My GP, a black Englishman, called Dr Plange, kept exclaiming, "Oh you will have gestational diabetes for sure, this baby is huge".

I went and had the two hour fasting test and the results came back negative.

I remember being on the phone to Mum close to term crying, "This baby is going to be enormous!" and Mum telling me, "No, it won't. I was huge with Rebecca and it was all water". 

She was wrong, Lucinda was born 9lb 9ox or 4.35kg and she fed furiously from me and grew into a dimply legged, Michelin like baby. She was also a dream baby. She was a thumbsucker so she self-settled.

She loved feeding from me and I remember the hell I went through to get her to take a bottle so she could stay with Mum while we went to Joe and Jo's "no kids" wedding. She cried blue murder whenever Mark tried to feed her from the bottle. We tried all kinds of teats and eventually she took a Nuk latex teat in her rocker from an arm stretched out from behind it and in front of Spanish movie on SBS for distraction.

She was very late to walk and had a lot of trouble with her speech, so much so, she ended up seeing a speech therapist. "Ch", "Qu", "Th", "Sp", lots of words didn't come out right. My favourite misprounouciation of hers was "Kickely" for "Quickly". She would be playing outside and saying "Kickely, kickely".

She has loved animals from a very early age and can spot all sorts of creatures burrowing into holes in the ground or crawling along fencelines long before an inobservant adult does. I am convinced she will one day work with animals, possibly in animal studies, research or veterinary. We shall see.