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I don't think we could take more heartache that this damn disease has caused, so we might as well know up front before we start. I think there is a realistic chance you can adopt, even a baby, but you have to pay a lot of attention when speaking to a sw to use the 'right language'. 'When my husband first was diagnosed it was an huge blow, but we got used of the situation and we learned a lot about ourselves'. Than you find positives, how you learned to be more patient, how you learned to accept the situation, how this helps you to understand the losses the children have suffered, what you can do instead of can't. Giving the impression that your world will dissolve if you can not adopt or that you lost so much might not give the social worker the right impression. Yes love is important but not as important as commitment, going on when things are difficut, when the child rejects you, when life throws up mountains. If you can show how you manage and worked through disappointment, came out stronger on the other side, than this sets you up to be understanding adopters. Not needy adopters who want a child to fill up the hole of emptyness and loss. The children are very needy, most have special needs and parenting them can be challenging, love alone is far from enough. Read what you can about adoption in the uk, so you are prepaired and sort of know what they are looking for. The fact that your husband has ms will not exclude per sé, there are adopters out there with ms. But you need to be strong as in the worst case you might become the main carer for your child and your husband. This stuff you need to be able to discuss, it's much easier if you know what to expect and prepaire for it. If you are ready just take the step and make that phone call, go to an information evening and find out or adoption is the path you want to take, good luck!

Not much is an out and out impediment to adoption. Like Pluto says, often it's how you portray things. If you come across as still grieving for the loss of the life you expected when you were just starting out in life, then that will be a huge problem. If you can show that you have taken everything on board and learned valuable lessons from it then that's a completely different scenario. SWs are not looking for perfect parents - they are looking for resilient people who can parent traumatised children. You mention babies - it is difficult but not impossible to be matched with a baby but usually social workers are happier to take on people who are more flexible in terms of the type of child they will consider. So it is usually better to express an interest up front in say pre school age children and then firm up on actual age later on. But I would say to read up about the sorts of children available for adoption in this country. Babies have often been born addicted to drugs or may have foetal alcohol syndrome. Adopting a child from the care system is not the same as having your own child in lots of different ways. The only way to get a new born baby btw realistically is to foster with a view to adopt - it takes a long time for babies to go through the system to be approved for adoption so you might want to look into that too. Good luck

Thank you so much for your advice, as you both quite rightly pointed out, emotionally we are not quite ready to take any next steps. We need to grieve and get over the self pity but just really wanted to find out if it's potentially open to us in the future.. I don't underestimate the support, understanding and practicalities a child will need and love alone won't cut it. A lot of discussion and research still needs to be had if if we are not 100% then it wouldn't be fair on any child. Thank you again for taking the time, I'm sure I Will be back on! xx

You might like to consider counselling if you haven't already - not only will it help you come to terms with your present situation and consider whether adoption is right for you but it will be seen in a very positive light by SW s when you are ready to start

Totally agree about counselling. I did that - it was really helpful. xx

Thank you, this is probably something we need. I will look into this xx