MY BRAVE LIONHEART

Ria Constable, 22, from Newcastle will always remember her little boy…

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Sneaking down the baby aisle of the supermarket when I was a kid, my mum, Lisa, just laughed.

‘Come on,’ she’d chuckle. ‘Time to go.’

Mum says I’ve been broody from the day I was born.

She’s probably right. Even from a young age, I always knew that I wanted to be a mum when I was older.

I’d picked out my favourite baby names and everything.

‘If I have a boy, I’ll call him Leo,’ I’d say to Mum, when I was a teenager.

‘You’d need to find a fella first,’ she’d laugh.

But that didn’t take me long. I met Aaron playing video games online.

My mum would always moan about me sitting on the Xbox, but it wasn’t a total waste of time.

After chatting online, we started to meet up and it wasn’t long before I moved from Blackpool to Newcastle to be with him.

By the time I was 19, we were both desperate to start a family.

I know a lot of people would say we were far too young, but Mum had me at 21.

Broodiness ran in our family genes!

After a year of trying, sadly I still wasn’t pregnant.

We were both young and healthy, it didn’t make any sense.

I started tracking my ovulation cycle closely, but by 2018, three years had gone by and my monthly pregnancy tests were all negative.

‘You could try IVF,’ our doctor suggested to us.

It was our last hope.

In November 2018, we started the treatment.

While all my 21-year old mates were in uni or starting their careers, I was trying everything I could to be a mum.

After having the embryo placed into my uterus, we had to wait two weeks to see if it would take.

But neither of us could wait long enough.

‘Let’s do a test,’ I said to Aaron nervously.

We grabbed a handful of pregnancy tests and lined them all up on the side of the bath.