On your bike #MicroblogMonday

If you live in Germany, you really have to get yourself a bike. I bought one in Penny, a discount supermarket, shortly after arriving here. It was a city bike and lasted for about five years until it started causing problems - gears not working properly and then the pedals looking like they might fall off!

When I brought it to the bike shop to fix, they said it would cost about 150€ to fix all the various things wrong with it and it just wasn't worth repairing since second hand it would probably only cost 50€ to buy.

So I decided it was time for a new bike. That decision was more complicated than I realised. Do I want a rally, mountain or city bike? How many gears? What size frame? And then whether I should buy it from a discount supermarket again or go to a fancy bike shop this time and spend more money on it. The general consensus among my German friends is that you should spend at least 800€ to get a decent bike. However then you also have to worry that it might get stolen so you also need to fork out for an expensive lock or two and probably invest in bike insurance as well.

In the end I decided to go for another discount bike from a department store and found a nice one for under 300€. The deciding factor? I loved the colour, as you can see it's bright orange. At least if it does get stolen, it will be easy to spot!

Irish blog Awards - the voting begins

This year I've made the shortlist in the Irish blog awards in the Irish disapora category. That's the only category that's open to me actually as for everything else you have to be resident in Ireland. I was excited when I found out that I've made it one step further than last year!

I'm delighted to have just gotten this far but if you have a moment and would like to vote for me, click here. The vote is open until September the 21st.

If you've just come to my blog for the first time from the Irish Blog Awards website, then welcome! Relax, pour yourself a cuppa and stay for awhile.

Where the bleep is my stork?!

Every so often facebook shows you memories from that particular day in the past. Recently it showed me a picture of the GerMann and me on our honeymoon. It made me feel sad to think that two years later we are gearing up to start IVF treatment and I don't know if it will even work and whether we will ever be able have kids...Though I'm really trying to stay positive and am hoping that this time next year we might have our miracle baby.

I've been wondering about whether to talk about this topic or not but in the end I decided that having a blog is a way to share thoughts and make sense of things and it might be helpful to have an outlet while I'm going through all this. So I'm going to create a series of rather personal posts about what's been going on the past few months to fill you in.

Girl meets boy. They date, fall in love, get married and then start a family. Right? Unfortunately I'm learning the hard way, it's not so easy for everyone. One in eight couples these days experience infertility, which is defined as not getting pregnant after one year of trying. That's a lot of couples dealing with something that people don't really talk openly about so you can end up feeling quite lonely when going through it and it can feel hard to find people who relate. You also experience such a rollercoaster of emotions; hope, guilt, depression, anger, sadness - it's a lot of ups and downs.

When we started trying for a baby I was worried at the back of my mind we might have difficulty as my doctor here had warned me as due to my having had surgery when I was younger I probably have scarring around my fallopian tubes. But still I was hopeful. The first six months I wasn't overly worried or thinking about it that much as I'd read it could take some time (up to a year is still normal) but I did start to try other things at that stage such as improving my diet, trying acupuncture, using ovulation sticks, the list goes on. During a HSG test where they put dye through your tubes to see if it can flow freely I found out that one side was blocked but the other side looked fine. And I'd read a lot of women also fall pregnant shortly after that test- maybe the dye helps clear our any old cobwebs, haha!

Unfortunately though, after several more months of nothing happening once we reached the one year mark it was time to make an appointment with the doctor...to be continued..