‘She’s proof that dreams can come true’

Juliet Jones, 42, from Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, had one last chance for a longed-for second baby but the odds were slim. Only one powerful emotion kept her going…

Opening at the pregnancy my eyes, I test, looked fearing to see yet another negative result. To my utter disbelief, instead of one lonely line, there were two. Tears rolled down my face as my husband

Rob and I hugged, united in relief and then happiness. two-and-a-half, When came our son running Isaac, to see what all the commotion was about, we scooped him into our arms and told him that finally he was going to have a little brother or sister. I’d been diagnosed with endometriosis a month after Rob and I married in 2011, and we had our second round of IVF in January 2013. Isaac was born after that and I was so happy to become a mother, but I didn’t want him to be an only child.

Because it had happened relatively easily with Isaac, I naively thought it would be the same the second time around. I couldn’t have been more wrong. In October 2014, after our third round of IVF, I suffered an ectopic pregnancy at six weeks. Losing the baby, along with one of my fallopian tubes, was devastating. We had three more rounds of treatment, but each one failed.

Friends and family told me to be grateful for what I had, and I was, but it didn’t take away the longing. By 2015, we had spent close to £20,000 on treatment and had just one embryo left in the freezer. We’d already been told by the embryologists that it might not be strong enough to survive the IVF process and even if it did, there was a risk the baby could be born with health conditions like a cleft palate.

We gave it a lot of thought, but

Rob and I knew we would love our baby whatever happened. So we were just so happy when we finally saw that positive result. But we were scared, too, that something would go wrong and our dream would be snatched away from us.

Hope was top of our list of names for a girl: it was all we’d had when everything was against us. And in February 2017, I gave birth by C-section after my waters broke three weeks early. As our daughter was laid on my chest, perfect and healthy, the midwife asked her name and I proudly replied: ‘This is Hope.’

Today, aged four, she is fun-loving, fearless and feisty. She loves princess dresses and playing with her big brother’s Nerf guns. She is a constant reminder to me that dreams can come true when you don’t give up hope.

‘Hope was all we’d had when everything was against us’