LTTTC exposed me to more styles of parenting than I'd have witnessed if we hadn't struggled with IF. All our "real-life" friends and family followed fairly "traditional" methods, but spending years on the forums and having so many online friends have success before me allowed me to see other styles of parenting (eg attachment parenting, BLW, etc) that I hadn't known existed. That gave me the confidence to do things my way and try to enjoy the experience more. I particularly loved doing BLW and am so very glad I knew it was an option! BLW further affected my parenting style by forcing to me relinquish some control to DD and that has flowed on later stages of her development - setting limits for her health and safety but allowing freedom within those limits. I'm such a control freak; I'd never have been able to do that under other circumstances...

In addition to that, similar to Mildez, I find I sometimes have an overwhelming fear of losing DD. She is my raison d'être, my reason for getting out of bed in the morning. Without her, there would be no reason...

As for telling her about our journey, I think we will. My only worry is about her telling too many people when she's young, so we may wait a while. While it's not something to be ashamed of, I do worry that there are some crazy people out there who may be violently opposed to the concept of IVF and there's no way to spot "crazy" on the surface... I prefer to get some idea of a person's opinion about IVF before sharing that information and young children don't have that same caution... There's also a high probability that we won't be able to complete our family without donor embryos and, given the different family medical history, it's likely we'll need to be open about the journey with any future child we may have that way.

If I wanted to go back and change our TTC journey, I'd really need to go back further and push for a GP to take my AF pain seriously when I was a lot younger. I had endo symptoms for 20 years before diagnosis and that gave the endo plenty of time to destroy my egg supply. Treating it earlier could have avoided a lot of our heartache... I'd also found a way to get over my fear of needles more quickly and start acupuncture earlier. However, if we had taken a different journey, we'd have had a different child and there's no way I'd trade DD, even for a complete family, so I wouldn't go back and change anything...