The Beautiful, Chaotic Reality of Having an IVF Baby in London

It was 10:47 PM on a rainy Tuesday in London, and I was carefully shuffling a half-eaten block of Cathedral City cheddar and some slightly sad-looking kale to make room for roughly four thousand quid's worth of hormonal injectables. That's the part they don't show you in the glossy clinic brochures. You don't just get a medical team; you get a second part-time job as an amateur pharmacist operating out of your kitchen, trying desperately not to contaminate life-altering medications with yesterday's leftover vindaloo.

There's this bizarre psychological weight to the yellow sharps bin sitting on the kitchen island right next to the fruit bowl. It sits there, glowering at you, a bright plastic reminder that making a human being is currently involving more biohazardous waste than a minor dental surgery. I spent weeks staring at that bin, terrified of knocking it over, whilst also feeling this weird, protective attachment to it.

We were keeping all the used needles in a massive cardboard box in the spare room, because apparently there's an unwritten rule of the internet that if you actually make it to the finish line, you're legally obligated to take one of those viral ivf baby pictures with the newborn surrounded by injections, arranged in a perfect, traumatic little heart shape on the living room rug. I spent hours meticulously organizing those little plastic caps, completely ignoring the fact that we didn't even have an embryo yet.

Every evening became a high-stakes performance art piece. You find yourself holding your breath while grasping this tiny plastic dart, tapping it aggressively to dislodge microscopic air bubbles like some manic doctor on a soap opera, desperately praying you're pushing the plunger at the exact right speed to avoid leaving a massive purple bruise on your wife's already battered stomach.

The actual egg retrieval and embryo transfer came and went in a blur of blue hospital gowns and bad instant coffee, which we survived, only to immediately plunge into the psychological torture chamber known as the two-week wait.

Waiting for the science to work

I was absolutely terrified about the health of our first ivf baby (well, babies, but we were blissfully ignorant of the impending twin situation at that point). The two weeks between the transfer and the pregnancy test are a masterclass in losing your absolute mind. Every slight twinge my wife felt was either heralded as a miracle of cellular division or the catastrophic end of our dreams, depending on what hour of the day it was.

When the positive test finally happened, I expected to feel pure, unadulterated cinematic joy, but what I actually felt was a sudden, crushing wave of anxiety that I now had to keep this microscopic, incredibly expensive science project alive.

When the girls finally arrived, a bit early and looking entirely like angry, translucent little birds, my anxiety shifted into overdrive. I'd read entirely too many late-night forums about how IVF children might be smaller, or delayed, or somehow infinitely more fragile than naturally conceived humans.

My doctor—a lovely bloke with a massive beard who looks like he should be chopping wood in a Scandinavian forest rather than checking infant reflexes—poured us a lukewarm cup of tea and completely dismantled my panic. He mumbled something about how our twins were perfectly average considering they'd been baked in a very crowded oven, and that all the terrifying statistics I'd read online were mostly just statistical noise based on outdated tracking methods, guessing they'd catch up to their peers by age two anyway.

The reality of the gear you actually need

Because their skin was so fragile in those early days, dressing them felt like handling museum artifacts. Everything seemed to give them a rash, from the hospital blankets to the ridiculously expensive boutique outfits my mother kept sending in the post.

This is where I've to be completely honest about what seriously worked. The Sleeveless Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit from Kianao became an absolute lifeline. It's my favorite piece of clothing we owned because it was literally the only thing that didn't leave angry red marks on their sides. It has this perfect amount of stretch, which is vital when you're trying to wrestle the arms of a screaming, rigid newborn into a garment at three in the morning without feeling like you're going to accidentally snap a limb. It doesn't have any of those scratchy tags, and it survived being washed at absurd temperatures when the inevitable nappy blowouts occurred.

On the flip side of the gear spectrum, let's talk about teething. When the teeth finally started cutting through, we bought the Panda Teether Silicone Baby Chew Toy. Look, it's fine. It's completely non-toxic, it's dishwasher safe (which is a massive bonus because I refuse to hand-wash anything anymore), and it looks adorable. But if I'm being brutally honest, they chew on the panda's ears for about three minutes before launching it directly at the cat's head. It does the job when they're trapped in the buggy, but given the choice, they'd still rather gnaw on my dirty trainers or the television remote.

The crushing weight of parental gratitude

Parenting a baby that you fought this hard for comes with a very specific, deeply annoying brand of guilt. Because you spent years crying in clinic waiting rooms and drained your savings account to get here, you feel this overwhelming pressure to be blissfully happy every single second of the day.

Page 47 of some rubbish parenting book I bought suggested you remain perfectly calm and serene during toddler meltdowns, which I found deeply unhelpful at 3am when I was covered in twin drool, an unidentified sticky substance, and functioning on two hours of broken sleep. You're allowed to find it completely rubbish sometimes. It doesn't mean you aren't grateful; it just means you're a human being who's tired of being yelled at by someone who doesn't even know how to use a toilet.

If you're currently in the trenches of trying to buy things that seriously work and aren't just plastic rubbish that will break in a week, have a look at the organic baby clothes collection, because heaven knows you've enough to worry about without adding contact dermatitis to the list.

Trying to nurture the genius out of them

Because they were a bit small, we overcompensated by trying to force them into reaching their developmental milestones as quickly as possible. We surrounded them with flashcards and contrast images until our living room looked like a very aggressive modern art installation.

Eventually, we realized we just needed to let them figure it out at their own pace, which is when we introduced the Wooden Baby Gym | Rainbow Play Gym Set. This was a godsend. It's just a sturdy wooden A-frame with some charming, quiet animal toys hanging off it. It didn't flash neon lights, it didn't play aggressive, tinny electronic music that makes you want to throw it out the window, and it genuinely looked quite nice sitting on our rug. They'd lie under it, occasionally batting at the little elephant, entirely content in their own tiny world, giving me precisely fourteen minutes to drink a cup of tea while it was still hot.

Telling them about the science

People always ask how we plan to explain the IVF journey to the girls. Right now, they're two. They currently believe the dishwasher is a magical portal that creates clean spoons, so explaining the intricacies of laboratory fertilization seems a bit premature.

But eventually, we'll just tell them the truth, messy and complicated as it's. We'll tell them we wanted them so much we had to ask some very smart people in white coats for help, and that their origin story involves a lot of love, a ridiculous amount of money, and me accidentally storing thousands of pounds of medication next to a block of cheddar cheese.

If you're looking for gear that supports your own messy, unpredictable parenting journey without adding toxic chemicals to the mix, explore Kianao's wooden toys and sustainable basics before you dive into the endless rabbit hole of internet research.

The messy questions everyone secretly asks

Do IVF babies cry more than naturally conceived ones?
No, they cry exactly the same amount, which is to say, all the time, loudly, and usually when you've just sat down with a hot meal. The method of conception doesn't change the fact that their primary method of communication is screaming at the ceiling.

Should I really save all my injection needles for a photo?
Only if you genuinely want to. We saved ours in a massive, slightly unhinged-looking box for nine months, took one photo that made us both deeply emotional, and then immediately drove them to the pharmacy to be destroyed because having a massive bin of medical waste in a house with a crawling infant is a terrible idea.

Is the two-week wait really as bad as people say?
It's worse. Time literally warps. A single afternoon feels like an entire financial quarter. My only coping mechanism was watching incredibly terrible reality television where people argued about minor inconveniences, which made our massive life-or-death panic feel slightly more normal.

Will my IVF baby be smaller than other kids?
Ours were tiny, but they were twins, which is basically a guaranteed ticket to the neonatal unit anyway. My completely non-scientific observation is that by the time they hit nursery, they're all just a chaotic blur of sticky hands and muddy knees, and you literally can't tell who was made in a lab and who wasn't.

How do you deal with the guilt of finding parenting hard after IVF?
You just have to talk about it with people who get it, completely ignoring the toxic positivity brigade on Instagram who insist every moment is a blessing. It's entirely possible to be overwhelmingly grateful for your child whilst simultaneously wanting to hide in the bathroom for ten minutes of silence. Both things are true.