I am Helen Shannon, an American (and as of April 2010 – a British citizen!) living and working in the south of England by way of Sweden. I currently live outside of London with my husband Alastair, our twins Nick and Nora, our dog Gorby, and our cat Maggie, in our 100 year old house that we’re renovating because life isn’t stressful enough. I am also stepmum to Melissa (19) and Jeff (14), two amazing people that I’m proud to have in my life.

I am a sufferer of EDS, but luckily that’s not related to being slightly left of normal. I’ve also been through years of therapy to help learn how to live with and recover with a few rather uncomfortable issues (anorexia and bulemia mostly. It wasn’t pretty). I cover the therapy and recovery on this blog because I initially started this site as a way to work out my emotions and because it seems like few others are willing to talk about just how suck it is to be working through an issue.

On October 3, 2007 I gave birth to my beloved twins, Nick and Nora (not their real names) who arrived 4 weeks early via emergency C-section on the heels of a very complicated pregnancy that included subchorionic bleeding, a CVS, constant bladder and kidney infections, hospitalizations and pre-eclampsia and was concluded with preemie fun like jaundice, failure to thrive, and developmental delays. The babies came after 5 rounds of IVF and many years of tears that included two miscarriages. You can read about my infertility treatment on this website – I carried over my previous site and it’s listed under the category “Twistedovaries”, where you can read the entries month by month in a very disconcerting “I know how this is going to end” kind of way (brace yourself for the TMI in those posts. Hope you like body fluids.)

Oh, and I am one of those horribly soppy and emotional types who is madly in love with my children and consider myself to be very, very lucky. I don’t apologize for being soppy and emotional. I do apologize for dressing the dog up that time, though. I don’t know what I was thinking.

I regularly update pictures on my Flickr account, which you can view here.

And if you want to know what I’m reading, you can catch it here.

I have a healthy addiction to Pinterest and have “adopted” more than one item from there. You can find me pinning here.

Finally if you want to ask me a random question, it’s here.

My cast of characters here on my blog (all names on this blog are changed to protect the innocent and to keep me from being googled. And yes – I do sometimes call the folks here in my real life by their fake blog names. That doesn’t cause confusion or anything like that.)

Alastair – my husband, an Englishman 12 years older than me. We got married married on 02 July 2010.

I think that’s about it – if I’ve missed anything out, well, I am late-thirties and rapidly sliding down the steep decline of dementia. Welcome. And if you think about stealing anything here or lifting it and using it as your own, please don’t. I have a mean side and that would most definitely get the mean out.

My history and archives are available via a password. You can email me for said password, I will then supply it. I’m not ashamed or embarrassed about my past, it’s just my past. I was finding it hard to keep moving forward while looking backward, so I cut the cord.