Today is my 37^th birthday. Three years off 40 and I really don’t know where the last 10 years have gone!

I spent the first half of my 20s mostly living and working in France.  When I was 25 I moved to Scotland but continued to live the party life, out drinking every weekend and spending most of my Saturdays and Sundays recovering from hangovers. I honestly forgot how old I was for a while and was convinced I was 26 for two years. When I turned 28 I had to sit and actually work it out to make sure I was right!

I was quite happy turning 30. I owned my own flat, had a half decent job, and plenty of friends around me. I did have a bit of a niggling feeling that my life wasn’t really going anywhere though. I had been single for 7 years. Although I quite enjoyed my job it didn’t pay especially well and there were few prospects for promotion. I took the plunge and left my job for an even lowered paid one but doing something completely different and where there seemed to be more opportunities for career progression. But after 18 months working for one of the major high street banks the crash happened and suddenly my prospects didn’t look so good.

So I decided to take an even bigger leap and do something I had thought about since I was at school. I resigned from my job at the bank and took up a place on a PGDE teacher training course. Thanks to a very generous loan from my dad I didn’t work for a year but instead completed my training to be a French teacher. And that was when everything about my life changed.

As well as doing my teacher training I lost three stone in weight and then feeling much happier in my own skin, I took a trip to London when I had finished my course where I met the man who was going to become my husband.

When we met I had just turned 32. Barry is the same age as me and we had both been single for a long time. To be honest I had resigned myself to a life on my own, where the children I had always imagined having didn’t exist.

But just 8 months after we first met Barry moved to Scotland to live with me. Three months later he proposed, another three months after that we had bought our first house together. A year after getting engaged we were married and six months after that I was pregnant.

Now, I’ve been a teacher for five years, happily married for three, Toby is going to be two in a few months and a few short weeks after that our second baby boy will join our family.

And despite all that, I don’t know where the last 10 years have gone, I still feel like I should be 27 not 37! Heading towards 40 doesn’t scare me though – in fact I think my 40s are going to be awesome. Our boys will be 5 and 3 and hopefully the real adventures of our life as a family will just be beginning.