Certified Babymakers: Nicola & Pete

Read time: 2 minutes

Meet Nicola and Pete, the kind of couple who somehow juggle three kids, a multigenerational home, and London life with equal parts humour and honesty. Their fertility journey wasn’t straightforward, but it was real: ups, downs, a few surprises, and a lot of learning along the way. In true OVA style, they trusted their bodies, made some smart choices, and found their way to the family they’d always hoped for.

Can you introduce yourselves?

Nicola: I’m Nicola, I’m 42. I live in London with my husband Pete, our 3 kids and… my dad, which is kind of like living with a teenager sometimes, but it works, and I feel really grateful for our multi generational mad house.

Pete: I’m Pete, Nicola’s husband, proud but slightly knackered dad to 3 gorgeous kids, household head of logistics and when I’m not doing all that I work for a big commercial art gallery.

Do you mind telling us a bit about your fertility journey? 

Nicola: Pete and I didn’t meet until I was 33 at which point most of my friends already had kids so I was starting to panic that it wasn’t going to happen for me. I pretty much opened our first date with ‘do you want kids?’, much to everyone’s horror. We had a really fun year together and then started trying for a baby. It took a few months to get pregnant and we were pretty devastated when I miscarried at 10 weeks. Luckily I was pregnant again soon after that and it stuck and now we have a rambunctious 6 year old. I had another miscarriage before I then got pregnant with our second, a super sassy little girl who is almost 4. We thought we were done…. Well, I reluctantly thought we were done despite always wanting a big family, but Pete was done, and given I was 38 when I had our second I thought it probably just wouldn’t happen.

What lifestyle changes did you make that you feel *actually* made a difference?

Pete: Nicola was always kind of into health and lifestyle… she had her weekend party moments but she always ate well, didn’t drink most of the time and was interested in nutrition. I have always been a bit all or nothing so Nicola really lead the way with optimising diet and lifestyle. I started with the basics - cut down on the booze, ate more veg and spent a fortune on supplements!

Nicola: I work in food - developing recipes for magazines and cook books and styling food for photography, so cooking nutrient dense and tasty food was a big priority but luckily for me not a huge change, just a few tweaks here and there and adding more good stuff stuff in rather than taking stuff out was my approach although I pretty much gave up booze and switched to more moderate exercise - leisurely jogs and lots of yoga.

I had always taken high quality supplements, so switching to a fertility targeted one made sense, in theory… but when I was working out what to take it seemed to be a choice of collating my own selection to make sure I got the essentials like folate, choline and omegas or spending an absolute fortune on one that had everything in one!

When I heard about OVA after I had our second baby, I thought ‘that would have been so good when I was pregnant!’ I saw there was OVAPlus Advanced Hormonal Support supplement and given I was in my late 30s, winding down an extended breastfeeding journey without having had any periods for quite some time, was aware of peri menopause looming and not sure i was totally done having babies, I started taking it. It became a part of my routine without me really thinking about getting pregnant. A case of ‘just in case’.

My period returned (yes, just one!), and 4 weeks later when I was behaving mildly oddly, my husband asked if I was pregnant… I snapped back as if he was crazy. The other two had taken a bit of time, planning and effort. Plus, I was younger then. Surely not. He wasn’t crazy, he was right.

I switched to the OvaHer Fertility & Pregnancy Support immediately because it had everything I’d been looking for before in one and at a reasonable price. At 6 weeks I started to feel pretty rough and found eating a real chore, which carried on for 9 months which was hard, but I wasn’t worried on that front because I knew Ova had my back.

And now we Cosmo, who is now 5 months and has somehow blown us into orbit and completed us all in the same breath.