How Did I Get Myself So … Pregnant? May 28, 2010

I guess we all know by now how the human body works, at least more or less. And I suppose you can guess exactly what I was doing over Christmas break that got me into this situation. I guess it should make sense to me, but I am still baffled that from two people can come three, and that it all worked so quickly and so well. I am flabbergasted at nature, in all of its strange and swelling glory.

Honestly, I had intended to get pregnant around March. That would put me on maternity leave right at my two-year anniversary with my company. This would give me some sweeter maternity leave, but oh well, that didn’t happen. You see, I didn’t think I would get pregnant so quickly. It took my mom five years of trying, and she suffered from miscarriages before anything actually stuck. I had prepared myself so well for failure that I didn’t even believe it when that second line popped up on the pee stick.

I figured I would share some of the things that really helped me get to this delicate state.

Do buy:

The iPeriod app for your iphone. I’m sure there are similar apps for other smart phones, and probably some great tracking devices or calendars that link up with your email or some such. Either way, track your period — and it works best to do it not just on paper but on a tracking device hooked up to the magical calculators on the internet that figure out, month by month, when you are most fertile. iPeriod works by having you enter the beginning and end of your cycle over several months. After several months, it really begins to figure out exactly what times you’ll be fertile. As you may have figured, this is fabulous for those trying to get pregnant, and those who are trying to avoid getting pregnant. When you enter your period start and end date, it calculates your fertile days for the next month. It shows when you are kinda fertile, and most fertile, and not fertile. It looks something like this:

iPeriod Calendar

It’s pretty awesome. The red dot days are your recorded period days, and the light green days are the days leading up to ovulation (potentially fertile), and the greenest day is your exact day of ovulation.

For those of you familiar with the Fertility Awareness Method, this is a kind of dumbed down version of that. It takes out the temperature tracking and so forth, and figures it out for you. That said, it’s probably not as effective as tracking all of your detailed information and watching your temp on a daily basis. But it’s way less annoying!

It seemed to be pretty accurate for me. My cycle got way irregular when I got off BC, and this, after a couple of months, started to predict my period quite accurately … and thus, my fertile days. I am a fan.

The benefit to having this type of calendar on your phone is that you can fill out your days when you’re standing in line at the grocery store, you can check to remind yourself when you are ovulating, and you can calibrate it against any other tracking devices you might have. This particular app also comes with a discreet icon that doesn’t say PERIOD all over it.

I would recommend it to any lady trying to get pregnant, trying to track her period, or using natural cycle birth control. It’s a good idea all the way around. And you can’t beat the price: 99 cents.

Taking Charge of Your Fertility …

So I mentioned the Fertility Awareness Method. What’s that? Well, some of you may know, but I can say that I didn’t at all before I started trying to get pregnant. As it turns out, no one really educates us ladies on what goes on with our bodies during a cycle, and no one really tells us about HOW the body actually manages to get pregnant and stay that way. So, duh, we all know that a sperm fertilizes an egg. But, as it turns out, this doesn’t happen randomly. And it can’t happen at just any old time of the month. Now that seems so simple to me, but before, it wasn’t something I thought about in great detail.

So, if you are interested in fertility tracking, either to get pregnant or to stay not pregnant, I recommend buying Taking Charge of Your Fertility from Amazon. It shows you how to chart your fertility, talks about body temperature and its correlation, and tells you how the body works to get pregnant. I read it from cover to cover. I never really tracked my fertility like it told me to, but I’m so glad I knew all of the info. It worked so well with my dumbed down iphone app, and I didn’t have to do much thinking about it. I won’t get into the gory details on how to tell when you are fertile, but I’ll just say it’s something they do NOT teach you in health class, and it’s not something your mom is going to sit down and tell you about.

I will say that you have to be comfortable with the ins and outs of your body in order to track your fertility effectively. You just can’t be squeamish, and you have to learn how to read the signs that your body is giving you. There’s a lot of talk about … body stuff … and you gotta roll with it.

That said, the information is indispensable.

And we got pregnant two months after we started trying.

For those women who find it more difficult to get pregnant, the FAM method will help you figure out what’s going on. There are several chapters on how to figure that stuff out, and how to proceed. As I said, the information is indispensable.

So, that’s how I got myself into this situation, and I’m glad I educated myself beforehand. Good luck!