Taking Charge

Six months ago, when we decided to start TTC, I never thought I'd be here. I never thought I'd struggle to conceive. I figured I'd get pregnant pretty quickly. Don't we all though?

I said I would just see what would happen for six months before trying any at-home helpers. Haha. I went one month before I started charting.

Charting has opened my eyes. I can't believe this is something that I wasn't told about as a younger woman. Sure, I took sex education in school, but that basically just scared you into thinking that it took only one sexual encounter to end up pregnant. I mean, seriously. That was the fear as a 16 year old. So I was a virgin until I was 24. Disclaimer, that's not the only reason I wasn't having sex until that age...just probably a big portion of it.

Charting is a tool that gives me the knowledge and thus the power to understand my own body. This body that I was taught was a mysterious turncoat of a residence. Willing and able to deceive me at a moment's notice. But little did I know that by taking my temperature every morning and using a free app on my phone, I would be able to understand, for the first time in 16 years, what my body was doing and why. Mind blown.

Sherlock image via tumblr

So what is the charting thing? Easy. I have an alarm set for 5:30 am on my phone. Every day I wake up, turn off the alarm, pop in my thermometer, doze for a minute until it beeps at me, take it out and go back to bed. When I really wake up, I check the temp and enter it into the Fertility Friend (FF) app on my phone. The app takes care of making the chart and predicting (pretty accurately) when I'm going to ovulate and expect my dear old Aunt Flo to show up. There are a lot of options with FF to aid with TTC, but all I do is the temperature input. I'll not go into how amazing I think it is that our resting body temperature changes due to the hormones in our body and is the only way to confirm ovulation (apart from blood draws). The human body is an amazing thing and I am so glad to know even a little bit more about myself now since I started temping, as it's called.

So we're at six months trying and I still haven't got it right, obviously, but at least I know myself better and can take some of the anxiety and wondering "Am I pregnant? Am I pregnant?" mantra out of my head for the most part. Here's hoping it doesn't take another six months to get a positive test.