Before the Rearing- Getting Pregnant

I recently had a lovely afternoon chat with a good friend from work who is embarking on the practice of concertedly trying to get pregnant soon. She is charting temps, etc and was asking whether we did anything to try to help the process along… yes, we did.

We started “trying” (i.e. not not trying) to get pregnant in December. I wanted to be pregnant for Christmas. It didn’t happen. I was so distraught (don’t laugh at my naïveté) that we didn’t try for two months after that. In March we kicked back into gear and were, again, unsuccessful. At this point, I was noticing that I had a rather irregular cycle. On a whim, I picked up a package of ovulation tests.

How these work: ovulation tests… you pee on a stick every day (starting at day 10 or something of your cycle) and when you start ovulating you get a little smiley face that tells you to get busy. Oh yea- it’s romantic.

I started those in May with no success. At this point I started going into despair thinking I couldn’t get pregnant. I made an appointment with an OB to get everything checked out. Did I overreact- yes. Was it worth it to ease my mind- yes. Was this important to me- yes.

Two weeks after the appointment with the OB, I found out I was pregnant. So, I believe in the ovulation sticks… especially if your cycle is unpredictable.

Some things I learned during my journey in trying to get pregnant…

• Even though it seems like everyone is doing it, it isn’t that easy. Well it’s easy in that there isn’t much effort necessary on your part other than the sweet sweet lovin’ but you have a very short window of time in that you can actually get those crazy little swimmers to you ready and appropriately positioned egg.
• You want to refrain from getting up for 30 minutes after you complete the act of trying to get pregnant. Give those swimmers a chance.
• Though everyone seems to think that you should be doing it all the time trying to get pregnant, you actually want to limit it to once (maybe twice every once-in-awhile) a day to keep the swimmer count up.

Pain in the rear even before the rearing begins. Best of luck to you!