Feel a little sheepish posting here when I am not technically trying yet, and everyone on this forum is so knowledgeable and full of acronyms. I talked to my doc yesterday about starting a family (TTC! I know this one now) and she put in an order for blood tests to check out cholesterol & thyroid. If everything comes back OK, I’ll have my IUD removed.
In the meantime, asked her about vitamins, and she said taking a women’s multi was enough–no need for a prenatal. That kind of surprised me? What would y’all recommend?
As a true beginner in this realm, I don’t know what is standard vs. what you add in later if needed. What should I test/track, and what is only necessary if things don’t go as planned/hoped? I don’t have many friends attempting this yet. For reference, I’m 31yo and otherwise healthy (as far as I know). I use Clue to track my periods and I can often feel ovulation cramps. I saw recommendations for the Fertility Friend app and Taking Charge of Your Fertility upthread so I’ll check those out.
Welcome! FF is great for tracking basal temperature and an extensive range of symptoms… If you have regular periods/ovulation you may not need to switch away from Clue, if that works for you. (just my 2c) I don’t have much else to add, haha. Still a raw beginner myself and trying to figure out my PCOS.
Hi! I also went off the pill at 31 (almost 32). I had normal periods, though I do have an abnormal uterus but doctors seemed to think it wouldn’t have an effect on getting pregnant.
I think part of deciding what to track is based on your timeline. I decided at the time that I was going to give myself a year of not thinking about it too much. I tracked using Fitbit app (which is not at all good but I was already using it for tracking steps so shrugg).
Summary
We got pregnant after 9 months, but we were both traveling for work a bunch around that time, so the number of times that sex happened during optimal times were low. The second time that sex happened during one of the Fitbit predicted “fertile” windows i got pregnant.
We’re currently tabling the discussion on Baby #2 for another 6 months, because we’re still not sleeping through the night consistently and the pandemic has us both crabby and exhausted. Next time around I think we’ll need to be more deliberate about temping and scheduling because
Summary
The first time we just had a lot of sex. Now, we’re really really tired and pass out immediately when lying down.
It totally depends on you! I had waited so long just because of life circumstances that I was unwilling to be super laid-back about it because I wanted pregnancy to happen fairly quickly. I also had this deep pit of dread in my stomach that something was wrong, which ended up being true for me wompwomp. But there are plenty of people who just pull the goalie so to speak and roll with it and see if it happens. And it’s only after a certain amount of time of try and casually that they get really serious about it. And that’s totally fine! Half of pregnancies are unplanned, and that wouldn’t be happening if it required most people a bunch of tracking to get pregnant. Especially because you have regular periods, it’s pretty straightforward to just plan on having a lot of sex a couple weeks before you expect your next period and call that a day.
There’s nothing wrong with being laid back. There is ALSO nothing wrong with wanting to track/learn more intensively, either to try and make it happen sooner or just to learn more about your body. Neither option is morally superior lol.
Eta also circumstances like- if you and partner are low libido, tracking can enable you to have less sex and the same odds. Or if one of you travels a lot (a factor we had going for us), so you know if you’re hitting your window or not. Stuff like that can definitely weigh in.
The main thing is to be getting enough folic acid. A women’s multi generally DOES have enough for pre-pregnancy… because so many pregnancies are unplanned, there is a lot of behind-the-scenes effort to sneak folate into American women. But you would need to switch if/when you conceived.
Agree with what everyone else says–it’s up to you how much effort you put into it. You could just right in with the pee sticks (OPK = ovulation predictor kit) and the thermometer, or you could just take a laid-back approach. Most people will get pregnant soonish just by having enough sex. Those who won’t, won’t. If you want to move fast, tracking can help spot a problem sooner. I do wish I had consulted an RE sooner… but I think for a lot of us, it can take a while to decide how far you want to go.
If you have a little money to burn and do want to move fast, I have a TempDrop–a wearable thermometer so I don’t have to take my temp every morning. Trying to do that was interfering with my sleep. There are fancy bracelets that claim to predict your fertile days, but I don’t know how much I trust those.
Ha, I feel that. “Grim and battle-scarred.” It’s kind of hard to believe that I’ve “only” been doing fertility treatments for 14 months (longer if you count the time that the Boy was on medication trying to boost his sperm count)–it feels much longer.
CCRM, which is my clinic, had me take baby aspirin for my transfers. I’m not sure if that’s for all patients or just ones over a certain age or what.
I’m really pulling for you. You’ve had a hell of a year.
Well, it will be two years in June since I first took a mail away panel that showed low AMH, and the only reason I even did that was because I wanted to ideally wait one more year and wanted to see what things looked like, like did I have that much time? When it came back bad, I started temping and doing supplements, so, in a way I have been at this for almost two years.
Before I took that test, I halfway believed everything would be just fine because people in my family on both sides are insanely fertile (I have a total of 16 aunts and uncles, all but one of whom have kids, including a 40+ “oops”) and also because literally everyone thinks I’m like 10 years younger than I am. The college kids I am in campus organizations with assume I am their peer when I am literally twice their age in some cases.
But the other half was, like,
Embarrassingly woo-woo superstition that sounds a bit like a mental illness symptom
Ever since I was in my mid-to-late 20s and started thinking about having kids, I had this creepy feeling that something wasn’t going to “let” me. I had a bizarre, cannabis-induced delusion at some point that there was a conscious force to the universe that was actively conspiring to not let me breed for some reason. This was WELL before I even was interested in trying, it was just a weird thing that I felt out of nowhere. But the superstitious feeling stuck with me to some degree and, lo and behold, here I am nearly 15 years later, and multiple actual real-life factors are making it difficult for me. So, IDK, maybe that was a bit of psychic foreboding or something.
I changed my diet soon after my doc visit 04/15. Won’t go into details bc cw diet and unimportant, but I did notice my painful acne/bacne cleared up… So maybe I had the ruby slippers all along?
If that was the case, based on premom LH estimates and temp readings, I may have ovulated on the 28th? That might explain current irritability. Or people at work might just actually be extra annoying right now.
Note: I got jabbed on the 23rd and I think I skipped my outright feverish BBT, but may have still been elevated next day?
I’m still looking forward to consulting with endo and applying even more measures to rebalance my hormones/testosterone, for fetal health and ongoing regularity and general health too.
I would recommend if you want to take something with iron to get your levels up, take it now because you will very likely want to take something without iron during the first trimester as it can make any nausea you have worse.
Oooh, good point. Many women’s multis do have iron. The other thing I forgot to add is, if you are buying vitamins, I would just buy prenatal. No one wants to be stuck with half a bottle of useless vitamins! But if you already had some, or if you’re not going to try for a few months and can finish a bottle of regular…
I feel pretty good about my iron levels (although I haven’t had them tested in a long time) so I treat myself to gummies. I started doing it when I was on like 25 supplement pills a day and now I’m spoiled .
(We want a third but I’m not sure I can manage pregnancy again so even though I just had a baby, I’m lurking here because it’s going to take us a few years of planning to be sure we can make it through another one).
Welp. It is my first time experiencing Mother’s Day as someone who has had two consecutive losses instead of climbing on the being-a-mother train. Because my sister is super Christian and believes that I now have babies in heaven, she wished me a happy Mother’s Day. It was . . . not a good feeling.
Also, grumpily, childishly, and selfishly, I am feeling butthurt about the situation where my family decided a few years back that we were only going to give presents for birthdays and holidays to the kids and not the adults because there are so many kids now. I was fine with it at the time, figuring that I would be getting on that train soon enough, but I just bought birthday presents for three kids in two weeks, staring down two more bursts in July and August, and now I kinda feel like every household gets showered in gifts but mine. Not even that I need more “stuff”—it’s just that I do love the joy of a good surprise and I’m feeling left out.
So having embryos is weird. Because now we basically need to face that we may end up having to CHOOSE if we have a boy or a girl, and it’s likely our last kid whichever we do. We have 2 good girl embryos and 1 good boy. (The loss was our highest grade boy, tied with the highest grade girl). A girl is the highest grade now. I think SirB wants to go boy for like, fullness of life experiences. I lean girl transfer first partially because of grade also probably because Latte is a delight and maybe because I never really had a sister? And reusing clothes LOL. I dunno. But I’m way too scared of twins to transfer 2 and let fate decide that way.
Anyway, it’s a little surreal to simultaneously be like “I don’t know if we even CAN have another, I just want a healthy baby” but at the same time being like “yeah but you’ll have to choose soon so… start thinking about that”.
That choice feels impossible to me! As a 30something woman with a younger sister I am constantly seeking out media that can describe or explain our relationship–both the love and hate–and nothing quite touches it. I loved the sister relationships in Fleabag and the book All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Towes (even though it has a sad ending). I have a younger brother as well but it’s a different vibe. I’d love to parent sisters.
I’m sure more comes down to personality than anything, but I can’t predict that lol. But sex does shape so much lived experience. Ugh. It’s just an impossible choice. Between SirB and I there are 4 brothers and my estranged half sister who is much older and I didn’t grow up with. I wonder then if part of my leaning girl is so that Latte doesn’t feel “alone” in her generation the way I did?
Oooh, I worry a lot that if I have a caboose baby it will feel alone in its generation. It will BE alone in its generation. I think my niece is going to wait after all but even if she didn’t, her kids will be a different generation than my kids.
But my brother and I were super close as children and my brother and our sister were very close as adults, so it doesn’t necessarily mean much. What an agonizing choice! And I agree transferring two would be foolish. Your doc might not even agree to it, transferring two PGT normal is so unusual.
Especially because you have regular periods, it’s pretty straightforward to just plan on having a lot of sex a couple weeks before you expect your next period and call that a day.
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