Time to Start Peein' on Sticks!

...No, not a pregnancy test (yet).

So after reading The Impatient Woman's Guide to Getting Pregnant (as well as What to Expect Before You're Expecting, which I DO NOT recommend) I quickly decided to skip taking my hoo-ha's temperature or investigating my cervical mucus (side note: I know that there's plenty of gross stuff that goes along with getting pregnant and having a baby, as well as changing diapers etc, so why not eliminate as much ick as possible!?!) and just get a fertility monitor.  The Clearblue Easy monitor, to be exact:

That's a little underwhelming, and my rug in the bathroom looks like crap.  How about this:

Much more appropriate to the level of fancy here!

Basically, if you are trying to get pregnant (or, you might want to know this is you're trying not to get pregnant) you have around 6ish days out of the month of higher odds, with about 3 of them being optimal for getting preggers.  Not that I don't enjoy getting it on with Hubs, but wouldn't you want to know if you were even in the ballpark?  Besides, now he has 3 days of guaranteed sex!!  And, later on, I'll have a much clearer idea of a real due date. (Off-label benefit: I can keep drinking wine until my hormone levels rise!)

So, starting with day 1 of your cycle (the day your period starts, or the day after if it starts in the afternoon), you turn the thing on, tell it you're starting a new cycle, then pee on a stick when it tells you to.  It measures the amounts of estrogen and LH, or Luteinizing hormone, to tell you when you are about to ovulate.  If you're trying to get pregnant, having sex just before and during ovulation increases your chances (the "just before" having more to do with the life cycle of sperm etc.  Read all about it in TIWG).

Today, I didn't even have to pee on a stick - if it's day 1 of your cycle, you're not fertile.

From here on out, I turn on the monitor every morning (before going to the bathroom so my pee has the highest concentration of hormones) and do what it tells me to do, taking note of where the fertility level is (low, high, peak/ovulation).

It's almost baby-making time!!