*EDIT. Please do your own research before taking any of the supliments I mention in this post or speak to your GP for advise. It worked for me, but certain things may not agree with you so please check it all out thoroughly before taking anything.*
I’m gonna confess and say that I always love a good TTC blog post. I know I’m nothing but a nosey cow, but i find it fascinating finding out people’s stories. Once we were actually trying I NEEDED to hear these stories.
I do feel like my own TTC story is going to be boring though. When you’ve been with your boyfriend for 5+ years, people are going to start asking the inevitable questions. Anyone that knows my boyfriend will know that there is no rushing him. He is the most laid back, slow paced kind of guy around, the exact opposite of me! If I had my way, we would have most likely had a baby or two by now!
I genuinely have been asking Rara when we can have a baby for years. And for years it’s always been ‘Not yet’ or ‘One day’. Well in April 2016 it was finally time to get my implant taken out after 3 years of unprotected sex without even a second thought. I’ve been on a million different types of pill since I was 18, they all made my blood pressure sky high which is why I was on the implant. But after years of taking contraception I told Rara I’d had enough. So out came the implant. Then we went to Vegas a few months later, so we had said no baby making until after the holiday.
I can remember being jet lagged and asking Rara a day or two after we got back when we could start trying. He was veering towards the end of the year. I bumped it up gradually over the weeks, and eventually it got to September, and he finally agreed we could start trying after my next period. In those 3 months I’d started taking Seven Seas Trying For A Baby vitamins. I was all set to go, we’d have unprotected sex a few times using my phone app and I’d be pregnant!
That first month when I got my period I was shocked. I knew it was a long shot, but I just assumed we’d be one of the lucky ones. You hear of people getting pregnant on one night stands, so it couldn’t be that hard. I started obsessively googling my symptoms that month, because obviously Google and three year old chats on a message board would have the answers to whether or not I was with child. And whilst googling this I realised I wasn’t fluent by any means in the world of TTCing. TWW, BFP, BFN, DPO, POASA. If you haven’t had a baby or never been in the TTC game then you will be just as clueless as I was at first!
Then I bulk bought a load of cheap pregnancy tests on Amazon, and I’d do a test pretty much daily until inevitably I’d be gutted when mother nature came calling again. Not going to lie, some days I’d even do a test twice, just to make sure!
Here’s a few things I found out from obsessively googling the subject;
Normal lube kills sperm! I never knew this before, and that first month that’s what we used, so really we never stood much chance! So I ended up buying Conceive Plus the second month of trying. Which Rara decided he didn’t like. So then I ended up forking out for yet another sperm friendly lube called Preseed.
Cervical mucus is actually important! You have to learn to read your knickers! And you will become obsessed over it. And Google it 24/7. I had an app as well that would ask me daily what my cervical mucus was like and would then tell me if that particular type was fertile. I had never paid any attention to this before, but now I realised that actually at certain points of my cycle my body wasn’t producing as much as all the apps and Google searches had told me was normal. After another Google search I ended up buying a few supliments​ that apparently would do me some good and sort out my problem. I was willing to take anything within reason so that second month I started taking daily; Seven Seas Trying For A Baby, Evening Primrose Oil, Royal Jelly and Agnus Castus. All in pill form with breakfast.
Caffeine isn’t great for you. I know this one is pretty obvious, but I had a real thing with a daily coffee to start my day from my lovely Tassimo machine. Sometimes I’d have more than one. And that wasn’t including any fizzy drinks or chocolate that also contain caffeine. So that second month I also started to wean myself off coffee. Alcohol has never been an issue for me, I rarely drink as it was so I did stop drinking but not really as I probably only drink a handful of times in a year anyway.
I think that was the only changes I made. Nothing too drastic really. November was the second month of officially trying. And I had the worst pains on my left side during and after my fertile period. My boobs were hurting from day 1 of ovulation and then my period was late. For all of 24 hours I just knew I was pregnant. I could tell. I felt different from the first month, we’d done it! I woke up the next morning, got a pregnancy test out, went to the loo, and found blood in my knickers. I was gutted. I was so convinced and then I just felt like such an idiot!
I’m pretty sure I was a cow to everyone that week. I’d bought the fertile lube, I’d taken the magic pills, I had what I thought was potential implantation pains, and yet there was still no baby. Even though this was only the second month of trying, I was fed up!
I told my boyfriend our next plan of action was to have sex every other day after this period, for the rest of the month. I never used ovulation strips or temp checked or anything like that. I would just use my app on my phone. I had about 4 different ones and they all ended up telling me different ovulation days and the fertile windows would differ by a few days, so sex every other day was the only way in my eyes to ensure we got pregnant. In my mind, after all that sex if we still didn’t have a baby at the end of it then there was obviously something wrong with one of us.
I also had a trip down south to visit family and friends before Christmas and I was asking advice from two of my friends who have children. They both told me to forget about it and not stress out, which I hate being told because this was literally all I thought about 24/7! They also both said the times they fell pregnant, they had switched things up slightly and did the deed somewhere other than the bedroom! If that’s what it took, I’d never have sex in the bedroom again!
I will hold my hands up and admit by this third month I was a nightmare. I would remind my boyfriend of our plans that night. ‘Oh you’re going to the pub tonight? Don’t forget to pencil me in before you leave!’. All the fun had been sucked out of trying for a baby. Now it was just something we did as and when I said. However we did migrate from the bedroom on a few occasions, and I’d go waddling back in to the bedroom afterwards with my legs tightly together, and then lay on my back and keep my legs in the air whilst I updated my apps. I have no idea if this works, Google suggested it and I wasn’t one to argue with people that swore gravity got them pregnant! I’d also not wee for at least an hour afterwards. Saying it now, it all seems ridiculous, but you will literally do anything if you want it that badly, and you will listen to anything that worked for anyone else! If someone told me to drink a pint of my own piss and I’d 100% fall pregnant I’d bloody do it!
So by this point we were in our third month of trying and it was Christmas time. Apparently we had sex on Christmas day which neither of us remember, but according to my app we did! I also started a journal writing down symptoms and scribbling a green tick if we’d done the deed that day. On Christmas Day I wrote that I had some pains on my left side again, and it was really uncomfortable to sit. I felt really bloated, even before Christmas dinner! Then on Boxing Day we went to my sister’s. She said we needed to buy a Clear Blue digital ovulation test thingy as my niece was conceived on the first month of trying using this. It basically tells you when to have sex based on a flashing smiley face and I bought one at the table there and then. This would hopefully help us get over the issue of not wanting sex after a month of it every other day took the spark away. Because this way it was only 4 or 5 days you HAD to do it. That sounds awful but we were both so fed up with it by this point! So I ordered this for the next cycle, because I just felt like this month wasn’t the one. I was having the same pains as last month, although my boobs weren’t hurting this time around.
So New Year’s came and went and I was back to work. On 13th January it had been snowing. I had a lift off a colleague and on the way back I had said how on New Year’s Eve we both fell asleep before midnight and didn’t go out. I was thinking about how I had actually penciled in sex before going out but we never got round to it. And then in my head I decided right there and then that when I got home I was going to do a pregnancy test. I knew I was 2 or 3 days late for my period but I wasn’t optimistic. Every month I was certain I was pregnant and I wasn’t, so why would this month be any different. And I felt totally normal. I was moody and hungry and had all the signs that dear old Aunt Flow was on her way! But I had been so good and not tested at all this cycle so I could allow myself just one test.
It was just gone 3pm when I did the test. I was so convinced that nothing would come up that I left the pregnancy test on the side whilst I went and made a cup of tea, instead of obsessively sitting there waiting for the result to change in my hand like I usually did. Or holding it up to the light desperate to see that second line, that was another favourite of mine!
Anyway, I came back to the en suite, I hadn’t even reached the door way and I could see a mile off there was two lines on that test! I ran the rest of the way in and picked it up. And then my heart started hammering. We had done it! I was finally pregnant! We we’re going to have a baby! I started shouting and swearing and waving the test around in Rara’s confused face!
I felt like it took us ages and ages, but really we started trying in October and by Boxing Day we were actually pregnant so not that long at all. It takes over your life though and you obsess over it. I spent every day constantly googling and asking silly questions for months on end, and typically the one month I was more excited for Christmas than anything else and really didn’t think it was our month at all, ended up being the exact opposite!
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