26 November 2016

Make Love, Not Babies; reframing "trying" to conceive

I should start with a disclaimer:
The opinions and experiences expressed in this post are purely that of the author.
This is not meant in any way to be directed at any particular person or be in response to any particular comment.
I fully acknowledge that my own personal experience is nothing more than an anecdote, and a data set of one (1) generally proves nothing.


My wife was (is!) really excited about starting a family. I've been looking forward to it too.
I convinced her to agree to wait just a couple more months after we got married to save up some money so we can both take 6 months to a year off to be full time parents.

And I also asked for one critical thing:

Can we please not "try" to have a baby?


Can we instead just make conditions such that it is possible, and then "allow" it to happen?
She agreed to this.
No testing kits, no books, no thermometers, no fancy expensive lubes, and no pills of any kind.

Of course she took vitamins with folic acid and DHA, and she has a free app where if you put in the dates of each period it will predict the next one as well as likely fertile days based on the historical pattern. But she was doing both of those things for the past year anyway.
The app has the option to add temperatures to improve accuracy of fertility prediction, but we just took the calendar based prediction as a good enough rough guide. Fertile days start several days - up to 5 days - before ovulation anyway, and only last about a day after, so knowing the exact day is of limited usefulness anyway - once you know for sure its basically too late.