January

As soon as we got back from vacation my pregnant friend called me and told me they had their baby a few days earlier. We went to see them and I held the baby and he was so tiny and so sweet that I almost cried. I was so desperate to have one of my own...

My friend was very tired and scared and she said she had not slept since the baby was born because she kept waking up to check up on him and then to feed him and change him and she was so stressed and sleep deprived that she was jealous of us taking a vacation and having fun. Only if she knew how jealous of her I was (in a good way of course)!

I went to see my friend and little baby Alex every few days and in the course of our conversations my friend told me that she and her husband had been trying to get pregnant for 2 years. But when I asked her whether she was checking her ovulation, etc she said no, they had just been having unprotected sex hoping to get pregnant and she was almost losing hope when she got pregnant with Alex.

So somehow that gave me some hope and I was determined to do everything I could to increase my chances. I finally got an Ovulation Calculator after spending hours researching how they work and how reliable they are. I got the CVS kind but it got really good reviews on epinions.com in it looked fairly easy to use. I also read online that taking Vitamin B-6 is good for conception and for keeping the baby so I started taking that as well. I had stopped using the natural progesterone because I wasn’t really convinced it works, but who knows, maybe I'll start using it again soon.

I started using the Ovulation strips on day 12 of my cycle and for the first few days the test line was so thin that I thought I'm not doing it right. However, on day 15 both of the lines were the same color and I scrambled to get the manual and see exactly what it means. According to the instructions, it meant that I will ovulate within the next 24 hours and the egg only lived for 12-24 hours so the best time to conceive was in the next 2 days.

I told my husband we got busy for the next couple of days, although again it was not romantic at all and by that point, it was almost like we had to do it and that's why we were doing it. I'm not saying it wasn’t good sex but it just felt weird that we were having sex to get pregnant and it was difficult to enjoy it as much as before with all the pressure. And of course you have to be careful not to spill any of the sperm, lift your legs when you're done and all this other romantic stuff. My husband never really admitted that he was stressed as well but he had a couple of "performance" problems where I had to put some extra effort to get things going so I could tell that it was different for him as well.

Unfortunately, after all the efforts and the planning, my period came right on time on day 29.