Our conception story

***Note: this post will be way funnier to anyone who has actually tried to get pregnant before, especially if they did any charting. For the rest of you - sorry!***

I suppose that for most people, the *wtf* moment of pregnancy comes when you get the positive pregnancy test.  For us, though, it came much earlier than that.

Having watched a number of friends struggle with infertility, miscarriages, and worse, we had prepared ourselves for a long, slow slog towards parenthood.  At my preconception checkup, my doctor was very clear that because of my “advanced” age, it could take me 9 months to a year to start ovulating normally after stopping birth control (oral contraceptives).  We decided to start trying early.

Because I had no idea when my cycle would return to normal, I immediately started charting basal body temperature and cervical fluid in an effort to get more data (gotta love data!).  Well, CF was not being cooperative (basically, no changes at all, flatlining at zero), so I went merrily along assuming that I was still in post-OC fertility purgatory.  Until the morning I woke up, and (ironically) perfectly on schedule, my temperature had spiked.

“What...the...fuck,” I mumble, half awake.

“I told you so,” husband says, unhelpfully. “I knew you were on schedule.”

“But...but...where was the egg white?!  I was promised egg white!  Where the fuck was my EGG WHITE??”

I watched in slow shock over the next week and a half as my temp stayed high - higher than it had been on OC, actually.  Then, in Australia, 9dpo, I spotted - I never spot.  “I knew it,” I mumbled to the toilet.

The positive test, on the morning of my 33rd birthday, was not a surprise.  I’m still exactly not sure how it happened, but somehow, I got pregnant my first cycle off of birth control.

I think the news did take a while to sink in, even after the barfy-ness started about a week and a bit later.  Of course, we still worried and counted days and had no idea how things were really going inside my belly since we had no way of checking so far from home. We sort of figured that no change was good news, right?

And thus we’ve launched into parenthood :)

Side note: Last night, we saw our first fireflies of the season!  I'm not sure how to convey how awesome I think fireflies are - I had never seen one in person until I visited my uncle in DC when I was 16, and as a child, I simply read about them (with awe) in books.  They are, and always will be, something quite exotic and special to me!