Natural Family Planning

Before my husband and I got married, we were all about the condoms. I simply did not want a child out of wedlock, and at that time, I had no idea what was in store for us. But once we got hitched, it seemed to me that maybe we could lose the condoms, since if I got pregnant, I wouldn't be an unwed mother, and we were going to start trying soon anyway, so why not?

So I started researching various forms of birth control that didn't involve barriers. And it came down to basically 3 options: birth control pills, shots and natural family planning. Considering that I had a bad experience with BCP's in college (a period every 2 weeks and depression), I really wanted to avoid them. Shots were an interesting idea, but we wanted to start trying relatively soon after the wedding, and shots are more of a long-term option. So natural family planning it was.

NFP got a bad rap from my Catholic friends who had to sit through pre-marriage seminars about it, so I initially didn't think it would be for me. But once I started to learn about it, I found that it was really interesting and it makes one very aware of their body and all the various processes that go into a woman's cycle, and that could only be good, right?

How it works is, every morning right when you wake up and before you even get out of bed, you take your temperature using a special thermometer. It measures the temperature into the hundredths instead of tenths like regular ones. And then you plot it on a chart (I use FertilityFriend.com... it's got a widely used charting system, and it's free!). You also track other things like cervical mucus and other symptoms, like headaches, cramps, etc. I won't go into it much, but the ultimate goal was to identify when you're most fertile, and then BD like there's no tomorrow... or if you're using it for birth control, avoid sex at all costs.

And the kind of bad part, is that it's slightly addicting for someone TTC. In the LP, it's very common for me to just stare at my chart and ponder exactly what that morning's temperature means, and whether that twinge near my ovaries was just a twinge or something more. Then I have to make myself step away from the chart, because I am no closer to figuring out my body than I was when I first began charting.

But I do know one thing for sure... I will now almost always know when I'm about to O. There's no way to unlearn this kind of knowledge. Makes me wish more women would learn NFP... then at the very least, women would know more about their own bodies. And I'll go out on a limb and say that if I should be blessed with a daughter, she will learn how to chart when she gets The Talk, which will be about the time she gets her first period. It'll be a good learning experience, I think.

Yeah, I plan ahead.