Monday, June 1, 2015

there's an app for that


So we’ve started the whole trying for a baby thing. Again. When we started trying for the Bright Spark the Husband was in the middle of a health crisis and suggested we wait for a few months for him to get further into his treatment. A few weeks later we were pregnant. We’re not rabbits by any sense of the imagination. It only took once and there we were with two pink lines and worrying about birth with no idea how much our lives were going to change. 

With the Little Prince we’d been waiting to start after I’d had surgery to remove a tempestuous gall bladder full of stones. When we had the post-surgery all clear I began doing basal temperatures, checking cervical mucus, counting days to ovulation and all the other wacky things a clucky woman does to occupy the time. This was all kept in my bedside journal and new details of intercourse and mood were pencilled on a regular basis. It was probably a wee bit obsessive, but as previous posts have mentioned I like to be organised and this was all that I could control. The Husband was quietly patient about the whole thing. He didn’t need much convincing to jump when I said “jump”. It took us a few months to get things started then I miscarried early in the pregnancy (see "from tragedy I grew a garden"). Within one cycle I was pregnant again with the Little Prince. Again, one shot wonder. 

So I have high expectations that we can again get things going by simply declaring to the universe that we’re having unprotected sex and bring on another baby. But quite frankly I don’t have the time or energy to monitor whether my cervix fells firm like my nose or soft like my lips, but the simple cycle monitoring I’ve been doing in our family calendar didn’t really seem like enough. So yesterday morning I found myself in the app store searching for “ovulation”. And up popped about a dozen different trackers making claims about how much faster than the national average time I would conceive if I used their app. I quickly reviewed and selected one to download. So now I have this app on my phone which contains all the intimate details of my menstrual cycle and when I have sex with the Husband, and tells me how fertile I am on any given day of my cycle and when I should expect “aunty Flo” to visit next. Also how many days I need to wait until I can pee on a stick and scare the living daylights out of the Husband again by presenting it to him randomly during his morning shower. I was quite comfortable knowing there was something allowing me to track these details in the mobile age when the thing I carry everywhere has an app for most things I need.

Then this morning I was checking my email and there in my inbox was a message telling my how fertile I am today. And the thing is I already knew this. Because last week when I was in my fertile stage even just the sight of the Husband was enough to get me thinking about baby making activities (and subsequently running late for a morning meeting), and today I was much more interested in folding washing and making banana bread. Not to mention the Husband has been nursing a rather unattractive sore throat and head cold this weekend and was much less uninterested in baby making than he was last week.

My body knows when it’s fertile; I love that my monthly cycle has that period where my husband is the sexist man on earth and I must have him now. It’s one of the reasons I have not gone back to hormonal contraceptives after the Little Prince was born. I spent over a decade taking the contraceptive pill in my teens and 20’s and it was a revelation to come off it before I tried to conceive the Bright Spark. When I teach my students about the ovarian cycle I tell the boys to watch out for the girls when they were short skirts and more make-up at this is probably their fertile period and they’re quite literally on the prowl for lov’n. Our bodies are so well adapted for reproduction if you can tune in to the nuances of your cycle you don’t need a fertility tracker – but that won’t make money, so there’s an app which will do it for you and also help you keep a record of your lifestyle and diet choices.

So went back into the app and found my way to the settings where I turned off the daily fertility reports. You see our first two kids were conceived out of heat of the moment, hormone fuelled, “I must have you now” passion, not “the ovulation test I just peed on suggested we’re coming into my fertile window so are you feeling lucky?” type sex. I think I prefer it this way; it makes for better stories and why would I want to rush from the fun of baby making sex to the exhaustion and nausea of the first trimester (I really do but that is a whole other post).


P.S. I also put a password lock on the app – you don’t want that information falling into the wrong hands (not sure whose hands that would be as some app development company is already getting the intimate details of my sex life…).

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