I'll try not to overshare in this post, but I wanted to give a brief overview of some of what was involved in us getting pregnant, and what I found helpful or unhelpful in our journey.
The first step to getting pregnant was to go off birth control. I had been on birth control basically since I first got my period. I was 14 when it started, and the doctor recommended going on birth control at the time to help with my acne.
I had no idea what my cycle would be like without birth control, because I had barely ever experienced it.
I gave my body some time to adjust to being off birth control, and it took quite a while for it to calibrate. My cycle lengths were all over the place for the whole time until I got pregnant. Irregular cycles make it difficult to track ovulation, so I started by tracking my basal body temperature (using a thermometer right when I wake up everyday, and charting it). I didn't find this very helpful, and it was pretty much all over the place with no obvious patterns. What I did find helpful for me was to use ovulation strips. I got a big pack of cheap ones from Amazon (not these ones, but something similar - https://a.co/d/e4SfhWU). The most helpful thing I did was use an ovulation tracking app on my phone. There's a great app called Ovia. They also make pregnancy and parenting apps. I would enter the information from the test strips in the app, and it would calculate my estimated ovulation days for me and tell me when to take pregnancy tests (which I also got a box of strips from Amazon for).
Knowing a few people close to me who have suffered miscarriages made me extremely nervous for the beginning of my pregnancy, so I wanted to be as prepared as I could, which meant planning for the pregnancy. I stopped drinking alcohol a few months before trying to conceive, and I started taking prenatal vitamins instead of my regular multivitamin for the extra folate. I also tried to have a healthier diet and lose some weight beforehand (ended up losing ~30lbs).
Even with all the planning, preparation, and tracking, it ended up taking us close to a year before we got pregnant.
They say most couples are able to conceive within a year, so as the one year mark was approaching, we were starting to get concerned that there might be an issue. We were just about to start getting fertility testing done, when I finally had some positive pregnancy tests! I say "some" because I literally took like six different tests over the course of two days, to make sure.
The thing I found most unhelpful while we were trying was when people would say that it's usually when they aren't trying that people get pregnant. That was basically like saying that we wouldn't get pregnant because we wanted to. As someone who carefully plans and calculates everything as much as possible, this made it seem like I would never be able to get pregnant, which just added more stress.
Knowing that we can get pregnant and have a successful healthy pregnancy will make it much less stressful if/when we try for a second baby.
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