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Wednesday, February 23, 2011

I Love It, I Love It Not

I think I have a love/hate relationship with charting my temps.  No, I know that I have a love/hate relationship with it.  I started charting my temps in March 2010.  J and I had been TTC for 4 months and my cycles weren't regular (or at least they didn't seem regular) so I decided to start temping so that I could ensure we had good timing each month.  At first I loved temping.  It was easy to do and it made me feel in control of something TTC related.  I wanted to be sure that our timing was right each month and I didn't seem to have a lot of luck with OPKs.  But as the months stretched on and I was still wasn't pregnant, I noticed there were thinks that I did not love about charting:

1.  Patterns didn't really seem to emerge each month.  I seemed to ovulate close to the same time each month (usually CD 19 or 20) but there was really no prediction if I was going to ovulate at a different time. 
2.  Several months fertility friend took away my crosshairs part of the way through the two week wait.  When I showed my charts to my OBGYN she was confident those were still ovulatory cycles, but I was nervous that maybe I hadn't really ovulated. 
3.  My LP seems to be a different length each month.  Some months it's kind of short (10 -11 days) and this most recent month it was 16 days.  Again, my OBGYN thought this was still within the normal range. 
4.  Each month during the two week wait I continue to temp because I like to know when to expect AF, but then I start to get my hopes up that maybe I am pregnant.  Even though in my head I know that I'm not, my heart gets all excited and then I'm crushed when AF comes or I get a BFN. 
5.  I feel like since I'm the person responsible for temping, all of the weight about our timing for the month falls onto my shoulders.  I know I should figure out a way to involve J more in the process, but I haven't been able to figure out how to best do that.  After J's first semen analysis I actually felt relieved that I wasn't doing something wrong for all these months.  

Yet even with all these negatives, I can't seem to stop temping, it's like an addiction or something!  In other news, AF has arrived today, it's pretty light, but it's here, so now we're just waiting for our next appointment with the urologist on March 8th. 

3 comments:

  1. Hey! Welcome to the IF blogging land :) Thanks for the comment on my post (The Life of a Husband and a Wife) today! We seem to have much in common from our location (I'm in Louisville, KY only 2 hours south), our TTC timeline (we started in late September 2009) and our occupations (I work in nonprofits too). If you ever need advice or just someone to vent to feel free to email me: stwboswell@yahoo.com. I can't imagine going through everything without the support I've found on these blogs! Happy Friday!

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  2. I know what you mean! Charting can be both good and bad. I am finding it difficult to stop charting. I'm sorry about AF :( I hope your next appt goes well!

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  3. I was so proud of myself when I walked into my OB/GYN's office almost a year ago with 2.5 months of charts. She barely gave them a glance and said she preferred OPKs to BBTs because they tell you before you ovulated and not after. It was permission to me to turn off the alarm clock on the weekends. I had a hate only relationship with getting up at the same time every day just for a temp! Now, I just keep track of the first/last day of AF, and ovulation. I think I fould it too stressful to take BBTs, especially after I discover my first and only chemical pregnancy when my temperature plummeted.

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