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The other day, this happened, so Mom offered to send me the magazine that contained the picture. When I picked up the mail the other day, I was super excited to open the package, but when I opened it, I promptly started crying. Good Lord, I’m a sap.
You know what made me cry? A calendar.
…but not just any calendar – the calendar my Mom wrote on when they were TTC their first baby – ME!
You see, Mom had educated herself about FAM.
She didn’t have any concerns about IF – she just wanted to learn more about her body.
She checked her CM and took her temp and knew more about her cycles than most docs at the time (or, it seems, most docs today!).
In fact, once they decided to start a family, Mom & Dad successfully planned and prevented pregnancies for years without the use of hormonal birth control.
If you look closely at the calendar above, you can see that she took her last b.c. pill on January 24, 1981. I was conceived on May 17th (syttende mai – similar to the 4th of July for Norwegians, and since I’m 100% Norwegian, a pretty cool date to be conceived on!).
Obviously, she luckily didn’t have fertility issues, but the knowledge she armed herself with 30 years ago helped me diagnose 28 years later what was wrong with me...and how I could arm myself with knowledge about my cycles to show my OB that I was indeed not ovulating. That allowed us to start IF treatments after only six months of TTC, and I firmly believe that my FAM knowledge has changed the way I’ll treat my fertility for the rest of my life.
At any rate, it’s pretty surreal to see notes your Mom made about her last birth control pill, the dates of her periods, the day she ovulated, and the day they first heard my heartbeat (July 23, 1981)*.
I mean, WOW, right?!
*As a random sidenote, the first time I heard RockStar’s heartbeat was July 14, 2011… almost exactly 30 years later. So cool. 🙂
**Something else that was so interesting to me is that my Mom also had long cycles (at least the two she had between going off of b.c. and conceiving me) of 41d and 48d. She conceived me on CD20 of her 3rd cycle post b.c.
**Something else that was so interesting to me is that my Mom also had long cycles (at least the two she had between going off of b.c. and conceiving me) of 41d and 48d. She conceived me on CD20 of her 3rd cycle post b.c.
