Skip to the pictures if you’re just looking for the ovulation test links (Click on the photos) for trying to get pregnant. If you care to know our story, keep reading!
After 12 years together, we’re finally adding a 3rd to our Wolfpack. We got married in 2019 and just celebrated our 3-year anniversary. We have talked about kids quite a bit, but it wasn’t something that was on the very top of our priority list. It was always if it happens wonderful but if it doesn’t, we weren’t willing to investigate other options to make it happen or ensure we would be parents.
I specifically did not want a winter baby as my birthday is December 19th and I have always disliked the “winter” aspect of it. Dylan, specifically did not want a “fall baby” as he is an avid hunter and didn’t want to be in the woods while I was giving birth. With both these points being fair I began to look at the calendar and counting months hoping that I could plan out when we could have a baby or what might be a desirable timeframe for us.
Little did I know that your 40 weeks begins from the start date of the last menstrual cycle. Maybe I’m not smart but had no clue this was a thing. So just to clarify, my math was entire wrong when deciding on what date to pull the goalie. I told myself any time April – Early October would be ideal for us. When doing my math at the time I figured it would be able July 1 when we would “stop being safe”. I was on the birth control pill from 17 to 28. I stopped taking the pill August of 2021 to let my body get back into the natural flow of things free from extra modified hormones. At the end of the day, does this matter? Who knows, everyone says something different.
I got off the pill and everything basically immediately went back to normal for me. I think this is important to state as everyone is different. I have heard about all the apps that track your cycle, so I had downloaded a variety of those and basically followed the guidelines of when to lock yourself up from your partner and when you let yourself out. Once again, little did I know they can be insanely inaccurate.
As I said, our pull the goalie date was July 1, 2022. I was supposed to be ovulation (according to my little apps) about a week or so after this. My husband decided, not knowing my plan that it was a good time to take a trip with the boys to Kansas to scope out some hunting spots. Highly irritated, I moved out unborn, unconceived child’s birthday to May. Life went on as normal, so I thought.
One thing led to another with my attractive husband on the 2nd of July in the early morning. Laster that day I used the resources I had to find out I was actually a very fertile myrtle that day unlike the app was telling me, and I know the exact date our little girl was conceived.
Ovulation Testing!
I had read online every horror story about not being able to get pregnant due to being on birth control for so long, being a part of my generation, women in general being more vocal, and people I know struggling to get pregnant. So, with this fear I wanted to be “prepared” and as knowledgeable as possible, which is I assume what all women planning to get pregnant do. However, I didn’t want to place too much pressure on us and just wanted it to happen if it happened. Through this, I did end up find out that there is ovulation kit you can get off amazon for extremely cheap.
Essentially you end up getting 50 ovulation strips and 20 pregnancy test strips for $20. The package has about 65k 4.5 Star Reviews. I had ordered these sometime in June/July and started to mess around with them to see how they worked. It’s super user friendly and helpful. You are supposed to take the ovulation tests to see when you ovulate, and it will rate the darkness of the test and give you a bell curve of when you ovulate. You do this by peeing on the blue ovulation strip, waiting a few minutes logging onto the free app PreMom and take a photo of the test results. The app then rates the strip for that day to tell you the low or high change of ovulation. My exact results are below.
Whenever I tell people this story, I put a HUGE emphasis on not using the apps you can download and just type when your last period was to calculate your days of ovulation because, like I said, mine was not accurate. The apps were telling me that I should have been ovulating an entire week after I ovulated. I often wonder if this contributes to why women struggle to get pregnant on their own. When you bring up the subject, not many women even know you must be ovulating to even get pregnant in the first place.
The Pregnancy tests that come with the package are pink and they work the same way. You pee directly on the strip or use a cup then dip the stick into the cup for 5-10 seconds and it will give you your result within a few minutes. Depending on the darkness of the test results it rates low-high of your HCG levels by taking a photo of the results on the strip.
I ended up knowing that I was extremely fertile during the time not exactly “trying” but knew damn well we weren’t being “safe” in any way. Knowing this I was still taking the ovulation strips everyday to find out what my bell curve looked like and to be more knowledgeable about my own body. However, on July 13, 2022, for whatever reason I said okay lets to a pregnancy test too just to see what it looks like or how it works. I work from home, so I took my test and went back to working on my daily items. 15-20 minutes passed and frantically remembered I had to take a picture of my ovulation strip to get an accurate reading for this accurate bell curve I wanted.
I went back to my tests in the bathroom and saw the pink strip had an extremely faint line. I was not expecting this AT ALL due to the fear that had been instill in me of how hard it would be to conceive. Everyone from very close friends to doctors would say to me how it takes a normal healthy woman up to 6 months of trying to even get pregnant every time I even mentioned the thought of trying for a baby. I was literally in shock, like jaw hanging on the floor shocked. This was a week prior to when I was even supposed to have a missed period, so the confusion and shock compared to everything I was told was high.
This had to be about 10:30 AM and my husband worked until 4 PM that day. I obviously wanted to be sure, so I ran to the corner store and bought all different brands of pregnancy tests. Everything from the blue ones to the pink ones, the ones that were digital, the ones with happy face vs sad faces. I rushed home and took out the first and most accurate kind that would show YES if my levels were high enough. Sure enough, it didn’t even take 30 seconds for YES to show up. I just remember standing there in disbelief thinking holy shit I am pregnant. Completely alone in my house I couldn’t stop laughing or looking in the mirror saying oh my God I’m actually pregnant.
I ended up going to the store and getting baby balloons and a few more tests. I ended up taking all the tests which came back positive and put them on our center island along with the balloons. Dylan came home and was walking into the back door as I pressed record on my phone. I didn’t want him to feel like he had to give a certain kind of reaction, so I just set my phone on the counter faced up to catch the audio. It took him a second to register the balloons and tests, but he was over the freaking moon. Equally, if not more shocked than I was that it happened for us so quickly. We felt and still feel and understand how insanely blessed we are at how easily this little baby came to us.
We found out at around 13 weeks that she was a healthy baby girl, and we cannot imagine it any other way now that were currently 24 weeks pregnant. We literally are scared shitless but cannot wait to be Grace Elizabeth’s parents. We know this is going to be out biggest accomplishment yet and that its going to also be our biggest challenge yet, but we cannot wait for every laugh, smile, snuggle, and tearful moment we have ahead of us in result of this little baby girl coming into our life.
hollydanielleb.life 