**Any man out there reading this blog may want to skip this post. I will not write ANYTHING offensive, personal, or embarrassing in nature. I will write as if my father or brother were reading this. I just wanted to put a warning there if it makes anyone uncomfortable.
Perhaps someone will stumble upon this post who really needs to read it.
I mentioned in my last post that I had trouble getting pregnant this time around. The majority of women are able to conceive twelve months postpartum, some obviously before, and others later. For women who are nursing, twelve months seems to be the time that most babies either cut back significantly or are weaned altogether. Once a baby stops nursing through the night, a woman's chances of pregnancy skyrocket. Caleb stopped nursing through the night a long time ago, and when he hit the one year mark, I found myself unable to conceive, for several months, in fact.
What is not commonly known is that ANY nursing at all, for some women, is a means of contraception, even if it is one measly nursing a day. Many women do not have this problem, and go on happily to conceive while still nursing. I found myself in the former category, though it took me a few months to realize what the problem was.
I used the charting method in order to achieve pregnancy, as I did with Caleb. I won't go into the details of that here, but it is incredibly helpful to figure out where you are in your cycle and when the time of ovulation might be. It involves taking your temperature each morning before your feet even hit the floor, which is also a great tool in pointing out a key detail in a woman's cycle: when ovulation has occurred. That part of the cycle, after ovulation occurs, to the start of the next cycle, is important also. That is called the luteal phase.
After several months of disappointment, I was trying to figure out why we were not having success. I was scared because I was getting older. Perhaps my time was done. In desperation, I began to search the internet for things like "trying to conceive while nursing", wondering if nursing had anything to do with our lack of success.
It turned out it did. In a nutshell, nursing was causing my luteal phase to remain too short (too short means under ten days), which meant simply this: no fertilized egg would be able to implant itself on the uterus wall. It is possible to even have an extremely early miscarriage, in which the egg was fertilized, but could not make a go of it. Whether that is a life that will be in heaven, I have no idea. Only God does.
I discovered that there is a solution! By taking an herbal supplement called Vitex, a woman's luteal phase could stretch out in one or two cycles, and thus achieve the pregnancy she longed for. Totally healthy, by the way, no chemicals involved in any way.
I feel blessed that my solution was an easy one. I didn't see any doctors nor did I have to even leave the comfort of my home to get an answer.
Praise God from whom all blessings flow! We are so excited for this new life within me!
