When to Start?

Some things I've learned so far from "The Impatient Woman's Guide to Getting Pregnant":

• Start prenatal vitamins as soon are you are considering getting pregnant.   Now you can get prenatal vitamins with DHA included, but I found a few downsides to that.  They're WAY more expensive and they aren't as easy on your stomach.  After lots of research and input from  my pharmacist friend, I opted for Nature Made Prenatals.   I supplemented these with a Fish Oil/DHA and calcium.

• You may want to give up smoking, drugs, alcohol, and caffeine before attempting to get pregnant.  And that goes for your partner too.  These have been found to reduce fertility.  The extent of my drinking pre-pregnancy was a glass of wine here or there, so I wasn't overly concerned with this.  

• It will take your body some time to regulate after stopping birth control.  Now this doesn't mean that you can't get pregnant the first cycle off, it just means your cycle won't be consistent and that if you plan on charting, it may be difficult. 

• Stress does not reduce fertility!  Again, it may make your cycle irregular and make it difficult to chart/predict when you're ovulating, but it doesn't make you any less fertile. 

• It can take a while to get pregnant.  For an average, healthy woman, it takes 6 to 12 months to become pregnant.  

With this last piece of information, my husband and I decided that we wanted to get started sooner rather than later.  I will be going off my birth control at the end of my current pack, which is exactly one month from now.

The Right Time to Start

My husband and I finally decided that it was the right time to start our family.  And no it wasn't some magical moment where everything perfectly aligned and we both felt ready to be parents.  The conversation last week went something like this:

Me:  "Your birthday's in a few months.  You're going to be 29, we're getting so old."
Hubby:  "We are, we're almost 30."
Me:  "Wow.  Wasn't our plan to have our first kid before then? That's crazy."
Hubby:  "Yeah, we should probably get started on that."

And that was how it all began.  Like I said, no magical moment where we both felt ready because really I think if we waited for that to happen we'd never have kids.

So, ready to get started, I wanted to do my research and get the facts.  I purchased the following books to get me started:

The Impatient Woman's Guide to Getting Pregnant by Jean M. Twenge

Bumpology:  The Myth-Busting Pregnancy Book for Curious Parents-To-Be by Linda Geddes
A science journalist attempting to make sense of conflicting advice about pregnancy.

Expecting Better:  Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom is Wrong - and What You Really Need to Know by Emily Oster
A professor of economics gathers and presents all of the data out there to give you everything you need to make informed decisions regarding your pregnancy.