"Sorry again, for not updating for closure on the last cycle. I'm bad at that, I guess. No, the tests were not faulty. I still have the ones from last cycle and the positive is clear enough for me to see, fainter the night before, fainter the day after, and then a negative. I was definitely pregnant. My period was REALLY heavy, for me. It also completely wiped me out and I felt unwell and shaky and faint the first day - maybe just the heaviness? After that it was more like a normal period, though still heavier than my usual. And I was okay with it, this time. I felt a bit sad, but you know. God knows what He is doing!"
So that updates the last cycle! :)
I can't believe I am already this far into my next cycle without an update here yet! I feel strangely guilty! ;)
My cycles are becoming more normal than I expected them to be after all that long year of waiting to ovulate (thinking I might never do so again) which is thrilling! :) I had 6 days of EWCM starting on CD11 (gasp! That's almost pre-children normal for me! Except for the 6 days thing. That's more potentially fertile days than I used to have.), and then I ovulated on CD16 - SIXTEEN!!! The earliest I've ovulated for... years, I think! Actually a completely "normal" time for a woman to ovulate! Yay! :D
There was no parsnips before I ovulated, not because we were avoiding it, but because we had my grandparents to stay over the weekend that I ovulated, and the days leading up to it were an exhausting blur of house-cleaning and the usual daily things (exhausting as they are, especially for Neil with his 2 hour commute to London, starting at 4.30am, urgh!). He took Monday off though, to recover, and you know... Monday morning... ;) So I either have zero percent chance of pregnancy, due to the egg only surviving up to 24 hours after ovulation, if we missed that window, or a really great chance of pregnancy, due to "perfect" timing of parsnips and freshly ovulated egg, hehe!
I can't isolate the hour I ovulated, so I just don't know which way it is for me this time around, but I had lots of EWCM until the afternoon of the Sunday, and then suddenly less of it. Apparently that can be a sign that ovulation has taken/is taking place. I had some ovulation type pain that afternoon/evening, but I can't remember the specifics on time now. Then, Monday morning I temped on waking as usual, and got a raised temp that is in my usual post-ovulation range, which surprised me! I did have that "overly warm" feel that I usually do after I ovulate, so in that sense it didn't surprise me, but otherwise I wasn't really expecting to see it. I thought maybe I would ovulate on the Monday. So the temp is a pretty certain thing for me, though I can have the odd rogue temp like that when I haven't yet ovulated (apparently, of late). BUT the higher temps were sustained after that, so I guess I did ovulate on Sunday. BUT (again, lol!), ALL of Monday morning and up to early afternoon, I had the most awful ovulation pain. I don't think I have had ovulation pain that bad before. It was so distracting, and seemed to be on both sides instead of just one like usual. I thought I had "done something" (and it was before the parsnips, so it wasn't to do with that), strained a muscle, or something, but it was definitely ovulation pain. It completely disappeared by mid-afternoon. So maybe I ovulated later than Sunday?! :/ Sunday night? So the temp was up by the morning but the pain, etc. was still lingering? If so, then Monday morning parsnips would be very good timing.
I remembered something I once read online when we only had boys and I was sometimes posting the nub pics of their ultrasounds at ingender.com, or whatever it's called. People talking about the O+12 method - I had already come across it, but I remembered it last week again. There's a theory (tried, tested, and apparently 90% success rate) that if you time the only parsnips you have in that cycle, for 12 hours AFTER ovulation, you are way more likely to conceive a girl. ;) A mother of 8 sons tried it, after following the now-debunked Shettles method for a girl (by which I have myself two sons, incidentally - not that I was trying it, just that was how the timing worked out on those particular cycles). She researched herself, and decided to try something new, timing parsnips for 12 hours after ovulation, to catch the egg in its last few hours. And behold, she had a daughter! ;) Since then there has been a high "success" rate (I say "success" like that because to me, success is a baby, not a gender). I never tried it, because we've never wanted to TRY for a baby (after Nathan, when we first changed our family planning method to the "over to you, Lord" method. ;) ), or try to influence the timing or gender or anything. Just not prevent, and enjoy! :D And hope and pray, of course, in my case! Heather, my lovely wonderful doula, has always said that you have to take action to prevent pregnancy, you don't take action to make babies. They are made by doing nothing but enjoying a healthy relationship with your hubby, which should be the case anyway. You can't prevent pregnancy by doing nothing. So we do nothing. ;) The point of which is to explain why I never tried the O+12 method. I didn't want to influence things either way, just let God.
The natural timing of things this time happens to put me either at more than 24 hours after ovulation (but I don't THINK it was that long after really, it must have been less than 24 hours after... I'm just not sure how many hours before 24 hours...), OR it puts me approximately in the O+12 window (parsnips 12-20 hours after ovulation).
So now I am already 8DPO (feel soooo guilty for not writing here sooner, ha!) and waiting for... a period? I don't know. It's the same kind of feeling as having NO IDEA if the baby I'm carrying is a boy or a girl - it could be either way and it's just a neutral wait to find out. Feels like that.
I have spent most of the week thinking I'm probably not pregnant, because - well, nothing obvious. But my temps are WACKY!! Never seen anything like them before! They are up one day, down the next, up the next day, down the day after, etc! Weeeird. Not particularly high temps either. One of the lower temp days, I woke up mouth-breathing, so that may have skewed it, but the other days were all same time, normal conditions, etc. Just weird. I figured they must be "non-pregnant" temps, seeing as they were so different from recent cycles where I have conceived. Maybe.
I haven't had many symptoms. I am unusually hungry for the past few days, except yesterday not quite so much. I have a hormonal spot that's come up yesterday. I felt unusually weepy one day a few days after ovulating (I almost NEVER feel weepy, so it's always a heads-up for me that something "different" is going on). It was sore to breastfeed for a few days from ovulation onwards, which is odd for me, but it's cleared up now, so maybe that was just something else. I had some odd crampy sensations a few days ago, which weren't usual for me, and in the end after much pondering, I put them down to constipation or something, since I couldn't be sure it wasn't due to that (I'm so constipated!!! It's my usual state, but it's worse this past week). But see, those are pretty small things, and even if I am not pregnant, I have hormones anyway, as my luteal phase goes on! So all of those could be down to that. Not sure about the hunger, for me, but yeah. No nausea this cycle - I had a mild bit one of the hungry days when I didn't get lunch fast enough, but nothing else.
BUT, though. Today I was making lunch for the children, and while I was standing there buttering bread, I suddenly became really really crampy. Within a few minutes it was classic period pain, hot and radiating, and through to my lower back on both sides. I kept making lunch, and then maybe 5 minutes of this period pain later, I felt a bit "leaky", so I knew I had my period, what with the pain just starting then too. Usually when I get my period the bleeding starts before the period pain, but whatever, it came on within the same 5 minutes. So I hurried through the rest of the lunch, desperate to get to the loo and get myself sorted out if I was starting my period. I got the kids at the table eating lunch and dashed off upstairs to find nothing at all on my underwear. The cramps were just as bad, so I figured I'd use the toilet and then wipe, and THEN it would be there, but still nothing, just the same CM I've been having since ovulating. For the first time, I thought, "Hmmm...!" ;) But I figured maybe my period would turn up in a little while. The next chance I got to remember about it was a few hours later, mid-afternoon, and I realised I had no crampy sensation at all! None! I couldn't remember how long it had lasted or when it cleared up (I am SO BUSY all day long!! My brain can't remember anything, lol!), but it was gone. It came back for a short bit (10 mins maybe?) later in the afternoon, and I went to the loo but there was no bleeding. And that was it. I've had some mild cramping since, but nothing much, and now it's midnight (aaaaargh, my alarm will go off in six hours!!!!) and I have no bleeding, but mild low backache and mild cramping right now, which I have had on and off all day, and for the last few days here and there.
Soooo, you know what I'm going to say. "Bad cramps" (on my chart) which occur in the luteal phase without being followed by my period within the hour, always. ALWAYS. mean pregnancy, for me. Always. And I may not be pregnant this time, but if that's the case, this will be the first time that I have ever had bad cramps in my luteal phase without my period following straight after, and NOT been pregnant. Ever, in all my 11 years of pregnancies! So that is a definite HMMM, even with all the other things that have made me think I am probably not pregnant. There's no denying this particular symptom. Maybe it'll be a new thing as I'm getting older or something, in my luteal phase? I don't buy it myself, but hey I'm open to the possibility. Maybe... We'll see.
I am very tired today, so I'm a crazy woman staying up this late to update my blog! :/ It's strange for me to be 8DPO and totally unable to rely on my temps for interpretation for once! They are so weird and have no pattern at all, so I can't hang anything on what tomorrow's temp will be! If it drops right down though, it will be a good sign that I'll start a period tomorrow, at least there's that. I'm really excited to have made it to 9DPO in the morning (which I will, as I'm going to bed now!), if I'm not pregnant, because I was wondering how long my LP might be without pregnancy to maybe eke it out a little more than otherwise, and the last two (both conceptions that didn't stick) were 8 days long - not enough. :( So if I get my period tomorrow then I will have had another 8 day luteal phase. It doesn't thrill me that I seem to be stuck with my luteal phase only lasting 8 days (no progression of it getting longer, like I'm used to), but it's a positive thing that I will have made it that far without the help of a pregnancy - hopefully the next one, if I conceive again, might be a little bit longer and it might be long enough to sustain a pregnancy?
The one other thing is... I have had a bit of EWCM on one occasion during the day AFTER I ovulated (literally, one time when I went to the loo, there was EWCM, and the rest of the day, none), and again the following day (two days after ovulation). When that happens, Fertility Friend likes to change your ovulation date to a bit later, because EWCM isn't supposed to occur much after ovulation. So it makes them think you haven't ovulated yet if you still have it, if you see what I mean. I had almost none, and nothing like the 6 days prior (tons, all day long), but you have to note it if you have it. The chart did that for me this cycle. At first it said that I ovulated on CD16, and then just this morning at 8DPO, when I entered my temp, it changed my ovulation date to CD19 for some reason! I took the last day of EWCM off (CD18) and it reverted back to CD16 for my ovulation date. So I'll keep it like that for now. I need to be aware that they might be right, much as I always hate to admit, lol! The first time this ever happened, was when Lydia was conceived. I KNEW when I ovulated, I had a little bit of EWCM after I usually do, after ovulation, and they went and changed my ovulation date around this time in my LP. I was so annoyed, and then oh, it turned out they were right and I somehow ovulated later than I thought, despite all my symptoms and knowing my body so well with all these years of being Crazy Obsesso-Woman, lol! ;) Goes to show! It has happened once in recent months as well. So, with that crazy ovulation pain and the VERY OBVIOUS fertile CM and symptoms, AND the temp rise after CD16, I totally think I ovulated then, but there is a chance I didn't ovulate until a couple of days later (or 3 days, if FF is correct). Which definitely gives me a good chance at being pregnant this cycle. :) But it would make me only 5DPO so far.
Anyway, I must go to bed! I will update again, and try to do better at this closure thing when I get my period! Sorry about that!