Natural Family Planning - To avoid and to conceive

I've been charting for 30 cycles. We started charting because after 10 years on the birth control pill, I and my husband (Frenchie) were thinking I'd gone crazy. The pill is supposed to level your moods, help with acne, and keep your period coming every 28 or so days. So what happens when your moods go all over, you breakout consistently and you're getting more than one period in 28 days? You start looking for alternatives.

My Dr had put me on 3 different pills in the 2 years I was having trouble. Every 4 months or so we would change to another one because of side effects, or there being no improvement. Finally, my husband (fiancé at the time) said enough. He said get off the pills, we'll figure something out.

I turned to Natural Family Planning (NFP) as our alternative. I was tired of stopping my body from doing what it was meant to do. I wanted to stop putting fake hormones in my body and allow it to rest and return to it's natural state. I read the book Taking Charge of Your Fertility front to back. We took the plunge and started charting to avoid pregnancy. We did two months on our own, and then went to a teaching couple I found through Serena Alberta.

The couple was amazing. A husband and wife team taught us everything we needed to know to avoid pregnancy, and how to, when the time came, switch to trying to conceive. The thing I loved was that the husband of the pair of them talked directly to mine. He was adamant that Frenchie learn all the rules and how to read my charts just as well as me. I didn't want to be the "gate keeper" so he needed to know by looking at my chart when we could and couldn't do the deed.

We successfully avoided getting pregnant for almost 3 years. It wasn't hard to do, and although at times it was frustrating, it's a wonderful way to be on the same page. You learn to be more intimate with each other in more ways and enjoy the "honeymoon" phase every cycle.

Fast forward to now. We have now flipped our charts to try and conceive. All those times we avoided, we now look forward to.

I have learned a lot about my cycles and about me as a person. I have learned how stress affects me, that not everyone is an "ovulation at 14 days and period at 28" person. I have learned to see how my cycles change with certain times of life and able to figure out when something isn't quite right. I am so thankful we switched to NFP and I can't see us ever doing anything else.

Preconception: What we thought about

Husband and I have been together for 6 years, married for 2. When we got married we wanted to wait a bit before starting a family. Just be married, enjoy being husband and wife and do a lot of things you can't do once baby comes. Not saying you CAN'T do what we had planned, it's just more difficult, and different.

We looked at our finances.
We started taking my entire salary and putting it into savings and living on his to see how we would do. What we saved we would use for travel and lump sum payments on anything (Car, Mortgage, Loans etc) We made a "baby fund". I made a budget for how much things would approximately cost for the first year of having a child. I also made a budget for being a working mom outside the home, inside the home or not working at all. I'm thorough and Husband likes data.

We made a "Baby Bucket List"
These were things we wanted to do before we were blessed with a baby.
Most of them were traveling or hanging out with friends. Our biggest thing was France. We wanted to go, not worry about being away for close to 3 weeks. Enjoy drinking as much wine, eating as much cheese and seeing all the sights without towing a kid around. That trip, for me, was our "last hoorah" before settling down.
We went to almost everywhere on our list, except a few that we decided we could do with kids.

We started looking after ourselves.
Husband and I are each 50% of the DNA that makes a child. We both need to be healthy by eating a balanced diet, exercising and taking care of our emotional well-being.
For me, my emotional well-being is the biggest place I have trouble. I am a stress case. I have had mild depression and frequent anxiety attacks that were quite debilitating. It takes a strong person to be selfish and do the right thing for themselves.

We started charting using NFP (Natural Family Planning)
I'll have a special post on this entirely, but a quick summary here. We started using NFP long before wanting to start a family. (Yes, it works!) I was tired of hormones being put into my body and wanted it to function on it's own. This allowed us to see exactly how I was affected by stress, changes, anxiety and led us to be preventative about health rather than waiting for "something to be wrong". It also brought us closer as a couple and allowed us to be more involved in how my body, a future mother, works.

We started training the dogs
I'm not saying they weren't trained before, they were. This is a different kind of training.
We never really thought about how the dogs are with kids until we thought about the "what ifs" of having a child and two dogs.
I have several nieces and my sisters are wonderful to help us with the dogs. They would bring their children and allow us to see how the dogs interacted in a VERY supervised environment and did so frequently in order to get them used to these small creatures that move fast and make high pitched sounds. We have a trainer as well that is giving us life long skills to train them. The great thing about him is he will come back and train us as our life changes.

What things did you think about before trying to conceive?

Why "makes five" ?

You're probably wondering why the title is "And Bébé Makes Five"
Well, we have two children of the fur variety. Adding a baby would make us a family of 5.

Beta and Taylor are our two dogs. 

Beta we have had since she was 2 months old. We adopted her from a rescue society and she's been in our family for 4.5 years. She'll turn 5 December 2013.

Taylor is our newest addition. We adopted her from a friend in January 2013. Our friend was leaving for a school term in Europe and unable to take Taylor with her. The adoption was great and she fit right into our family, making us four. A dog for each of us! Taylor will turn 5 in August 2013.

We've been married for 2 years. We've done a lot of travelling and it's finally time. We pray to God that he will bless us with a life (or two!) to cherish and raise.

I hope you will join me on my blog as I post about preconception, trying to conceive, pregnancy, birth, and our growing family.