How to make a good Fertility Action Plan

According to the current school of thoughts, if you have actively tried for a year to get pregnant and failed, you may have a fertility problem.
You should not be desperate; maybe you just kept missing the time when you were the most fertile.

Before rushing to the doctor to run expensive testing, the first thing to do is to draw an action plan.
Nothing works better than an action plan, where you can put down the steps you are to follow to get some answers.
Because you know, every person is different. People think in cliché and very often is better to learn to understand your body first, and then take the decisions.

I was talking previously about taking the basal temperature and what you can learn from it.
So, let’s try to make an action plan, shall we?

1.Start by taking good quality vitamins that include 1 mg Folic Acid, very, very important for the good neural development of the baby. It’s best to have be taking it for a year prior to conceiving, especially in our baby boomer’s case, more prone to pass genetical defects to the baby.
2. Purchase a basal thermometer and get a piece of paper ready for taking notes.
3. Establish how do you feel comfortable taking your temperature: vaginal or oral. I was asked if it’s embarrassing taking it vaginally. Yes, it is. That’s the reason I took my vaginal temperature in the bathroom, not in the bed. I was asked another question: how do you take the temperature vaginally? Although taken aback by the question, I tried to give a straight answer: the same way you have intercourse, only that instead of a penis you insert a thermometer in the vagina. Naturally you have to be careful not to push it too much inside, because then you have to dig in and recover it. Again, it’s a thermometer, not a dildo.
4. Take your temperature at the same time if possible, every day. Start monitoring even if you are having your period.
5. Along with the temperature, record the cervical mucus. It’s an important tool to evaluate the changes that occur within your body. A normal mucus should be translucid, increasing in quantity around ovulation time. You are going to see that right after the end of the period, there are going to be some ‘dry’ days, with hardly any mucus. Approaching ovulation, it should be an increase in the quantity and the aspect. The mucus will ensure a nutritious medium for the sperm as well.
6. Between two periods you are going to get a graph. From the graph you will see how long is the time between ovulation and the onset of the next period. This is called the lutheal phase (LP) and a normal one should be about 13 days. If the ovulation is not a fix date or time of the month, the LP should be almost the same, plus or minus a day. If the LP is too short, you have to work something on prolonging it. But let’s not get ahead of ourself. We’ll talk about it more later on.
7. Pay attention to your libido; it tends to increase around ovulation time. I guess the Mother Nature is sending signals that it’s time to procreate.

You have to go through this monitoring for a few months in order to establish a tendency and draw conclusions.
When you know more about your cycle, you will be able to choose options. It’s not point of starting taking supplements (other than multi vitamins) until you figure out what’s happening with your body.

Along with my taking vitamins, I put my husband through the same regim. Why? Because he was over 40 as well, and because I wanted to improve the quality of his sperm. Very often men mistakenly think that just because they ejaculate, they can procreate as well. Not true.
They can have lazy sperm or not motile at all ones. At that point there is no chance to be able to fecundate anything. The sperm is dead.
But that’s the worst scenario. We’ll talk about men vitamins and supplements later on as well.