A couple days of (non) ferning pictures

Day before yesterday has a pretty classic non-fertile pattern of spots:

 It always looks like I"m taking pictures of some celestial body, doesn't it?   Anyway,  today's looks more transitional although no ferning:

Random

I think I just overheard my co-worker say something about time traveling with baguettes to whoever he's talking to on the phone.  Meanwhile, the guys in the next cube cluster are talking about what would happen if you ate the really tiny magnets they've been playing with all morning.  If you ate one and then waited ten minutes and ate another one, would they be strong enough to cause bowel perforation?  If a cow swallowed some barbed wire, could you feed it magnets to try to work the barbed wire out of its system?

Yeah.  I work with software developers.

Fertility tracking tools

I admit it.  I am a gadget freak.  I like to tinker and play with widgets and gizmos.  So, when we started trying to conceive, I went looking for TTC gadgets.   If you have not gone looking yourself, you would probably be surprised at how many gadgets and gizmos are available for tracking fertility signs.  I have already introduced you to the "ovulation microscope."  I actually own two of these gadgets.  The Fertile-Focus is a small, lipstick-shaped microscope that is designed to be unobtrusively carried about on one's person.  It works... mostly.  It only has 50x magnification.  The "slide" you put your saliva on is basically the back of the lens, and when I look into it I feel like the LED light is burning a hole in my brain.  But, it works.

The Fertility Tracker (tm) is a slightly larger, less discreet model but still easily portable.  It has 100x magnification and comes with six actual (plastic, unfortunately) slides.  I can keep my results around for a few days for comparison, which I really like.  The pictures on this site are taken through the lens of the Fertility Tracker (tm) with my Canon digital camera.

But wait!  There's more!  I also bought an OV Watch (tm).  This gizmo is designed to be worn on the wrist like, well, a watch.  It has little sensors in it that test perspiration for electrolyte content.   It is an expensive gizmo. The "watch" itself costs around a hundred bucks, plus you have to buy a new sensor each month and those are about $40 each.  You can get package deals where you buy the watch and multiple sensors at the same time, but I'm glad I did not do that because this thing just does not work for me.

It works by looking for a surge in chloride ions.  The problem is that women normally have more than one chloride ion surge in each cycle.  For the "normal" 28-day cycle, the first chloride surge comes about 5 or 6 days before ovulation.  There is a second surge that occurs close to the time of the LH surge (just after it), so just a few hours before ovulation.  The OV watch, in the case of a "normal" 28-day cycle, looks for that first surge and starts counting down to ovulation.

If your cycle is longer than 28 days, however, the first surge may be much more than 5 - 6 days before ovulation.  In fact, the surge that comes 5 - 6 days before ovulation for women with cycles of 30 - 39 days may be the second or even the third surge their bodies go through in a month.   To see a graph of how the surges line up, check  ovwatch.com.  Unfortunately, their graph only depicts a "typical" 28 day cycle, so if you're not "typical," they don't have much to say to you.

This is all well and good if you have regular cycles that are about the same length every month.  OV Watch can be programmed to recognize that your cycle is longer and then it will look for the second (or subsequent) surge before it starts counting down.   But, if your cycles vary from month to month, OV Watch can not cope.  Each month, it will look for your surge based on the length of your last cycle (or based on an average length, which could be even worse).   If you have yo-yo cycles (long, short, long, short), it will be wrong every time!   The worst part though, in my opinion, is that these chloride surges can happen whether or not you ovulate.  They just happen to line up with ovulation, timing wise, but they do not directly correlate with ovulation.  So, the OV watch tells you that it is five days before ovulation and you believe it, but you may or may not actually ovulate.  In spite of its name, the "OV" watch is NOT an ovulation predictor. There is only one, tiny note of that in their documentation, "Women whose menstrual cycles are anovulatory might get misleading results from this device."

Of course the most famous and well-known fertility gadget is the Basal Body Thermometer.  This little jewel is not much different from a regular thermometer, just a little more precise.  If used every day, first thing in the morning after at least three solid hours of sleep, it can detect the rise in body temperature that is a tell-tale sign of progesterone production which is an indication that ovulation has taken place.

Added to my arsenal of gadgets are the OPK test strips that test for LH surge and the home pregnancy test kits for "just in case" purposes (I'm sure I'll need them some day), as well as Preseed (tm) lubricant because every other lubricant (including saliva, apparently) kills sperm.  I have my own little science lab going on.  It's pretty cool, actually.

I may miss all the testing and playing with microscopes after I get pregnant.

WOW night

"Honey, we have enough guildies on to run a heroic, are you coming up?"
"Just a second. I'm downstairs taking pictures of my spit."

Sigh. This is probably not a conversation that would happen in most households. Today's "spit" looks more transitional. Only a very tiny bit of ferning. I wish I could get better pictures of it. The crystalization patterns show up better, but not as well as I would like.

If only it were that simple

I frequently wonder what kind of parent I will be if i do manage to procreate.  I did not have good role models.  I also did pretty poorly the first time I tried this.   Should I start taking parenting classes now, or wait until I have a reasonable expectation that soon there may be something to parent? 

CD26, DPO 5

Still quite a bit of ferning.  I was surprised to see this at DPO5.  I have not used the microscope for very long, so I'm not sure if this is normal for me.

CD 22, DPO1

Taken with my Cannon A435 through the lens of a fertile-focus microscope.

DPO 5, cycle 2

This may seem an odd place to start a TTC journal.  I am in the middle of the two week wait.  This could be the time!  In that case, this will turn from a trying-to-conceive journal to a pregnancy journal tout de suite. Otherwise, I shall go on chronicling this weird time in my life just because it seems the modern thing to do.

I am 42 years old. Why, you may ask, would I just be deciding to have a child at this "advanced maternal age"? Well, this is not the way I thought my life would go. Truthfully, I never thought I would want children until I accidentally had one 20 years ago. She was the love of my life. I did everything wrong, from divorcing her father to letting him have custody of her (he was a bully, I - a wimp), and so on. She had a rough life. She would have turned out fine in the end, if a bit rough around the edges from her early life experiences. She would have -- except she was killed in a car accident several years ago. She was seventeen.

But, that is not why I'm trying to conceive. Not entirely, at any rate. Before my daughter died, I met the man of my dreams. My true soul mate. At that point, we were old enough to hear our biological clocks ticking, but young enough to believe that we could still make a baby. I talked it over with my daughter and she was all for it. It was going to be perfect.

Except the part where my daughter was killed in a car accident. And I was in no emotional state after she died to think about trying again. So we waited... and waited...

And now, I am 42 and he is 38. Is it too late? I suppose we shall see.