Do You Know When You Can Get Pregnant?

 

Best Times to Conceive

When can you get pregnant, and when is your next best chance to begin the baby you and your partner are trying for?

As you may already know, there are several choices you can make to increase your chance of getting pregnant naturally and also influencing whether your child will be a boy or a girl.

This includes the choices you make about what you eat, lovemaking positions and understanding your monthly cycle.

When You Can Get Pregnant – Know Your Cycle

During your cycle, there are only 4 to 5 days each month when pregnancy is possible. These fertile days are just before until just after ovulation.

Some couples opt to have intercourse every other day when trying for a baby (and more frequently is also OK), while others want to know when ovulation is happening. There are several ways to do this.

If your menstrual cycle usually is 28 days, this will make day 14 the day of ovulation and your best chance day to become pregnant (day 1 would be the first day that your last period began). If your average cycle is 30 days, day 16 is the day of ovulation. Or if it is usually 32 days for you, the ‘magic’ day is day 18.

When You Can Get Pregnant – Body Temperature

Body temperature rises just slightly – by as little as a tenth of one degree up to a full degree – at the time of ovulation.

By tracking your basal body temperature for a cycle, you will be able to pinpoint the right day, and this is easy to do at home with an inexpensive basal body thermometer from the pharmacy (chemist). Use it right after you wake each morning.

When You Can Get Pregnant – Other Methods

There are also now ovulation sensors (they actually measure a hormone that is present just before ovulation) that can predict when you will ovulate a couple of days or so in advance, but these cost a bit more than the basal thermometers (expect to pay about $30 to $45 for nine uses).

You won’t need any equipment at all to monitor your cervical mucus.

Ovulation causes a change in the appearance and consistency of cervical mucus, the clear vaginal liquid. Most of the time, it is a natural anti-sperm agent; but at ovulation it becomes thinner, slippery and the consistency of egg white and actually helps sperm reach the egg.

Learn as much as possible about fertility, getting pregnant, pregnancy and having a healthy baby.

Alicia Pennington is a former midwife and now a baby gender selection coach who has written Prince or Princess, an e-book about natural ways to get pregnant with the baby boy or baby girl you really want and everything you can do to increase your chances for success.

She developed her knowledge and methods in more than 12 years working with new parents, and then used these methods herself to get the daughter, and then a son, she and her partner wanted.

“We really wanted a girl first; then a boy,” she says. “And that’s exactly what we got!”

When You Can Get Pregnant – When To Make Love To Make A Baby Girl…Or Boy

So, now that you’ve narrowed it down to five days of the month where you are fertile, it’s time to figure out how to time lovemaking to choose the gender of your child.

Let’s consider the differences in sperm that carry the chromosomes that decide gender.

A sperm carrying the Y chromosome will result in a boy if it successfully fertilizes the egg.

A sperm carrying the X chromosome will result in a girl.

Think of Y sperm as the sprinters, while X sperm are the marathon runners.

Y sperm are very small, but also very quick and agile. The main downside is that they don’t live very long.

X sperm are bigger and much slower, but they have the advantage of living a lot longer.

To have a boy, you will need to allow the Y sperm the time they need to reach the egg as quickly as possible. This means sex on the day that you ovulate. The Y sperm won’t live much longer than that 24-hour period that the egg is viable and you need to give them that chance to meet the egg before they expire.

If you’re trying for a girl, you should time intercourse to two to three days before ovulation. During this time, the Y sperm will have died out, leaving the slower but more hardy X sperm still in the race. This increases the chances that you will have a girl.

Find out more about how you can naturally select your child’s gender.