Trying to Conceive

We've decided to switch from not preventing pregnancy to trying to conceive this month. My husband has repeatedly stated that he doesn't get the difference but he's fine with whatever I want to call it as long as it involves nookie. It's come down to the fact that my relationship with my hormones is best described as "adversarial." Over the last few months I have felt like myself about 25% of the time. The rest of the time I have PMS, the P itself, a nice reaction to all that progesterone my body would like to keep on hand "just in case," or am recovering from all this hormonal excitement. I don't remember it being all that bad before and I suspect that nursing hasn't helped matters. It seems that the level of nursing Charlie would like to do puts me right on the edge between suppression of cycles and full-on fertility and any little change (like nursing an extra time a night while my husband is away) throws the whole thing into a tizzy. In addition, around when I ovulate, my supply dips so there are extra night feedings which confuses things more and then we get an incident like this month when I think I ovulated (and dipped) twice to make for 2 weeks of a special kind of miserable. Of course, all this night waking makes temping completely pointless so this is just an educated guess about the ovulating based on limited secondary fertility signs. I drew the line at checking my cervix... At any rate, it left me feeling that if I was going to be this miserable, I might as well be miserable with a purpose and go ahead and really make an effort at getting pregnant.

And, since it's really getting to the point that if things don't stabilize I will wean due to sheer misery, we've started night weaning. Charlie usually nurses at least once during the night still and sometimes more frequently. According to my research, night nursing effects fertility more than day nursing and so, I assume, cutting it out will help stabilize my hormones. Also, a good portion of the time he doesn't actually eat all that much and they only time we have a hope of doing night weaning is this month- the first time in ages my husband is slated to be home for several weeks in a row. Last night was our 1st go and went rather unexpectedly. The DH and I were prepared for much crying and tantruming and misery. The deal was that Charlie wouldn't be seeing mommy at all until time for the morning nursing which we decided could happen anytime after 5am (envisioning hourly wakings with wailing). Sometime between 1:30 and 3ish, the window Charlie usually wakes up in for his 1st night feeding, my husband would go in with a snack and hold Charlie in the rocker while he ate. We expected this to go over like a lead balloon and so we picked one of his favorite snacks. 2:30 rolled around and in my DH went... The snack was greeted with crows of delight, happy babbling and eating ensued. There was no crying at all. Over the next few nights we will fade the snack and then fade the rocking and, in happy land, Charlie will magically begin sleeping through the night within the next 2 weeks. Now we just need to tell Charlie the plan...