Wednesday, June 29, 2016

What We've Been Up To

We were introduced to this great summary of Catholic thought on sex, marriage, and contraceptives - "What the Catholic Church Teaches on Contraception and Why."

We've been following the news on Zika (remember our three part series on Zika). There have been two interesting reports from Colombia ("New Doubts..." and "Five new confirmed cases", both interesting and neither conclusive.

I finally got diagnosed with hypothyroidism, after nearly 2 years of being certain it was effecting my cycles. We've been reading a ton on hypothyroidism, and hopefully NaturalGuy will be writing a post with some of the studies we've found most helpful.





Saturday, June 11, 2016

We're back!

We're finally finding a new normal to settle into. NaturalGuy started a new job recently and I just quit my job. We're still very sad about the loss of our Nicola, but also increasingly eager and anxious for another baby. We're driving ourselves crazy with charting and spotting "pregnancy" symptoms.

We've spent a lot of time in doctor's offices in the past few months and we've been very grateful for our charts. We've been working with a nutritionist who uses CCL charts and through this and a blood test our doctor ordered, managed to diagnose and correct vitamin D deficiency. More recently, we've been working with a NaPro (Creighton) trained doctor. She is happy to work with our CCL charts, although we've started learning Creighton in case it gives us some insight. It's been very easy to get the hang of Creighton - the "rules" are very similar to CCL's mucus only rules, and of course, we're not TTA so it's mostly just observation. Creighton's notation for mucus is quite nice. I think the biggest weakness in Creighton is that there is no way to distinguish an unsuccessful attempt at ovulation from a successful one, aside from the note that if a woman is under "unusual stress" she should be prepared for multiple attempts. This would be really tough for us during my longer cycles. Creighton is also very heavy on instructor/couple interaction - we had a bit of trouble finding a teacher who "clicked" with us and switched after the first class.

Otherwise, we've been taking things one day at a time. We'd appreciate prayers!