There is one book I recommend to any woman trying to get pregnant or trying not to get pregnant. It’s called “Taking Charge of Your Fertility,” and it teaches you how to read 3 bodily signs to know when you’re fertile: your temperature, your cervical fluid and the position of your cervix. It also breaks down your cycle into days and explains what’s going on on what days so you know exactly when you’re most likely to conceive and when you’re not.

It is NOT the rhythm method. It’s called the Fertility Awareness Method and it’s much more informed and reliable. You can either use this information in the book for birth control or baby-making. I used it for both.

In our first year of marriage, I got so sick of the pill—I felt like I was having PMS all month instead of just the week before my period. I was fighting with Dave constantly and I just wanted to get off it. So I picked up this book, started charting (they provide you with detailed charts to track your bodily signs and a lot of other things) and got off the pill. It was a great decision.

I think because I was charting for 4 years for birth control before we started trying, I was already in tune with my body’s cycle. We just had to switch the timing of things. Instead of NOT having sex on the days I was fertile, we HAD to have sex on the days I was fertile. We ended up getting pregnant in 3 months. The first 2 months we were too stressed an ended up fighting instead of lovemaking on our fertile days, which is a very real and frustrating factor in “trying.”

So if you’re in either category, trying or not trying to conceive, you really should read this book. To me it was like lightbulbs turning on on every page—I thought to myself why on earth didn’t they teach us this in 5th, 6th and 9th grade sex ed? Maybe I wasn’t paying attention...or maybe it wasn’t as relevant to me back then.