From a young age, I have always known that I wanted a family with multiple children. However, as we all know, we spend most of our young adult life praying not to be pregnant and I still saw babies and kids as weird screaming aliens until very recently. The baby fever switch was quite sudden and I suddenly found myself adoringly staring at random stranger’s babies and wondering how amazing it would feel to have my own. I think meeting the love of my life, Jerry, definitely helped in propelling me into this mode. I was so excited to marry him and to start a family, I can only begin to imagine what an amazing father he would be to our children.

We got married in August after being engaged for a little more than 11 months and dating for less than 2 years. In my wedding vows, I likened our relationship to my favorite quote from “When Harry Met Sally”: When you meet the person you want to spend the rest of your life with, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible”.  Shortly after we were married, we decided we were ready to start trying for a baby. We started living together early on so did not feel the need to have to try out the “married life” feeling, since we already felt that way!

After doing some research in how to prepare my body for a baby, I also realized that getting pregnant is not easy at all. I follow many amazing bloggers who share candidly their struggle with infertility and was surprised to know that it can happen to anyone, not just people who are above a certain age. I think we assume it is easy because people usually post the good news, but very often we do not see the struggle and effort that has gone on behind the scenes. Because of this, I wanted to give myself a realistic time frame for getting pregnant and to have fun! I did not want this to be a unromantic process where the only goal is to make a baby. Ultimately this is about the love I have for my husband and our plans to start and raise a happy family together. I decided to just go at it naturally and not rely on ovulation tests for now as I felt like it made it a bit too planned and structured (however ovulations tests can be very helpful for people with irregular periods!).

After a amazing month long honeymoon trekking across numerous national parks, I returned to Hong Kong and stopped my birth control. I thought it would be good to give my body some time to get back into its regular cycle. I did do a bunch of research about signs of ovulation, but symptoms also differ between each person. In two weeks, I was traveling to Spain, London, and Amsterdam and according to a regular cycle that would be my time of ovulation. When I was back from my trip, I noticed that I was a lot more emotionally volatile (oh no!) than usual and also quite fatigued for no reason. I would also get hot flashes particularly after eating. I decided to get an early response pregnancy test and patiently waited for the results…

After waiting a few minutes, I was surprised and slightly disappointed to see the signs for “Not pregnant” on the pregnancy test.

 

To be continued…