Preparing for Pregnancy: Nutrition (Part 3)

NaturalGuy and I have been putting some effort into improving our eating habits. We want to be healthy and we want to raise our children with healthy attitudes towards food. I want to eat as nutritious a diet as I can - afterall, I'm hoping to grow a baby in the foreseeable future!

Being "Pro-Creation" in Conversation

Sex, children, and marriage are not infrequent conversation topics among our diverse group of friends, and those are sometimes tricky conversations for us. Most of our friends have different views on these topics and it can be tricky to explain what we believe - and tricky to even feel included in many of the conversations. In the past few months we've been trying to get more comfortable living our faith publicly and one way we're doing this is by being more open about how we want children sooner rather than later. We've been lucky enough to get some great advice from more experienced married couples using NFP -

The affect of night light on menstrual cycles

I just had the shortest cycle I've had while charting, and I suspect the shortest for a while before that as well. I ovulated on day 19, a solid 7 days before my previous earliest ovulation and my cycle ended on day 31. What a sudden change! This has gotten me speculating on what might have made the difference. At first I thought that nothing had changed, but then I did some sleuthing and found a few articles on the effect of light at night on the menstrual cycle.

10 things to do during the fertile phase

NaturalGuy and I are abstaining at the moment - we're seeing fertile mucus earlier than in previous cycles and we're hoping that means I ovulate earlier as well :) Last night we went to a talk on discerning, as a Catholic, that your vocation is marriage. Obviously we'd already done the discerning! But it was certainly interesting to listen to a deacon talk about dating and very fun to talk to some people we'd met at previous talks.

During the talk, one woman asked the deacon whether abstaining during the fertile phase while married was the same as abstaining before marriage. To me, this was an unexpected question.

NYT's follow up to "The Population Bomb"

 I've written about population growth before - namely, why I'm not too worried about it, but I had never heard of "The Population Bomb", a alarmist book published in 1968 that predicted that by the year 2000, overpopulation would cause world-wide disaster. Apparently, this is one of the books that kicked off the fear of overpopulation. The New York Times created this fascinating video, although I think the video does watchers a disservice by not describing the horrific means the author Paul R. Ehrlich considers for decreasing the population.