Pregnancy diary: Deciding to start a family and conception

After ticking off an overseas holiday and a friends’ wedding, we were ready to become parents. But when I found out I was pregant I was a little dumbstruck. This is why.

I’d always told my partner, Michael, that I’d wanted to live in our house, just us, for at least two years before having kids.

He’s wanted to start a family for a few years now but I was determined to get to a place of financial stability and into our own house before we even seriously contemplated it.

And so, as we approached that mark this year, we’d started talking about it again.

I had two things that I wanted to get out of the way before beginning the baby journey: Our postponed-from-2020 Thailand trip in January and our friends’ wedding in March.

Imogen and Michael in Thailand on holiday.

Michael and Imogen at a friends' wedding.

Once the boozy start to the year was done and dusted, we began the journey of starting our family by going to the doctors.

We told the doctor we wanted to have a baby and were keen to know the first basic steps.

She mentioned the obvious things to keep up general health; eat well, exercise regularly; don’t smoke or vape; and, it’s best not to drink alcohol while trying to conceive.

She instructed me to begin taking a preconception/pregnancy vitamin, which contains folic acid, iron and iodine, to support conception and pregnancy.

Pregnancy vitamins – Elevit, iron and folic acid.

She also said there’d be some blood tests to do once I did fall pregnant but we didn’t need to do anything with that just yet.

I’d already come off the contraceptive pill, so the doctor said it was now about tracking my cycle to know when I was ovulating for the best chance of getting pregnant.

I’d been on the pill for about 10 years, and had had pretty regular periods before that, so tracking my period was a new concept for me.

She also said that it was normal for it to take anywhere between six to 12 months to fall pregnant and not to worry if it didn’t happen straight away.

Once home, I downloaded one of the many period tracking apps available and plugged in some basic info about why I was tracking, when my last period was and roughly how long they lasted.

From there, the app gave me a doughnut-chart-looking breakdown of my cycle which indicated when I was ovulating and when my period was scheduled to arrive.

I don’t need to explain the birds and bees to you – you know what happened when I was in my ovulation window.

Then began the waiting game. Will my period come? Won’t it?

During those three or so weeks, whenever I’d get a bit annoyed with my partner Michael, he would joke about me already being pregnant, which was always met by my sneer.

As the week of my period rolled around, the nervousness increased, as did the jokes.

But the days passed by and my period was nowhere to be seen.

I said to Michael, “No but seriously, if it doesn’t come by Wednesday I’m going to have to do a test.”

Cue me, on Wednesday, still period-free, going to the chemist to buy a pregnancy test.

While we had been joking about it, I took the test feeling like I was probably pregnant.

Can you see the disbelief in our eyes?

‘Oh my gosh!’.

So I peed on the stick and purposely didn’t look as I ran out of the bathroom to begin the five minute countdown.

The timer went off and Michael and I went back into the bathroom to look together.

Blue line. Pregnant. Maybe Michael’s jokes were really premonitions!

Looking at the test, we were both a bit dumbstruck. We hadn’t expected it to happen this quickly – we’d only been trying for a month.

We were happy and excited but definitely in disbelief.

In fact, so convinced was I that it was going to take a while to get pregnant, I had a winery tour to go on that weekend.

In theory, I could’ve been on my period for that tour, so we could take a break from trying and I could enjoy the wine tasting.

But obviously, drinking was out the window now.

Michael and I took a selfie to mark the occasion – as good Millennials do – and went back to our evening, naive about what to do next.

Originally published as Pregnancy diary: Deciding to start a family and conception