warning: if you are uninterested in/wigged out by talk of signs of and body parts involved in fertility, the following entry may contain way too much information.

so a couple days ago i took out my nuvaring for sex, and forgot to put it back in (oops). when i found my ring in the pocket of my bathrobe yesterday i realized what happened and decided that now was a good a time as ever to start charting. i've been thinking about charting for a while now, but haven't gotten around to it because (a) i'm not trying to conceive and thus have very little motivation to stop with the hormonal birth control (HBC) and (b) i loveloveLOVE only having my period every 3 months or so, something i can do with the ring by just going from one to the next with no break in between, but that i can't do w/out the HBC.

but, i am eventually going to want to try to conceive (TTC), and want to get a feel for my reproductive health first. also, when we get around to TTC, we're going to try to time it so we have a girl, and to do that i have to have a handle on my fertility signs so that i can try to predict ovulation while it's still several days out. and from what i understand, women who have been on HBC for a long time (as i have--12 years) sometimes/often take a while (up to a year in some cases) to return to having regular cycles/ovulations. so, i wanted to go off HBC well before TTC in case my body is one of those that takes a while to recover from HBC.

so anyway, i've started charting. today, actually, since my period arrived about an hour ago. mental note: buy condoms.