is an adult, it will be a touching, informative look back at the time when she entered the world. For you and your partner, it will be a fun, celebratory action to kick off the pregnancy festivities.
Keep movie ticket stubs, takeout menus, a newspaper from the day you found out your partner was pregnant (as well as clippings of the most important headlines of the year), favorite ads, magazine clippings, and so on. Include pop culture elements that define the year as well as some of your favorite things.
As you choose names, add the list of all potential names to the time capsule. When you choose a paint color for the nursery, put in the paint color card. Any decision you and your partner make for the baby is a good candidate for inclusion. It may seem silly now, but in 20 years it will be the best gift you can give your child.
Chapter 2
Your Conception Primer
IN THIS CHAPTER
You may have spent years trying not to get pregnant, so the change from not trying to trying can be rather unsettling. Having trouble with something even the most clueless people manage to do effortlessly can cause you to lose sleep at night and can turn sex into a job. Getting pregnant is hard work … sometimes.
In this chapter, we tell you how to make the getting-pregnant process painless and fun — even if it takes longer than you expected.
Sperm, Meet Egg: Baby Making 101
Getting pregnant requires that several key players be on the field at the right time: namely, good sperm, a mature egg, and a suitable landing place in the uterus. If sperm and egg meet in the fallopian tube (the conduit from the ovary down to the uterus), join together to form a fertilized egg, and then float down to a uterus with a lining that’s exactly the right thickness to facilitate implantation, then pregnancy occurs. If any of those factors are amiss, well, that’s when things get complicated.
Producing a mature egg
Before she’s even born, a woman has all the eggs she’ll ever have. Unlike sperm, no new eggs are produced over time; the original eggs just mature, usually one at a time. Mature eggs are produced from immature ones (called oocytes), located in the ovaries, through a complex interaction of three hormones during the menstrual cycle. Those hormones — estradiol (a form of estrogen), follicle stimulating hormone (FSH), and luteinizing hormone (LH) — work like this:
1 Day 1 of the menstrual cycle begins when your partner’s period starts. FSH stimulates the ovaries, which produce estrogen.
2 Estradiol production starts to mature a number of egg-containing follicles, small, cyst like structures that contain the immature eggs.
3 One follicle, called a lead follicle, continues to develop while the rest atrophy.
4 Around day 14 of the menstrual cycle, LH kicks in to mature the egg and move it to the center of the follicle so it can release. Ovulation occurs 14 days before the last day of your partner’s cycle, so day 14 is based on an average 28-day cycle. If her cycles are longer or shorter than 14 days, she’ll ovulate earlier or later.
5 The egg releases from the follicle and begins to float down the fallopian tube. This is where you and your sperm come in.
Figure 2-1 shows the events of a menstrual cycle when pregnancy does not occur.
Illustration by Kathryn Born, MA
FIGURE 2-1: Every event in the menstrual cycle has a purpose.
Sending in some good sperm
Sperm can only fertilize an egg that’s mature, so you need to either have sperm waiting in the tube when the egg is released or get some there within 12 to 24 hours after ovulation, because that’s how long the egg can live.
Illustration by Kathryn Born, MA
FIGURE 2-2: Sperm are compact swimming machines.
Making the journey and attaching to the uterus
After fertilization, the new potential life must make it down the tube to the uterus, where it implants. The journey from fallopian tube to uterus takes five to seven days, on average, and implantation normally occurs seven to ten days after conception. The fallopian tube is normally a fairly straight tube, but if it’s twisted or dilated because of previous infection or pelvic inflammatory disease, the embryo may wander around in the crevasses and never get to the uterus.
WHY SO MANY SPERM?
Women produce one egg a month, most of the time, and men produce millions of sperm. Why the huge disparity? Because one sperm isn’t enough to get the job done — it needs lots of friends to help. Although only one victorious sperm makes it into the egg, breaking down the coating that surrounds the egg takes many sperm. And although eggs get to drift downward from the ovary to the fallopian tube, sperm have to swim upstream. Needless
