Christ, Coffee, and Cornfields

  My husband and I have been practicing NFP/cycle tracking/noncontraception within our marriage for over a year and a half now. It's crazy that we've been married for that long! Many of you know that I began tracking my cycle in high school, so it has been part of my life for the better half of a decade. It gives me a different perspective than many wives who only started because it was advertised as a pregnancy regulator, when in reality it is so much more.   In honor of NFP Awareness Week, I'm doing a piece with input from Jordan based on typical questions and ones that people have asked us. Side note: NFP, charting, and tracking are going to be used interchangeably in this article. A generalized definition is: documenting a woman's menstrual cycle using biological markers for the purpose of gynecological health, avoiding/achieving pregnancy, and contributing to the overall wellbeing of the woman and of a marriage by fostering an atmosphere of openness, communicat...

  We have just begun National Infertility Awareness Week, and I thought I'd start it off with telling our story. I've written about our journey within other posts, but this time I'm going to dedicate an entire piece to it. Infertility definitely has the hush factor surrounding it, and it's important to me to break the stigma and to help foster a dialogue. We aren't looking for pity or anything like that; we just want people to be aware that this cross is very real to more couples than you realize.   When Jordan and I got married in December of 2017, we told ourselves that we were going to try to avoid conceiving, at least for a little while, till we could get settled into being married. At the same time, though, we would have been overjoyed at being gifted a child. That's what we told ourselves, anyway. If you look at what our intimacy timing actually was though, we were definitely not trying to avoid getting pregnant. So every month, I was keenly aware that m...

  That's what I always explain to people when discussing cycle charting. It's more than just trying to avoid or achieve a pregnancy. It's way more than that, and to sell it short is a disservice to women.   What is charting, exactly? Basically, it's a way of keeping track of your menstrual cycle by noticing the signs your body gives you throughout your cycle. It's quite amazing how God created our bodies to keep us in the know; if only we listened to it more. I think most women subconsciously notice changes that happen to their bodies as it moves through each month, but don't actually file it away to look back on. I mean, let's be real here, sex ed and the puberty talk in school never discussed that sort of thing. All we heard is "you're gonna bleed for a week straight" and "your body is going to be changing." Nobody talks about what happens after puberty is over, when these kids grow up. It's no wonder why so many people are co...

  NFP. Natural Family Planning. Mucus. Sympto Thermal. Creighton. Basal temp. Charting. Sex. Abstain. Babies. Lots of words get thrown around along with the topic of NFP, or Natural Family Planning. What is it, and why would it be important to Jordan and me when we aren't even married yet?   There are so many reasons that Jordan and I practice and believe in NFP. I could talk and talk about it, but I'll just touch on a few main reasons we do it. First, though, let me give a general overview of what NFP actually is because it is widely misunderstood.   Natural Family Planning is a method of guiding married couples' physical intimacy that focuses on the signs a woman's body gives throughout her cycle so that together they can choose to participate in the marital act during appropriate times for their intentions of having a child. It also is used to forge a stronger bond between the husband and wife by encouraging communication and other ways of intimacy (spiritual, em...