Trying For A Baby

I remember when I used to not want kids a decade ago – it’s hard enough to make a living in today’s world, let alone feed another mouth in the family.

But after getting married and thinking about how life would be different when we have a kid (or two? not sure yet), we’ve decided to try.

Honestly, I’m not sure how much I’m affected by external factors such as seeing how other friends and colleagues have their own children or the unspoken pressure from my grandmother.

I do know that a part of me has grown to want a kid of my own, preferably daughter but I would be happy if I were to have a son too.

For my wife, she’s always liked kids but never thought that she would want to have one of her own – it’s always fun when it’s someone else’s child.

And so here we are, going for tests and preparing our bodies for pregnancy. I hope to share more in future blogs (and hopefully, a parenting section), but for now, just the preliminary stuff.

Going for tests

When my wife and I went for her blood test for fertility, we thought we would be the youngest few. To our surprise, younger couples were there.

Maybe it’s the family planning education campaigns’ impact or just the overall savviness of Singaporeans nowadays, trying couples know the importance of check-ups before marriage or conceiving.

Anyway, the results say that my wife’s only potential obstacle in conceiving is her ovulation irregularity, which is caused by hormonal imbalances.

Not a big problem by any means – we just have to watch her ovulation more closely and try during the “golden period”.

As for me, my semen analysis showed that all is good except the morphology of my sperms, which can pose to be a problem as well.

All in all, our issues reduce our chances but that doesn’t mean we can’t conceive. We just have to improve our fertility by watching our lifestyle and food intake.

Preparing our bodies

Because we’re more of TCM (traditional Chinese medicine) believers, we prefer to go for the more natural approach, away from supplements and such.

If our bodies are healthy and balanced, our chances of conceiving will be a lot higher and less likely to run into problems later on in the pregnancy.

Western medicine and supplements can help you conceive to a certain extent but the after-effects on our bodies are hard to anticipate because how long can one be on them?

Anyway, we’re avoiding certain kinds of foods (will probably share this in detail in another blog too) that are generally not so good for our health such as fast food, alcohol, overly spicy food (mala, etc.) and processed foods among others.

Also, we’re moving away from “cooling” food such as white cabbage, raw cucumbers, bean sprouts and cooling fruits.

Lastly, we’re taking some Chinese herbal concoctions that are meant to balance our bodies because the food we eat nowadays is very different than in the past (GMOs, unnatural growing methods, etc.).

Where will this lead us?

No one knows for sure whether a couple can conceive or not, even if both are perfectly healthy and fertile.

There are just so many ways the (fertilisation) process can go wrong.

That said, we’re ready to keep trying and seek medical help if we have difficulties after six months or so (there’s no shame).

I certainly hope there’ll be good news to share in the months to come, partly because then my hopes of starting a parenting blog would come true.

But, of course, the most part is that there’ll be another little one to join the family.