Getting Pregnant While Breastfeeding

Many people don't think you can get pregnant while breastfeeding, let alone breastfeed a baby while pregnant with another.  I'm currently doing the latter (with no plans to stop) and did the former as well.

Some people know that you can get pregnant while breastfeeding, from um, say, personal, perhaps accidental, experience. 

While it's true that breastfeeding can provide you with natural birth control, you still can get pregnant.  I didn't want India to sleep through the night, and promoted lactational amennorhea, for at least the first year of her life.  If you nurse consistently, most likely your period won't return until you introduce solids and cut back on nursing.  Or if your baby sleeps through the night.  *Most likely.*  Don't send me hate mail if you are one of the "lucky" ones who gets their period back at three months postpartum.  I'm sorry, I really am!

My journey:

My period returned in May, at about 10 months postpartum, after India went through a phase of sleeping through the night and I wasn't waking her to nurse.  I wasn't happy about it because I have friends who go 15, 18, 23 months or even longer without a period and I was not feeling ready for another baby at that point!  

Since we use the Fertility Awareness Method (FAM), I sort of half-way began to look out for any signs of fertility to prevent pregnancy.  I say half-way, because I know my body pretty well and it doesn't take more than 30 seconds of daily observation for me to know if my body is ovulating or not.  To my amazement and gratefulness, there were no signs of fertility.  This continued through the summer.  

In September, when my daughter was coming up on 14 months old, I got a case of baby fever and I started to think about having another little munchkin.  But my body was still regulating and I wasn't ovulating yet.  I wasn't ready to wean my daughter in order to jump start my fertility.  I knew I just had to be patient, but I was starting to feel ready, which was a big shock because pregnancy wasn't kind to me.  I'm not one of those ladies who just loves being pregnant.  Nope.
 

Remember how I said we use Fertility Awareness Method (FAM) to track fertility signs and how much I love it?  Well, this is just one more little pat on FAM's back.   In October, I had all signs and symptoms that I normally do for ovulation, except I didn't seem to have a lot of cervical fluid.  If we didn't use FAM, I could have gone on for months trying to have a baby and perhaps been diagnosed with secondary infertility, when I just needed more cervical fluid - all because breastfeeding left me with very little.  I know women quite often have less cervical fluid while breastfeeding.  It's very common for breastfeeding mothers to feel, um, dry.  Well, in order to get pregnant, cervical fluid is a vital part of the process.  A quick Google search of "how to naturally increase cervical fluid" brought me to a common oil, Evening Primrose Oil, that is rich in essential fatty acids.  I had heard of it, but didn't know much about it, or that it was actually a cheap and readily available product.  Many woman use it near the end of their pregnancy and during menopause and many others use it to help with arthritis and eczema.  But it's also frequently used for increasing the amount and quality of cervical fluid.  Here's how it works.

I decided that I would take it the next cycle because I only wanted to try for a baby that month because that would give me a due date of late July or early August and I was OK with that.  As long as I wasn't pregnant the whole summer!  Getting pregnant in December or January wasn't an option because I didn't want a baby born in September or October because that would mean I would be VERY pregnant the WHOLE summer. 

So, I take the Evening Primrose Oil and well, whaddya know, I'm preggo the next month, November.  Maybe it was the Evening Primrose Oil (EPO), maybe my body just regulated itself, but from everything I could tell the EPO helped greatly!

I share all this because I have several friends who are still breastfeeding and have had some difficulty getting pregnant, so I figure there are many others who are in the same boat!  Maybe it's something as simple as increasing your cervical fluid.  :)

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