Guest Post: "There’s an App for That"

-- The following is a guest post from our secret lady friend who chooses to remain 

anonymous until a baby kangaroo is officially put into her mama pouch --

We are currently on Month 2 of our Journey to Procreate, now that Flo has decided to pay a visit and I can more accurately gauge my cycle length (and thus my most fertile days). This time around I’m armed with the knowledge of an even greater arsenal of scary pregnancy articles and, most importantly, a better app. My mom thinks I should just relax and let this happen naturally,  but there are but a few things one can control during this process, and knowing that I’m doing everything possible to achieve success on my end is very relaxing. So there. And dammit if I’m not going to be the Valedictorian of Pregnancy.

So this app. A reader of this very blog contacted my Lady Bits buddy Anna to suggest it to me. It’s called, “My Days,” and lets you chart all manner of lady data, from the dates and level of your menstruation to the consistency of your cervical mucous (in my opinion one of the most disgusting phrases on this Earth), from your weight and temperature to the days you make sweet, sweet love (this you mark with a little heart, which is adorbs).

It even lets you graph your weight and basal body temperature. Science! The reason you’d want to do this, by the by, is that your basal body temperature will be a sustained degree or two higher once your egg drops, and you’ll probably put on a couple post-implantation. Fun fact: my normal body temperature runs a cool 97 degrees on average, and this morning I was a frigid 95.6. Am I even alive?

While I wait for the sparkles in my eyes to manifest in human form, I’m keeping myself busy by revisiting all manner of pregnancy blogs I’ve become acquainted with over the years:

• I spent great gobs of time that I should have been working at one of my first post-college gigs following Jeff Ruby’s blog Push on Chicago Magazine’s website. He wrote a riveting, no-holds-barred exposé of his wife’s first pregnancy and taught me what a mucus plug was.
• I started following Dooce, one of the original mommy bloggers, a year later, and read about her pregnancy with her second daughter in real time after devouring her account of her bout with post-partum depression after having her first.
• More recently, I’ve been following the blog of a friend of a friend of a friend who gave birth only last week. She's hilarious—her pregnancy posts are tagged “My Body is a Wonderland”—and her truthy scribbles actually helped me decide for certain that it was time to create life.

Do you have any require reading or app-ing you think pre-pregians should get into? Share in the comments below!