How to track your cycles and chart your fertility without going super insane
So we all agree: Charting is a super, insanely useful way to get really amazingly in touch with your body and your cycles. But if you’re not careful, charting can drive you super insane. When you put a lot of time into something if it doesn’t immediately pay off, it can be emotionally and intellectually devastating. Based on what I learned during my 44 months of charting (…I KNOW), here’s a little guidance on how to chart without going super insane.
Relationship hack: I got rid of my one-sided birth control angst when my partner volunteered to handle the pills
I had vented my annoyance with those birth control pill blister packs to my husband multiple times. These damned packs… just one more frustrating element that the person with the baby-growing parts has to deal with that the partner doesn’t. Resentment breeding ground, is what I’m saying here. Until my husband volunteered to handle those damn things himself.
Kynslie and Taylor: From Mormon wedding in Utah to expecting a baby in Idaho (by way of Georgia and the UK)
WOW! It’s been a pretty wild two years (and three months) for us. We went from Utah to Oxford, UK, to beautiful Savannah, Georgia. Then, due to my husband being laid off, we packed up our things in a week and headed west. BUT it’s turned out pretty good! We ended up buying an adorable house, getting a second dog, AND dun dun dun… found out in February that we are expecting our first baby (it’s a boy!) on HALLOWEEN!
What Makes a Baby and 5 other books that explain the different ways families are made
Based on how many of you have told us about it, we know a bunch of you are big fans of What Makes a Baby, one of the newer kids books out that explain conception, gestation, and birth to the 3 to 8-year-old crowd. While this book is a good one, there are a whole bevy of books out there that explain the different ways families are formed and exist.
Caroline Rothstein on feminism and bikini waxes
…Yet here I am, month in and month out, dropping my pants for a stranger, letting her slide hot, green, organic wax along my vulva, around my labia, and across my lower abdomen with a thick, pale wooden popsicle stick just so I can feel “clean.” How can I subject a part of my body with such a complicated narrative to this hedonistic ritual and still call myself a feminist?
Get sexy (even geeky!) boudoir photos from Portland-based The Sensual Photographer
We’ve talked about boudoir photography over on Offbeat Bride with Why you should consider boudoir photos. Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love my body. Much like the title implied, one of our plus sized Tribesmaids called her boudoir session “honestly the most liberating experience of my life.” If you’d like to feel liberated yourself, celebrate the body you love, learn to love the body you have, or give the gift of your sexy-ass self to a special someone(s), you can do so at a special discount with our Oregon-based sponsor The Sensual Photographer.
What are your experiences with the new generation IUDs?
as anyone used a new-generation intrauterine device (IUD)? My doctor brought it up, and it sounds like a great form of birth control. I like the idea of local medical interventions (a hormone-relasing IUD) when possible, rather than systemic (the pill). However, I frankly am still a little creeped out by something in my uterus. Clearly everyone should only take medical advice from their doctors, but I am asking for personal advice here. Have any Offbeat readers had favorable or negative experiences with one of the new generation IUDs? How did it fit into your lifestyle?
Should you allow your daughter’s boyfriend to sleep over?
What a concept — approaching self esteem by telling a child their darker selves are loved. Only in our culture is the primitive drive to propagate a species seen as dark and dirty. We MUST change that. Sex is not dirty or disgusting, it’s amazing and should not be relegated to something we do in the dead of night when the house is asleep and the lights are off. Turn on the lights and make love at noon. Sex and pleasure are not desires that should be hidden, but valid feelings that when expressed appropriately, bring immense joy into your life.