Vitamin A. I get Solaray brand ‘Dry A’ (25,000 I U) made from carotene and take 1 a day. You should SEE a difference in 2-3 days. Also, cod liver oil and coconut oil have helped me in the past. (A tablespoon of each every other day.)  God bless!

Guaifenisen-only (sp?) cough syrup or mucinex tablets help too.

There are a lot of suggestions for that in Marilyn Shannon’s book “Fertility, Cycles and Nutrition.”  These include changing your nutrition, adding vitamins to your diet, and even changing the night-lighting in your room.

You can take evening primrose oil up until ovulation has been confirmed and that should help with the CM production.

God bless you for your courage! I have “endo,” too, and though we didn’t have difficulty conceiving our son (Praise God!), I have a lot of pain. Here’s hoping our second will come easily, too. Fertility, Cycles and Nutrition is an amazing book. I hope the suggestions in it help you!

i dont think having a baby within marriage could ever be a sin…  someone correct me, but that just seems wrong.  you’re being open to God’s plan for your family!

someone, on here actually, gave what I think is the best advice about spacing/abstaining, for people (like me!) who worried about reasons and/or having trouble abstaining:

God will give you the grace you need to abstain when you need to - as in, He’ll help you have it not be hard and when you don’t need to abstain, it will be challenging to!

did that make sense?  the woman who posted that last time said it better

Please don’t feel guilty!!! (God didn’t make a mistake in sending you this child!) It’s God’s blessing to your family even if no one else sees it that way.  Try to take good care of yourself and continue to devote yourself to your family, many more blessings will result. (We had many, many times like these when our oldest were young, and they’ve grown up to be wonderful inspirations for many!)

Please don’t feel guilty, at least insofar as I’m sure you have not acted sinfully!  God does have a plan for your family and this baby.  If it helps at all, I know my parents felt overwhelmed when my siblings and I were all children—they had all 5 of us in 6 1/2 years.  My mom has told me she felt desperately overwhelmed when she was pregnant that last time—she was still under 30, we lived in a two-bedroom condo, they were pretty much at the poverty line financially, and she had just suffered through preeclampsia and premature birth with the fourth child.  But God gave my parents the grace to make it through some of those early trying times (including an early health issue with the fifth baby that my parents said truly made them grateful for her life), and our youngest sister has been a great blessing to our family.  By the way, congratulations!

I know how you feel, Jennifer.  We are expecting our sixth child, and I have the same feelings of guilt.  Just wanted you to know you’re not alone.  I have been struggling with those feelings that I am not doing so great a job with the other 5… and I also lack the discipline to abstain when we need to.  I am comforted by Lina and Mary’s comments. 

I think some of our feelings are from hormones, because i’m always a little more down in the first three months of pregnancy.  It’s also partly because our culture is so birth control oriented that we have absorbed some of that same thinking ourselves (like thinking to ourselves, “well, that was irresponsible of us, we didn’t need to have any more children right now; we can’t even deal with the ones we have… blah blah blah.”)  Bless you!  Just know you’re not alone.

I know exactly how you feel!  I have 5 little ones, 5 and under.  I got pregnant with number 6 when number 5 was only 3 months old (for a variety of reasons breastfeeding wasn’t an option for this one) which would have given us Irish twins.  Anyway, I definately felt overwhelmed and a little guilty but as my husband says frequently, you can never have too many blessings!  Unfortunately I miscarried . . . makes you value the pregnancy even more when you no longer have it!  Bottom line—count your blessings and when others are not happy for you look at it realistically—it is your life, your money and your happiness—you don’t tell them how to be happy and they can not (no matter how hard they try) tell you how to be happy.

Jennifer:
I am in your same situation and feel overwhelmed with my situation however I don’t understand how this is a sin ( having a baby)and I certainly don’t understand “So many of our extended family and even friend have warned us not to get pregnant anytime soon, yet here we are” Unless your friends and family are supporting you financially I see this as NONE OF THEIR BUSINESS and you should make them aware that this is NONE OF THEIR BUSINESS! The decision to have more children is between you, your spouse & God. Unless you set boundaries soon (which we had to do before we announced baby#4) these “friends and family” members will find they can voice their opinion on a wide variety of issues…. You are free to have an opinion- I just don’t care to hear it!  That being said I will pray for you because 5 under 5 (what we have) IS stressful but the difficulty of it should ease once the kids can all pretty much dress themselves and fetch their own drink/toy/you name it!! THIS IS A BLESSING although it may not seem like it right now. Prayer is where you need to be right now & know you’re not alone!

So weird - I get on this board sometimes and the posts are verbatim - my life story. My name is also Jen. I have 4 kids age 5 and under. And am 2 months pregnant with my 5th because my husband and I really like sex! There - I said it!!! Feeling overwhelmed and emotional but deep down excited to have another blessing growing inside. Just wanted to say it sounds like there are several of us out there and many more who have lead the way before us! Prayers to all those new little lives in our wombs and for the strength and health to handle all these kids and be good Mommies. God only wants us to be the best us we can be - that is all He asks of us - follow His teachings and His call for our lives

PS - Due in July - how about you?

Not sure if this is what Lina was referring to, but I posted my mom’s thought a while ago when Sara Fox Peterson was guest-blogging. It was in response to her article “Thy Will be Done” which is the best explanation of discerning NFP I’ve ever read. Here it is:

One time I asked my mom is she thought our reasons for postponing were serious enough, and she replied, “How’s the abstinence going?” I said that we were doing just fine and not having any disagreements about it, and she replied, “Then your reasons are good enough. When your heart and will are united to God’s, He gives you the grace to abstain fruitfully.”

Thank you, Mommy dear!

yes, Anne, that was it!  thanks for reposting, i LOVE that

The best way to handle this is to get in touch with a certified NFP instructor of whatever method you are using. There is a way to practice NFP without prolonged abstinence even while your fertility is uncertain. God bless!

My husband and I spoke with our certified nurse midwife about possibly storing the cord blood of our third child, now 8 weeks old.  She was a geneticist before a midwife and is very open to healing therapies from cord blood and has participated in many collections.  But she told us that very rarely is enough blood collected, according to current protocols and theraputic requirements based on research, so storing it could be potentially expensive and useless.  But perhaps later on less blood would be needed, I don’t know.  I can think of no reason why it would be morally wrong to collect it though.  Praying for your decision.

At one hospital I worked at we routinely collected cord blood for a cord blood bank in near-by St Louis.  There is nothing ilicit—you merely drain the blood from the umbilical cord that would normally end up in the bio-waste garbage.  It is a great thing to do for other people—and a lot easier then the alternative (bone marrow donation!)  I would highly recommend putting it in a Red Cross type-bank for the use of anyone who needs it . . .

I posted above about my experience collecting the blood—I found a great web-site that really does a good job of explaining everything as well as logistical info as well: http://parentsguidecordblood.org/

This is in reply to Sam’s post. Sorry!