These days an awful amount of time is put into to telling young women how NOT to become pregnant. Contraceptive Pills are prescribed to young girls before they reach their teen years and used to treat a variety of other health issues as well. In other words we spend the first years of our adult lives teaching our body to ignore it's natural cycles and not become pregnant. Is it any wonder then that when they time comes that we actually do want to become pregnant, our bodies don't always co-operate right away?

When you make the decision to get pregnant the first thing you should do is talk to your family doctor. Your doctor will be able to give you all sorts of advice and up to date information on pregnancy and what you can expect in the road ahead. For some people it is as simple as stopping taking their birth control medication, but these are the lucky ones, and increasingly the minority. Very very few people will get pregnant in the first month after stopping their birth control. The majority find that things don't 'just happen' and that they will be listening with interest next time they hear tips to get pregnant, rather than tuning out or dismissing them as old wives tales or the like.

You should also sit down and discuss with your partner how children will affect both your lives. The obvious point of discussion is finance, with children likely to mean one of you giving up or at least cutting back on your work hours. The point that is often neglected in these discussions is time. Children are an incredible suck on your time, and you have to plan for that and how you will adjust your schedule to the fact that children need to be permanently supervised. While arranging daycare is one option you need to discuss the effect this will have on their development. On the topic of development, there are a huge number of points of potential conflict in how you bring your children up. So many people assume because they are compatible with their partner, that their child raising opinions will be the same. This covers everything from religion to diet to whether sun-screen is a good or bad thing(really!).

Remember that getting pregnant means bringing an entirely new human being into the world, and you are responsible for this person. It is not a responsibility to take on lightly or half-heartedly and it is a lot of hard work. But it is also immensely rewarding.