As a woman, keeping up with your menstrual cycle is just as important as knowing when you're having your wisdom teeth pulled, especially if you're trying to get pregnant. And if you are lucky enough to get pregnant, then knowing how to calculate your due date using your last period can not only reduce stress but help you schedule the next nine-plus months.
Depending on how active your sex life is, pinpointing the exact moment you conceived can be a real challenge. As the American Pregnancy Association mentioned, pregnancy is calculated from the first day of your last menstrual period. However, the fetus does not begin to develop until you conceive, which is usually two weeks later. So, to determine when your newest addition with arrive, Baby Center noted that you can count 280 days from the first day of your last menstrual period. Granted, this won't give you an exact due date, but it will get you pretty darn close.
If you are trying to get pregnant, keeping track of your ovulation is also extremely important. According to What To Expect, the ovulation period is a 12 to 24-hour window each month when a woman is able to conceive. Ovulation usually occurs sometime halfway through your menstrual cycle. During this period, an egg is released from your ovary and travels down into the fallopian tubes, where it can be fertilized by sperm, as WebMD explained. If this doesn't happen, the lining of your uterus and the egg will shed, resulting in your menstrual cycle. If fertilization takes place, you will get pregnant.
Even though a whole lot has been happening inside of your body, as Baby Center mentioned, most women don't even have a clue that they are pregnant until they realize they've missed a period. It's around this time that the levels of the pregnancy hormone (hCG) in your body are high enough to produce a positive test result on an at home urine test, according to the American Pregnancy Association. And once you get that positive pregnancy test result, you may actually remember the exact moment when all of the magic happened.
