You’ve spent years avoiding pregnancy – doing all the things, being responsible – and now you and your partner are finally ready to try. You feel a weird mix of excitement and nervousness at the thought of having a baby because you know it will change your entire life. You figured getting pregnant would happen instantly. Isn’t that what they taught us in middle school health class? That pregnancy can happen any time?
But it hasn’t happened yet. And now you’re starting to worry that it might never happen. What if there’s a problem with your fertility? What would that mean for your future self and the family you’ve been imagining? The ‘what if’ thoughts keep piling up and each month that passes feels more and more unsettling.
It is possible to maximize your chances of conceiving, completely naturally
Hi! I’m Kristy Smith Kowalczyk (pronounced KOH-vul-check – it means “son of Smith” in Polish).
I’m a fertility coach for women and couples, and I’m thrilled to teach about the MANY health benefits of understanding and tracking fertility using the natural family planning method. I also help couples increase their chances of conceiving naturally without resorting to costly alternatives.
I can help you decode your body’s natural fertility signals so you can find out when you ovulate and use that information to your advantage – whether your goal is avoiding pregnancy or actively trying to conceive.
I can show you how to figure out the right timing so you can maximize your chances of conceiving naturally and quickly – without expensive devices or drugs.
And if you’re ready to say goodbye to the nasty side effects of hormonal birth control I can show you how to ditch the pill and embrace your natural fertility cycles so that you can get your body back.
After 18+ years of practicing natural family planning (NFP) in my own marriage I started this site to help other women experience the freedom that results from understanding YOUR own fertility and knowing YOUR individual cycle patterns, one cycle at a time.
As a mother of three (adorable) children I want to reassure you that YES! NFP works! but most of all, I want you to have the tools and confidence to use this effective, completely drug-free approach to managing your fertility.
My story
I stared at the brown paper bag filled with an unopened package of birth control pills sitting in my bedroom. My doctor told me it was time to start preparing and it would be better to get my body used to it before the wedding. It’d be one less thing to worry about since wedding planning was taking up all my spare time. The new engagement ring on my finger caught my eye as it sparkled; I wasn’t used to wearing it yet.
Yet I couldn’t escape the nagging feeling that something wasn’t right. The idea of taking a pill every day made me cringe inwardly…but the career-focused engineer in me would never take chances and risk possibly getting pregnant. The inner conflict swirled in my head. I knew my fiancé and I were not ready for a baby so I tried to convince myself this was the way to be responsible – the pill was necessary. Tomorrow I’ll start taking them, I thought to myself.
Until one conversation with a friend changed everything.
That evening I casually mentioned my doctor appointment to a girlfriend of mine. She immediately asked to meet up with me for lunch the next day. She wanted me to wait and not take the pill until after we talked. I figured waiting one more day wouldn’t hurt and I was curious about what she wanted to say.
I didn’t know at the time but that conversation with my friend at lunch marked the start of a journey that would quite literally change my life.
My friend shared about this method called natural family planning that provided a way to avoid pregnancy completely naturally. She explained that the method allows women to work with their bodies instead of altering them with chemicals, and that you could also use this same information to get pregnant later on. She told me how the pill actually works, by altering your entire endocrine system, which I had never heard before. When she talked I was immediately skeptical – after all, my doctor had never mentioned anything like this. Did this natural method even work? And it seemed like everyone uses contraceptives to avoid pregnancy, so how bad could they really be? But my friend explained that I could take a class to learn how to use the method and suggested that I at least look into it before making a final decision about taking the pill.
When I got home from work that evening I talked with my fiancé about my conversation with my friend, and told him what she had said about this natural family planning method. He had never heard of it but was willing to do some research with me. We both agreed to keep an open mind and approached it like an engineering problem at work, looking for facts and data to convince us what to choose. I was shocked to discover the decades of research that went into developing the method, and even more surprised that it wasn’t new at all – NFP has been around since the 60s!
My initial investigation only led to more questions: Why had I never heard of this before? Why didn’t my doctor tell me about it, if it works so well? How could it really be 99% effective? Did any of my other friends know about this? I talked to my mom, I talked to my coworkers, I talked to my friends and cousins…nobody had heard of it and they all thought I was nuts – why not just take the pill and move on?
NFP classes: an awkward introduction
I signed us up for an NFP class. The first lesson was held in a family’s house and the moment we walked in I felt super awkward. There were a handful of other engaged couples sitting in folding chairs set up in the living room. There seemed to be a nervous energy. The class instructors were a young-ish looking married couple and politely welcomed us in. They explained that they were volunteer teachers and their kids were upstairs.
Once they started teaching I could sense how much they believed in the effectiveness of the method and yet I couldn’t help but wonder if it actually worked. Their 4 kids were upstairs running around banging into things and the wife had to occasionally step away to breastfeed her baby. As we left the first lesson I remember wondering if this was something only for extreme hippies or for people who were ok with getting pregnant if it “just happened”.
At that time in my life I felt like pregnancy would threaten my career and wanted nothing to do with babies or diapers, and I needed a method that I could rely on.
Our homework was to start taking my temperature every morning and get in the habit of fertility charting. That was a brand new concept. We were supposed to bring back a completed chart next month so we could start interpreting it, whatever that meant. I still had tons of questions and needed evidence that this would really work – reassurance that we wouldn’t immediately get pregnant if we actually tried this.
I read every footnote in the class handbook and even looked up the medical research that was cited. The whole time I was trying to figure out if this was legit and wondered if “normal” people used this method. And the more I dug the more amazed I became. What I thought I knew from middle school health class about how pregnancy happens and how cycles work was mostly just flat out wrong. Realizing that made me feel angry. Why isn’t this taught in schools? This is basic information that women need to know.
Information that women deserve to know, about how their bodies work!
I couldn’t deny that the research was convincing; there is solid medical evidence from thousands of women that it DOES work, and at the end of the day I still had to decide for myself: ignore the facts in front of me and just take birth control pills, which, ironically seemed safer…or not. After several long conversations with my fiance we made the decision to throw out the birth control pills my doctor had given me and start using NFP instead. And looking back I’m SO glad I did. To this day I’m so grateful to my friend for that one lunchtime conversation!
If I could go back and talk to that newly engaged girl who was searching through all the fine print, terrified that NFP was only for crazy hippies I’d tell her to just trust her gut. And I’d tell that to anyone reading this: trust your gut. NFP isn’t for everyone…but shutting off your reproductive system with powerful synthetic hormones isn’t for everyone either.
I spent five years actively avoiding pregnancy and focusing on my career before we finally decided the time was right to try for a family. During those five years I worked really hard continuing an aerospace career that I truly enjoyed and completed a graduate degree. We had the benefit of those years of practice observing my cycles and felt comfortable identifying when I was fertile and when I wasn’t, so when we made the decision to try for pregnancy things happened pretty fast. We watched the changes in my natural fertility signs to get the timing just right. And exactly as the handbook described would happen, my temperatures stayed elevated and I knew I was pregnant even before taking a pregnancy test. I felt like we had some secret insider knowledge because of using NFP. Baby #1 was born, 20 months later baby #2 was born, and then 28 months after that we had baby #3 (intentionally!).
I don’t want to imply that after we threw away the birth control pills everything was super simple and we never had any difficulties, because the truth is that regularly practicing NFP is hard.
To be sure, the method is not perfect – just as any method outside of abstinence isn’t.
I had no idea miscarriage was so emotionally devastating…until I experienced it myself
Early in 2017, right after the Christmas holidays, my cycle temperatures suddenly jumped all over the place. They’d be low one day and high the next, which didn’t make any sense, and was totally different from any other fertility chart I’d had in the past 10 years. Where was the typical pattern I was used to? I was 35 and knew immediately something with my cycle wasn’t right but didn’t even imagine I was pregnant…until my period was way late and my husband finally suggested I take a pregnancy test. Seeing the unmistakable positive sign on the test was shocking. I stared at it in disbelief. We weren’t even trying, how could that be real? But the positive sign didn’t budge; it was right there staring back at me, no matter how many times I blinked.
For a long time I felt like the method had failed us. I made an appointment to see my ObG and eventually saw it with my own eyes on the ultrasound. I started envisioning buying a mini-van and thinking about how we might as well just keep the crib out. Our 3rd baby was about 20 months old at that time and we were just talking about transitioning out of the baby phase soon.
At a follow-up doctor appointment hearing the doctor say “I’m afraid there’s no heartbeat” was devastating on a level I had never experienced before. After 3 successful pregnancies and 3 baby deliveries it never occurred to me that a pregnancy could just…end, so abruptly.
The next month was awful as my body prepared to eject the contents of my uterus, and nearly everything else in my system, for that matter. For several days I couldn’t keep anything in my stomach; everything I ate just came right back up. I was weak and tired and miserable and dreading what I knew was about to happen. Then the bleeding started. And it just kept coming. And coming. I actually passed out at one point, which terrified my mom. My parents were with me at home, helping watch the three kids while my body did its thing, and after I passed out they ended up bringing me to the hospital. My husband left work and met us all there. The nurses gave me an IV to help with dehydration and hooked me up to a bunch of monitors.
Miscarriage was one of the hardest things I’ve ever been through. I had no idea it was so emotional. I felt SO sad, for weeks. The grief lasted long after the bleeding stopped. My husband was mostly relieved, and I just couldn’t relate. My heart goes out to anyone who has experienced the pain of losing a baby, regardless of how far along in the pregnancy.
I read online about ways to cope after experiencing a miscarriage and saw a suggestion that seemed like a good fit for me: planting a tree. My three kids were all born in California and I thought it would be nice to plant a palm tree as a small remembrance of the fourth baby we never had. It now sits right next to our front door in a lovely turquoise pot given to us by my mother-in-law. I’m not the best gardener but I’m determined to take good care of it, fingers crossed!
Paying It Forward
Today I have the opportunity to teach other women how to recognize their natural fertile signs and optimize their own fertility. We are each on our own journey as we experience our fertility, and knowledge is power: the unexpected challenges many of us encounter can often be resolved with a natural, science-based approach. It feels good to spread the word about the reliability of fertility awareness methods such as NFP and to pay it forward by helping other women. As I mentioned, I know NFP isn’t for everyone, but I’m SO glad I took the leap of faith all those years ago. My hope is that anyone else wondering whether it really works can feel confident that YES! it DOES, and will decide to learn to use it themselves. (PS I’d love to help you with that!)
I would love to hear from you! Learn more about how we can work together to maximize your chances of getting pregnant naturally here, or send me an email at kristy @ NFPinstead.com.
Check out the page that best matches your current goals: avoiding pregnancy or achieving pregnancy.
I invite you to schedule a completely free 30-minute Natural Fertility Discovery Session and let’s chat!
More About Kristy…
Kristy has 15 years experience building satellites and launching rockets as an engineer in the aerospace industry. She holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Aeronautical & Astronautical Engineering from University of Washington as well as an MBA from Pepperdine University. She also feels a calling to spread the word and teach the science of NFP, and gets so excited watching her clients feel empowered by learning fertility charting for themselves! YES!
She loves competitions of any kind – pub trivia, board games, the Olympics, or friendly wagers just for fun. Her favorite sports are tennis, hockey and football. She is passionate about spaceflight and has been planning on finding a way to get into space herself aboard a rocket since middle school. She is immediately drawn toward anything sparkly and cannot resist laughing at a good pun. She feels uncontrollably happy while at the beach and gets euphoric riding a surfboard. Chocolate chip cookies will always be her weakness. She is half Polish and reminds anyone who will listen.
She and her husband have been married 18+ years. Blessed with three kids plus one in heaven (miscarriage), they spent 12 years in Southern California before relocating to the Seattle area. They continually debate about whether the mountains or the beach are better, usually while snobbishly drinking craft beer or while eating vegetables for breakfast. Kristy is a “cradle Catholic” and is grateful to have been practicing NFP since 2006.