18 Weeks: Ova Ova

After stumbling upon BERF a few weeks ago and reading my conception posts, the owner of Ova Ova contacted me to share her website, which is a fertility tracker much like Fertility Friend. Ova Ova has a modern, fresh look and a more conservative ovulation predictor software than FF, which is good when you’re trying to ensure you “catch” ovulation for both family planning and trying to conceive.

I used Fertility Friend for a few months while trying to conceive and found it easy to use. I loved having the knowledge of my temperatures on a graph. Having the Android app was very important since I was entering data from bed most of the time. Note that I did track more information – but I kept it private because it was intimate! FF did feel old school at times, and it was confusing to figure out why the program was changing my ovulation date or when ovulation would be confirmed. But overall, it worked for me.

You can see my posts about using Fertility Friend here: Cycle 2, Cycle 3, Positively Pregnant.

There is now an alternative!

Ova Ova can be used for both natural family planning and trying-to-conceive cycles. The Ova Ova software uses temperatures and cervical mucus to pin-point ovulation with a bulls eye.

The bar colors make it easier to see at a glance when you are most fertile. Green bars on your chart mean you’re potentially fertile, blue bars mean you’re infertile, bulls-eye shows your ovulation day. Once ovulation is confirmed, all but the day of ovulation and the 5 days prior turn blue since these are the only days sex can result in a pregnancy. Here is a link to tons of additional information on charting!

You can also add in more details like prenatal vitamins, exercise and ovulation predictor kits. It’s great for tracking all-things-womanhood.

Amanda took my actual Fertility Friend chart and entered the data (minus the CM text for privacy ) Here’s what it looked like:

Compared to FF, there was a small change in ovulation date (which I’m pretty sure was accurate due to my ovulation predictor and my baby’s conception date based on ultrasound!)

For those of you interested in details, Amanda included the following explanation on why my ovulation dates were different on the charts. The simple answer is to be more conservation and not assume ovulation has occurred until you can be SURE it has:

Something you may notice that’s different between your Ova Ova chart and your Fertility Friend chart is that your ovulation date was pegged as December 12th (cycle day 27) on the Ova Ova chart instead of cycle day 24 like it was on the FF chart.

Although a combination of temperature and cervical fluid are very accurate methods of identifying your most likely ovulation date, most research shows that the very moment of ovulation could be plus or minus two days in either direction.  At Ova Ova, we’ve made a conscious choice that we’d rather identify your ovulation date once we are 100% sure that it has occurred rather than possibly identifying it early. This is obviously very important if you are going to use this method for birth control, but also for women that are trying to get pregnant.  We definitely don’t want our users to give up on sex too early before ovulation has occurred (you might just be missing prime time if you do), and you may start taking pregnancy tests far too early.

We use the most conservative rules of the symptothermal method before we identify ovulation.  So on your chart, you’ll notice that you were still identifying peak cervical fluid on cycle day 25 (normally cervical fluid dries up before ovulation occurs), also your temperature shift on day 25, 26, and 27 wasn’t as strong as is recognized by the Fertility Awareness Method rules.  Most traditional Fertility Awareness Research suggests that you should look at your highest temperature in the previous 6 (so in your case, 96.6), then draw the coverline .1 degrees higher (97.7), and if three temperatures exceed the coverline (97.7 in your case) and you don’t experience any peak cervical fluid, you can confirm ovulation.  After cycle day 25, your temperature on cycle day 27 (the supposed third day of rise) did not exceed 97.7, so I would be apprehensive about confirming ovulation for you on cycle day 24.  Our method uses an average of all your pre-ovulation temperatures and looks for a shift of .3 degrees above the average.  In an 8,000 woman study this was found the most accurate method of identifying the coverline, although the pre-shift six rules are also considered very conservative.  Fertility Friend gives no explanation, or has any published research about how they came up with 97.6 for the coverline.

Both FF and OO cost a fee for use after a 30-day trial, but it hardly costs much: Ova Ova is $36/year and Fertility Friend is $45/year for a VIP membership (I think – it’s hard to find this info on their site!)

FF has an app that was SUPER helpful for early morning data entry from bed. OO does not have one yet, but it’s in the near future and will be free for members.

Hope this information will be helpful to those of you interested in charting. Ova Ova has a free 30 day trial and Amanda has offered to giveaway free memberships to the first 15 readers to sign up : ) The first 15 people to email amanda@ovaova.com will be the winners.