The way you chart your BBT is right when you get up. They say you shouldn't even get out of bed. You need to have at least 4 hours of sleep and you should be temping around the same time. Working graveyards and trying to have a normal schedule on my days off doesn't allow me to temp around the same time. So I temp when I get up and it seemed to be ok.
During your period (the follicular phase), you're temps will set basically the bar of when you could see when you are ovulating. During this time, cysts will be forming which will release the egg during ovulation. When you ovulate, you'll see a spike in your temp and this is when your cervical mucus will be the best for conception. It'll be consistent to that of egg whites. I was so oblivious to what EWCM (egg white cervical mucus) was. Does it really look like raw egg whites? It sure does. Imagine cracking an egg and looking at the egg white and the yolk before it is cooked. The egg white is clear and stretchy, almost like something you'd blow out your nose when you're sick. That, my friends, is EWCM which will help your guy's sperm swim to that egg. So you will learn to love EWCM if you're TTC. Remember, you have 12-48 hours to try and fertilize that egg! Afterwards, your temp will rise because of the increase of progesterone. This is your luteal phase which is basically when the blastocyst (a fertilized egg) attempts to implant itself in the uterine walls. Progesterone is a hormone needed to help sustain a pregnancy. If you're pregnant, your BBT will continue to rise. If you're not pregnant, your BBT will drop right before you start a new cycle.
As you can see in my charts, during my follicular phase, my temps were lower than my luteal. Unfortunately, the dotted line on both of the charts indicate that no temperature was recorded. So I can't pinpoint when I ovulated but my best guess is between cycle day 16 thru 19.
During my luteal phase, my BBT rose a bit but it seems like it was a short phase, at least 11 days. Luteal phases are typically supposed to last 12-14 days. Without all my temperatures being recorded, I can't really tell if I may have a luteal phase defect. If your luteal phase is shorter than 12 days, there might be a lack of progesterone. Usually RE's will give progesterone supplements to try and correct this. Now you can see on CD29 (CD=cycle day) there is a grey dot on the Kindara chart and a lone blue dot on my FF chart. This is showing that there was a drop of temperature indicating that there was no pregnancy. Sure enough, the next day I started a whole new cycle.
Although it's disappointing, I have to look at the silver lining in all of this. It looks like I ovulated sometime during this cycle and I can temp everyday. It's a fresh start!
One more app I really like but don't use that much is the What To Expect Fertility app. The one nice thing about it is when we can see a positive pregnancy test, it will show you your estimated due date which is always exciting!
Happy charting!
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