I received an email from someone the other day. One sentence, very simple:

˝Hi. I…want to know what Fertility Flower is all about.˝

So what IS this project all about?  Well, first and foremost it’s about educating women about how their bodies work.  More than a simple fertility calculator, we accomplish this by showing women how to use the ˝Sympto-Thermal Method˝ (STM) which is one of a handful of natural fertility methods (other methods include Billings, Creighton, etc).  For those of you who are unfamiliar with the STM, hello and welcome.  And, I hope that as you become acquianted with the website, you will see how truly marvelous a creation you really are.  While the majority of women will access the website under the auspices of trying to conceive, there is a growing contingent who are telling me that they want to use the STM to avoid a pregnancy.  So, while Fertility Flower seems – at first glance – to be about building familes, it’s really more about supporting decisions to grow (or not grow) families by working with nature.  As a method, STM is healthy, natural, you are in control and it works for whatever goal you might have.  For those of you who are familiar with the STM (or FAM or NFP), I think you will quickly see that we are different.  This is because you are a multi-faceted person with lots of interests – most of all, how best to raise your family.  So, Fertility Flower is also about supporting families in their parenting choices and presenting alternatives.  Those of you who have been involved with the Facebook page know that we fairly often draw from outside the realm of fertility to discuss things like breastfeeding, doulas and midwives, cloth diapering, homebirthing, etc…

Who am I?  Well, I am Kimberly, of course :-)  I am an American living abroad with my husband and baby daughter, Blanka, and awaiting the arrival of our 2nd child (July 2011). The seeds of this project were sown after my first miscarriage in April 2008 when I dusted off the book, Taking Charge of Your Fertility.  It was one of those books that was on my bookshelf, left unread.  Well, that book changed everything.  Five months later, I was pregnant again.  A second miscarriage and a third pregnancy three months after that, this project sprouted and finally started to bloom around the same time as the birth of Blanka.  I am crazy about gardening which serves as the basis for the name of this project.

In any case, I hope to see you here again on Fertility Flower! We have a lot coming up in the garden:-) so check back often or sign up for the RSS feed.