When you and your partner are ready to have a baby, you should definitely use an ovulation calendar to help you conceive. Many people wonder when conception actually occurs and by using this simple fertility calculator you can pinpoint the day when you conceived pretty accurately.

To start using this method, simply go online to your favorite baby or pregnancy website and look for their free ovulation calculator. From there, type in your menstrual cycle information – the day your last period started and how long your cycles tend to last – and hit “enter”. From there the tool does its magic and you will be given the upcoming dates during which you can expect to be ovulating. These days are the ones you will want to make sure that you and your partner have intercourse. You might even want to jot those days down so that you can remember and look back to see when you actually conceived. You can always then use your datebook as a reminder of when you did and did not have intercourse so that you can make sure to have it frequently enough during the fertile window.

These fertility tools can also help you to plan your pregnancy. If you know that you want to have your baby during the summer months, you would just work backwards twelve months and then figure out your fertile window during September, October and November. This is what helped my friend plan her pregnancy and maternity leave. Since she is a teacher, she wanted to have her baby during the spring months so that she could have the rest of the school year off in addition to the summer months. It gave her the maximum amount of time with her newborn baby. But pretty soon she would be doing it all again because before going back to school in the fall she was feeling the early signs of pregnancy.