Have you tried everything there is in trying to conceive? Your friends and loved ones might be telling you to try these…
1) Fertility symbols/statues
Placing fertility symbols in the couple’s bedroom is meant to enhance fertility. Examples include a pair of elephants placed on either side of the bedroom door, a single piece of hollow bamboo (as a symbol of fruitful, rapid growth) in the bedroom and images of fruit or actual fruit — especially ripe pomegranate that are full of seeds, geddit? If you are placing real fruit in your room, though, remember to replace them before they start to rot!
The hubs and you could also take a trip down to London to Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Museum at Piccadilly Circus, and touch the African fertility statue — thousands of women have claimed that it works.
Whether these methods work or not, at least you get a decorated house and/or a second honeymoon with the hubs...
2) Clean your room, then stop
Contradictory sounding, but in Feng shui, it is important to clean your room, especially under the mattress. But once you start trying to conceive, you should not clean your room, especially under the bed as your energies “pool” here and shouldn’t be disturbed. So now you get an excuse to not clean. Yay!
3) Get children to jump on your bed
It is believed that through this chaos, the marital bed will be energised with conceptual qi energy. Even if it doesn’t work, you could become that child’s new favourite person! Jutst make sure the children don’t fall off or end up breaking your bed.
4) Lifting your legs up for 20 minutes after sex
This myth is widespread and it is believed that by lifting your legs, it will help the sperm get to the eggs. Since spermatozoa are genetically designed to find their way to your eggs, regardless, it’s not going to help or hinder. Did you know that it takes sperm between 45 minutes and 12 hours (woah…) to swim to the egg? That’s not exactly helping the “leg lifting” myth, is it?
5) Touching an expectant mother’s tummy
Some people object violently to having strangers try to rub their tums, and deservedly so. If you are going to try this, limit it to relatives or close friends. And you know, pregnancy is not contagious, you can’t just “catch” it.
6) Place knitted yellow booties under your pillow
Why yellow and knitted? We don’t know. But this Western belief requires you get the booties either from a store as a gift, or that it be hand-knitted by someone close to you. We don’t suggest hanging out at Golden Dragon or Spotlight and asking for booties…
7) Having sex at certain timings for a boy/girl
For example, having sex closer to your ovulation is said to create boys while having sex further from ovulation will create girls. Or having sex during the full moon give you a girl and trying to conceive under a quarter moon will give you a boy. Ultimately the gender of your baby depends on the chromosome that the sperm is carrying, in other words, it’s your husband’s doing. Good luck with that…
8) Drinking green tea to boost fertility
If you’re a fan of green tea, then this won’t be hard for you. This one has a hint of truth: The antioxidants in green tea will make your eggs more “successful”. But as it decreases the effectiveness of folic acid, which is a nutrient needed for fetal development, you can’t have too much. And no, there’s no definition of “too much”…
9) Eating yams gives you twins
This belief came about because a village in Africa — where eating yams is part of the staple diet — has the highest birth rate of twins.
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