Are you planning to/did you use an Instead Cup for your sway?

[TTC5]

Exactly. That is how most of us actually get pg - millions of sperm stay alive in the cervical crypts waiting and then the second the egg pops out, they "hear" or "smell" it and start after it. The whole female reproductive tract is designed around keeping the maximum amount of sperm alive as long as possible because your body wants to get pregnant.

Do you think this is where shettles was wrong? He claimed the boy sperm, after ejaculation swam fast to the egg, if there was no egg they died and the slow swimming girls got to the egg first.

But does it actually go more like, some sperms swim super fast to the egg, no egg they die. While others lay dormant in the crypts waiting for the egg to release, when it does the sperm all wake up.. and off they go again.

I often wondered why some people claimed you could get a boy 2dbo, when shettles had me believing that if there was no egg you were destined for a girl!

[atomic sagebrush]

Do you think this is where shettles was wrong? He claimed the boy sperm, after ejaculation swam fast to the egg, if there was no egg they died and the slow swimming girls got to the egg first.

But does it actually go more like, some sperms swim super fast to the egg, no egg they die. While others lay dormant in the crypts waiting for the egg to release, when it does the sperm all wake up.. and off they go again.

I often wondered why some people claimed you could get a boy 2dbo, when shettles had me believing that if there was no egg you were destined for a girl!

Well, Shettles was wrong in his fundamental premise and so as a consequence, all his ideas he based upon that premise were incorrect.

Shettles looked under a microscope and saw some sperm with pointy heads and some with round heads and decided that the pointy heads MUST be Y and the round heads MUST be X. But what he really saw was capacitated and uncapacitated sperm.

Based on this faulty assumption he then decided that since Y were smaller, they swam faster and were shorter-lived and weaker, and X must therefore be slower and stronger and more resilient to damage. He came up with the timing suggestions and then revived an old idea about pH that a veterinarian had come up with, to include vinegar or baking soda douches.

So a WHOLE lot of everything we "know" about swaying is based on one very very huge mistake. Subsequent research has proved that X and Y sperm are very similar in size and swim the same speed and live the same amount of time. Tons of studies have been done on timing and none of them ever seemed to find the same result. Shettles was an extremely talented man and highly accomplished, so people tend to give his theory so much more credence than it deserves, but at the end of the day it was an error in research that has since been disproved.

That having been said, through sheer serendipity, Shettles may have stumbled onto something that really DOES sway pink (abstinence vs. 2-4 days BD). Also, it may be that timing matters a bit in some other way - like, if you DTD before you have EWCM, it may reduce sperm numbers and also sway pink, whereas if you DTD at O when you have a lot of EWCM it may help maximize sperm numbers and potentially sway blue that way, so it makes his theory seem a lot more plausible because people HAVE succeeded using it and it works to a certain extent.

But it's not due to any mystical properties of a certain day and if we can reinact the same circumstances nearer to O (for pink) or improve the EWCM at O (for blue) then we will increase our odds of success and getting pregnant. Same with pH - if low pH kills sperm and less sperm sways pink, then low pH does sway pink but not because of any difference between X and Y sperm. High pH may help more sperm to survive and sway blue but that doesn't mean that you should therefore try to raise your pH to abnormally high levels because you may end up killing sperm that way, as well.

Plus, if you're one of those people who has a lot of EWCM prior to O, you may NEED to control that EWCM if you want to sway pink and if you don't, timing won't work for you. And if you're swaying blue and have very little EWCM or your DH has low sperm count/quality, you may DTD smack dab on O and still conceive girls.

As with everything, the devil in in the details!!!

[ttcboy2011]

oh my gosh Lola!! I am laughing so hard when I read, " I felt like I was digging for China trying to get that thing out"
Thank you so much for the laugh!