Hellobee Boards

I'm so sorry for your loss.

It depends on your cycle length when you want to start. I have an (on average) 30 day cycle, so I started around cycle day 10. For a 28 day cycle, probably cd 8.

A lot of women take them once daily in the afternoon. Evening can work, too. I usually took mine around 2:30. Some people have shorter surges and test more than once a day just in case they miss it. You typically ovulate 24-48 hours after a positive opk. An opk is positive when the test line is as dark as or darker than the control line. You can do a Google image search of positives for the brand you got.

Personally, I tested with the cheapies until I thought I got a positive and would confirm with a clear blue easy digital (NOT the advanced.)

So BD the day you get a positive and the next two days after that. It's important to have sex before you ovulate because the egg only lives for 12-24 hours after being released so you basically want the sperm "waiting" for it since they live much longer.

Best of luck!
@littleblessings:

I think it depends on your cycle length, and how regular you suspect ovulation is, when to start testing. After a few months of using them to get to know my cycle, I always got a positive on CD14 and the surge seemed to last about a day. So I start testing in the early evening (when I get home from work) on CD11, and starting CD13 I'll test in the morning as well. I usually get a positive in the morning. Cheapies work fine for me, I can tell pretty easily when it's positive, but since I also bought a box of the clear blue digital ones, I'll use those to confirm a positive on the cheapies. It was honestly much easier than I was expecting initially, but I'm lucky to have a regular cycle.

Best of luck!

I use them for 12 cycles with no success. They always showed a nice positive but I wasn't getting pregnant. I think they made me hyper aware and to be honest, crazy. The month I got pregnant I did not use them. I have vowed to never use them again because they made trying to conceive very stressful. That was just my experience!

I'd say the 4th one? I found it helpful to get the digital kind, to confirm what a positive on the cheapie looked like for me for the first couple of months. It's kind of a waste because I think the pack comes with 20 and really I only needed a few to confirm that I was reading the wondfos right, but it definitely gave me peace of mind. If you have a short LH surge, you might not quite catch it at fully positive.

For me, it's always super-faint, like your first one, except the evening of CD 13 (I can see the line w/o squinting, but it's still faint), them it comes in close to as dark as the control on the morning of the next day (when I can get a smiley face on the digital as well), then fades out to really faint by the next morning.

@littleblessings: lots of great tips here already. not to make your head spin, but I used both CBE digital (like periwinkle and simplyfelicty said, *not* the advanced kind) and wondfos. I know I was ovulating every month, but of the 4 cycles I was TTC, I only got the CBE smiley face two of those cycles (and I was testing twice a day, mid-morning and later afternoon, with concentrated urine). my wondfos similarly never got super dark, so I found it really helpful to line them up like you're doing, and I just made sure to have sex daily or every other day when I saw them starting to get darker. Just didn't want you to get frustrated if you saw that blank circle on the digital over and over--it doesn't necessarily mean you're not ovulating

These are from last cycle. Bottom one is clearly positive.

I'm sorry for your loss.

I've had an awful time with OPKs these past few months. The first month I used wondfos and got what I'm assuming is a positive even though the test line was slightly lighter than the control line. Later that night it was negative again.

The second month I used clear blue advanced digital (don't recommend!) and I never got a flashing smiley, but jumped straight from an open circle to a solid smiley. I used a wondfo when I got a solid smiley and it wasn't fully positive, but didn't try testing again that month after the solid smiley.

This last month I used clear blue advanced again and ended up with 9 days in a row of flashing smiley faces and then gave up since I didn't get a peak reading (solid smiley) after 9 days. I'm hoping I just missed my LH surge since it seems to be really short, unless I didn't ovulate for some reason.

I'm not using OPKs next month, they don't seem to work well for me. If I use them again I'd go with the clear blue digital, but not the advanced ones, they cause too much stress! I also don't like trying to decipher lines on wondfos.

Good luck!

@littleblessings: I see you just had a chemical - I'm wondering if the HCG is out of your system? I also had a really long cycle after my first chemical - it took me 6 weeks to get my period (and I didn't ovulate until 4 weeks post chemical).