We know that it is essential to understand your ovulation schedule in order to pinpoint the short window of success for insemination timing. But women often learn -- late in the process -- that temperature charting and ovulation detection kits don't always tell you what is important for you to know.

It's the nurses who often provide the most important relationship for a woman trying to conceive, because every appointment to the doctor begins or ends with a nurse's check-up of your emotional, physical and mental health. Here is a list compiled by nurses at Laurel Fertility Care (San Francisco) for Choice Moms, about what they encourage women to understand before agreeing to any treatments.

It is confusing to join the Choice Mom community as someone who is attempting to conceive and discover all these terms and abbreviations you've never encountered before. Here's a quick cheat sheet of the most common ones:

Whether a woman is using ICI, IUI, or doing home insemination with frozen sperm, she must order either unwashed or washed sperm from a bank.

Choice Moms was a "word of the year" contender in 2009 by New Oxford's New American dictionary. I created the term only five years ago in my "Choosing Single Motherhood" book to put the emphasis on Choice, not Single, in our motherhood journey.

There are three types of insemination techniques: 1) vaginal (or peri-cervical), which uses a syringe (the kind used to give infants liquid medicine) to place sperm into a woman's vagina, near the cervix, 2) intracervical insemination (ICI), involves the use of a catheter or cannula, to place the sperm directly into the cervix, 3) intrauterine insemination (IUI) involves the use of a catheter, or cannula, to place the sperm directly into the uterus.

Q: I am looking into having a child with donor insemination, but I am not sure where to begin, and what to expect about cost. What should I know?