When you decide you want to have a baby, realizing that happy fact can be more challenging than you may expect. Overall, 70% of women don't conceive within the first month of trying, and after a year 15% still aren’t pregnant.

Age does make a difference. In your 20s and early 30s, there's a 25% chance you'll get pregnant in about a month — but after age 40, there's only about a 10% chance you'll get pregnant in any given month.

Want to increase your chances? A Cochrane Library Review found that using a urine ovulation test to identify your peak fertility times (and then acting on that information) increases your chance of becoming pregnant to between 20% and 28% a month — right back up there with younger women.

Start a prenatal multivitamin for you and your partner six months in advance. (It promotes fertility and protects the fetus from birth defects.) Start getting 6.5 to 8.5 hours of sleep a night.

And don't drink. Drinking during the last two weeks of your cycle reduces the odds of conceiving by 40% and heavy drinking while you are ovulating reduces success by 54%.

If you do become pregnant, consider eating an Alternate Mediterranean Diet (reduced dairy, red meat, and sugar compared to the standard veggie-loving, olive oil- and fish-centric Mediterranean diet) or a DASH diet (vegetables, fruits, and whole grains, fat-free or low-fat dairy, fish, poultry, beans and nuts, and limited salt).

Those diets are associated with a 50% lower risk of preterm birth.