Menstrual Cycle 101

When little girls are in the process of growing into women, there are certain changes that take place. The first major change that will take place is puberty. Puberty is a stage in life when girls will begin to mature both mentally and physically. The physical aspect of maturation will be changes of your body, such as, growing breast, growing body hair, widening of hips, perspiration, weight and height gain. Puberty takes place at different times for different people, and takes longer for some than it does for others. Puberty is often a hard time, emotionally, especially with female, because of uncertainty and the drastic changes of the body.

The reason that young girls began going though puberty is because of hormones. Hormones are chemicals that are in the body, that are released when the brain tells them that it is time for the body to change, and grow. Hormones will play a big role in the way your body functions for the rest of you life. But now we will focus on how certain hormones work together to make us all beautiful women.

Since you were born, you have had two little sacs in side of you, near your stomach called ovaries. These ovaries have several roles to play. They produce hormones, which is what we just talked about, called estrogen and progesterone. These two hormones are what make it possible to have babies, because they cause the eggs in your ovaries to mature, allowing pregnancy.

This is where it gets confusing, so pay attention. I always try to think of periods as a cleansing process. They are a lot of body organs that are involved in having a period, the same one's that are also involved in having a baby. Think of the tune to the song about the bones that make up the skeleton that you learned in school, we'll call it the ovulation process:

The ovaries are connected to the fallopian tube

where the egg then travels to the uterus.

The traveling process takes about one day

and there it waits to be fertilized.

Let me explain the body parts that I mentioned; remember that the ovaries hold the eggs. You have two ovaries; and they take turns preparing the eggs to travel. One month, one ovary will let their egg go, and the next month the other ovary will let theirs go. They like to take turns. The fallopian tubs are like tiny tubes, and one end is connected to the ovaries, and the other to the uterus. The uterus is where women hold their baby's until they are ready to come out.

When a female's body is ready for a period, it begins with a cleansing process. This is when the shedding of the lining of the uterus occurs. The lining that built itself up inside the uterus is made of blood and other tissues. The