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The time from the beginning of one period to the beginning of the next is called the menstrual cycle. This cycle lasts an average of 28 days.

You may notice between periods a wet or dry feeling in your vagina. This wet feeling will probably come a few days after your period ends. You might notice liquidy discharge when you wipe yourself or on your underwear. This fluid may be for cleaning your vagina and cervix, for lubrication during sex, and/or for helping sperm swim into your womb (or uterus).

Around the middle of your cycle (13 to 15 days before the first day of your next period), the liquidy stuff gets thinner and clearer like raw egg white. At the same time, an egg is preparing to move out of your ovary (the place in your body that makes the eggs). This is called ovulation. After the egg leaves your ovary, it makes its way into the Fallopian tube. If a man and a woman have sexual intercourse without birth control (or if the birth control doesn’t work – yikes!), a sperm can enter the egg and fertilization occurs. The fertilized egg will travel to the womb. The lining of the womb builds up after ovulation, preparing a spongy bed for a fertilized egg. The egg attaches itself to the built-up lining for the nine months it takes to grow a baby.

If the egg isn’t fertilized, it still travels along the Fallopian tube, but then dissolves before reaching the womb. Once the egg is gone, the lining isn’t needed, so it leaves the body (it looks like blood) – that’s your period coming about fourteen days after you ovulate. And then the whole cycle starts again. Cool eh?