Having had a conversation recently with someone who just looked at me in confusion when I said I was 17 weeks, I thought I would explain what that exactly means.
Pregnancy is divided into 3 trimesters of roughly 3 months each:
- 1st Trimester is 1-12 weeks. It's where baby goes from being an embryo to a fully fledged Fetus. All of the main organs grow and get into place. Which is why the 1st trimester is the most dangerous time, because sometimes things just grow wrong. 1st trimester is also the time you get morning sickness and spots and general hormonal nastiness. You get the dating scan at roughly week 12.
- 2nd Trimester is 12-24 weeks. Baby grows finger nails, it's bones turn from cartilage into actual bones, babies movements in the womb start creating it's fingerprints and baby mainly works at getting much bigger. Your placenta takes over from just getting blood straight from you. You start to feel baby kick! and you start showing! At roughly 20 weeks you get a scan to see if there are any problems with baby, they can see things like, if the baby has a cleft palate, or if baby high chance at downs and what babies gender is (unless for the scan baby has it's legs crossed, or is lying in an awkward position).
- 3rd Trimester is 24-40 weeks. Baby keeps growing even bigger! babies lungs grown and get stronger. after 24 weeks baby is at the start of Viability, which means you can give birth and the baby has a chance of actually surviving. (though the longer the baby stays in the better! baby, don't you dare come out before 40 weeks). And basically everything becomes the count down towards birth! (I know least about this trimester, because I'm looking things up as the weeks happen)
p.s. I could be wrong about most of this stuff, I'm not a doctor! It's stuff I've remembered from things I've read on the internet.
No comments:
Post a Comment