What’s Happening With Mom?
Your life is about to change more than you can possibly imagine.
From bottles of red wine to bottles of formula, from spur-of-the-moment road trips to military planning required just to go to the grocery store, from cute outfits to sweatpants on heavy rotation.
You Are Going To Be A Mom!
But first, there’s the small matter of the 40 week odyssey of pregnancy.
Being pregnant is an incredible journey. Every part of your body is going to do some amazing, annoying, breathtaking, embarrassing, impressive, painful, and fabulous things in the next 40 weeks to nurture your growing baby.
Your baby is going to turn from two cells to a fully-formed, beautiful baby via various stages that include tadpole, alien, squid, and thing that won’t stop kicking you in the ribs.
The first day of those 40 weeks of pregnancy is usually defined as the first day of your period. So Week 1 is your period, and the start of the cycle that you became pregnant.
Even if you weren’t paying attention in Biology in school you’ll know that while you are dealing with Aunt Flo, you are not actually pregnant. So, you ask, why do pregnancy calendars count from my period? There’s a couple of reasons why health care providers count from this date.
Why Do Pregnancy Calendars Count From My Period?
Your period is the start of a series of hormone changes that cause your body to get ready for a potential pregnancy. The same hormone changes lead to the release of an egg from one of
your ovaries in about 14 days time. Without your body’s preparations in the first part of your cycle it would be impossible to become pregnant. So these two weeks are a vitally important part of pregnancy.
It’s also because it’s impossible to pinpoint the exact moment pregnancy begins, but most women know when their period started, so this is a convenient date to start counting from.
So (early) congratulations, and read on to find out what’s going to happen next!
What’s Happening With Baby?
We know that there’s no baby – yet! But during your period, your body is producing a hormone called follicle stimulating hormone, which causes an egg in one of your ovaries to ripen. That egg will soon leave the ovary, so it can be fertilized, and become a baby.
Tags: First Trimester, new pregnancy, pregnancy calendar explained, week 1
