What’s Happening With Mom?
Your ligaments and muscles relax, with the ultimate aim of spreading your pelvis and making the opening wider to permit baby’s exit. Your posture adjusts to support your growing baby’s weight more efficiently. These changes cause your back to ache, and makes it easier to injure yourself when exercising or doing physical activity.
Exercising while pregnant is still recommended, but take it easy, and favor forms of exercise that are gentle on your joints, such as swimming.
Relaxing ligaments affect your feet too, and bad news for shoe lovers, this means your feet can spread and your favorite shoes may no longer fit.
Your digestive system slows down so your body can extract the maximum amount of nutrients from your food for your baby. Together with your expanding uterus pressing on your intestines and stomach, this leads to heartburn and constipation. Around half of all pregnant women suffer from heartburn, but your grandma might say that’s a good thing – an old wives tale says that moms-to-be who have heartburn give birth to babies with more hair.
What’s Happening With Baby?
Baby’s skeleton, nerves and muscles continue to develop and every week your baby is capable of more sophisticated movements, and even make facial expressions. Right now baby is just practicing smiling and frowning, rather than actually feeling emotions.
Baby girls make millions of eggs in their ovaries. Your baby’s eyes are now sensitive to light. And, baby can hiccup. All babies hiccup a lot, while those brand new lung muscles learn how to work.
Baby grew an inch this month, and is now 4 inches long and weighs almost 3 ounces.
Tags: Baby's eyes, constipation, digestive system, egg development, Exercise, heartburn, Second Trimester, sensitive to light
