Pregnancy & Parenting
Congratulations, you're pregnant! One the signs of pregnancy stats showing and pregnancy symptoms date indicate that the pregnancy due date is near; its clear your little bundle of joy is about to arrive. Every woman goes through different stages of pregnancy and prays for a healthy pregnancy. Nine months of pregnancy is a joyous period for any woman.
The birth of child brings a lot of happiness in a household. With a child come a lot of responsibilities. Parenting can be a difficult job and the valuable parenting tips can make the job easier. Good parenting requires knowledge and skills necessary to successfully raise the child from birth through their senior year in high school.
Plan Early For A Baby In Your Life
Today women are not only a house wife’s they also want to became a working woman, so some times they become late for a baby because they don’t plan about it. If you plan about a baby after the age of 30s it will not create a problem for you, but after the age of 40s it will create a problem to be pregnant for you, because the percentage of fertility may decline in a women with age. If you are over the age of 40s and you have not a positive result about pregnancy after you are trying for six months, then you should go and consult to your doctor about fertility evaluation.
If you are trying for a baby from last twelve months (one year) and you have a problem to be pregnant this is known as experience infertility, this is a common problem in those couples who plan late for a baby. Now you consult your doctor and must have fertility treatments. These treatments may be surgical or with drugs advised by your doctor.
Take Care Of Your Health Before Pregnancy.
When you plan to be pregnant you must know about pregnancy and pregnancy diet.You can start getting folic acid daily from foods. Folic acid helps your baby to keep away from birth defects. Folic acids help in formation of spin and formation of brain in a baby. You eat the food and vegetables which are saturated with folic acid such as green vegetables and citrus fruits and food like rice and cereals. You can eat calcium rich vegetables like broccoli and milk food which helps your baby’s bones. Avoid alcohol and smoking. You should do daily routine exercises to keep you fit. Consult your doctor about your any type of health problem like blood pressure, diabetes or any problem. You should control your weight. Now you consult to your mother and female relatives about pregnancy and process of delivery and its minor problems. You should consult to your doctor about every type of genetic diseases which may be transferred to your baby.
Pregnancy symptoms: Top ten signs you might be pregnant
One of the early signs of pregnancy is sensitive, sore breasts caused by increasing levels of hormones. The soreness may feel like an exaggerated version of how your breasts feel before your period. Your discomfort should diminish significantly after the first trimester, as your body adjusts to the hormonal changes.
Feeling tired all of a sudden? No, make that exhausted. No one knows for sure what causes early pregnancy fatigue, but it's possible that rapidly increasing levels of the hormone progesterone are contributing to your sleepiness.
You should start to feel more energetic once you hit your second trimester, although fatigue usually returns late in pregnancy when you're carrying around a lot more weight and some of the common discomforts of pregnancy make it more difficult to get a good night's sleep.
Some women have a small amount of vaginal bleeding around 11 or 12 days after conception (close to the time you might notice a missed period). The bleeding may be caused by the fertilized egg burrowing into the blood-rich lining of your uterus — a process that starts just six days after fertilization — but no one knows for sure.
The bleeding is very light (appearing as red spotting or pink or reddish-brown staining) and lasts only a day or two. (Let your practitioner know if you notice any bleeding or spotting, particularly if it's accompanied by pain, since this can be a sign of an ectopic pregnancy.)
If you're like most women, morning sickness won't hit until about a month after conception. (A lucky few escape it altogether.) But some women do start to feel queasy a bit earlier. And not just in the morning, either — pregnancy-related nausea and vomiting can be a problem morning, noon, or night.
About half of women with nausea feel complete relief by the beginning of the second trimester. For most others it takes another month or so for the queasiness to ease up.
If you're newly pregnant, it's not uncommon to feel repelled by the smell of a bologna sandwich or cup of coffee and for certain aromas to trigger your gag reflex. Though no one knows for sure, this may be a side effect of rapidly increasing amounts of estrogen in your system. You may also find that certain foods you used to enjoy are suddenly completely repulsive to you.
Hormonal changes in early pregnancy may leave you feeling bloated, similar to the feeling some women have just before their period arrives. That's why your clothes may feel snugger than usual at the waistline, even early on when your uterus is still quite small.
Shortly after you become pregnant, you may find yourself hurrying to the bathroom all the time. Why? Mostly because during pregnancy the amount of blood and other fluids in your body increases, which leads to extra fluid being processed by your kidneys and ending up in your bladder.
This symptom may start as early as six weeks into your first trimester and continue or worsen as your pregnancy progresses and your growing baby exerts more pressure on your bladder.
If you're usually pretty regular and your period doesn't arrive on time, you'll probably take a pregnancy test long before you notice any of the above symptoms. But if you're not regular or you're not keeping track of your cycle, nausea and breast tenderness and extra trips to the bathroom may signal pregnancy before you realize you didn't get your period.
If you've been charting your basal body temperature and you see that your temperature has stayed elevated for 18 days in a row, you're probably pregnant.
And finally...
In spite of what you might read on the box, many home pregnancy tests are not sensitive enough to detect most pregnancies until about a week after a missed period. So if you decide to take one earlier than that and get a negative result, try again in a few days.
Once you've gotten a positive result, make an appointment with your practitioner.
Weeks 2-13
Conception
How your baby will grow
Before she actually starts growing, you'll set the stage. Last week an increase in the amount of estrogen and progesterone coursing through your bloodstream prompted your uterus to form a lush, blood-rich lining of tissue to support a potential fertilized egg. At the same time.
How your baby will grow: Before she actually starts growing, you'll set the stage. Last week an increase in the amount of estrogen and progesterone coursing through your bloodstream prompted your uterus to form a lush, blood-rich lining of tissue to support a potential fertilized egg. At the same time, in your ovaries, eggs were ripening in fluid-filled sacs called follicles. At the beginning of this week (often around day 14 of a 28-day cycle), you ovulate: One of your eggs erupts from its follicle and is swept away from your ovary and into a Fallopian tube. During the next 12 to 24 hours that egg will be fertilized if one of the 250 million sperm (on average) your mate ejaculates manages to swim all the way from your vagina through your cervix, up into your uterus to the Fallopian tube and penetrates the egg. Only about 400 sperm will survive the arduous ten-hour journey to the egg, and only one will succeed in burrowing through its outer membrane. (It takes about 20 minutes for the lucky winner to find his way in.)
Over the next ten to 30 hours, the sperm's nucleus will merge with the egg's as they combine their genetic material. If the sperm carries a Y chromosome, your baby will be a boy; if it's an X chromosome, you'll be welcoming a girl. During the three- to four-day trip from your Fallopian tube to your uterus, the fertilized egg (now called a zygote) will divide into 16 identical cells. Once it enters the uterus, the zygote is called a morula. A day or two later, it will begin burrowing into the lush lining of your uterus, continuing its amazing growth and transformation. By this time your developing baby is just a little ball of cells that's officially referred to by scientists as a blastocyst: It has an inner cell mass that will become the embryo itself, a fluid-filled cavity that will become the amniotic sac, and an outer cell mass that will become the placenta, the pancake-shaped organ that delivers life-sustaining oxygen and nutrients to your baby and carries away her waste products.
Note: Every baby develops a little differently — even in the womb. Our information is designed to give you a general idea of your baby's development.
How your life's changing: Your last period started 12 to 16 days ago, so you're probably ovulating now or will be soon. Strange as it may seem, your practitioner calculates your due date (and your baby's gestational age) starting from the first day of your last menstrual period. Pregnancy lasts about 38 weeks from conception, but since it's often difficult to pinpoint exactly when egg and sperm merged, doctors and midwives simply count 40 weeks of pregnancy beginning with the onset of your last period. That's why you're already considered to be two weeks into your pregnancy when fertilization occurs.
A lot of things have to fall into place for conception to happen — in this case, timing really is everything. To boost your odds, aim to have sex sometime between 72 hours before you ovulate and 24 hours after. (You're trying to accommodate the lifespan of both sperm, which survive for up to 72 hours, and the egg, which lives no more than 24 hours after ovulation.) Now's not the time to hesitate: Make sure your mate clears his calendar and that the two of you have plenty of time together to make love.
Before you retreat to the bedroom, though, you might want to do some homework: Read up on detecting ovulation to help you pinpoint your window of opportunity. Get the scoop on which sexual positions may help you conceive faster and even how you might influence your baby's gender. Finally, to spare you and your partner unneeded anxiety, learn how long it usually takes to get pregnant — most couples need more than a few tries before they can announce that a baby's on the way.
Last but not least, if you're trying to get pregnant and you haven't already stopped drinking, smoking, and taking drugs — even over-the-counter ones — now's the time to do so, since you want your body to be in the
Diet, lifestyle changes cut infertility risk
Women who followed at least five certain lifestyle and diet behaviors were about 80 percent less likely to have infertility from ovulatory disorders than women who followed none of the behaviors, a Harvard study concludes.
The analysis of 17,544 married women participating in the ongoing Nurses' Health Study II found those with the highest fertility scores: ate less trans fat and sugar from carbohydrates; consumed more protein from vegetables than from animals; ate more fiber and iron; took more multivitamins; had a lower body mass index (BMI); exercised for longer periods of time each day; and consumed more high-fat diary products and less low-fat diary products.
The relationship between these behaviors and reduced risk of infertility was similar for women regardless of age and whether they'd been pregnant in the past, said the Harvard School of Public Health authors of the study, which was published in the Nov. 1 issue of the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology.
"We analyzed what happens if you follow one, two, three, four, or more different factors. What we found was that, as women started following more of these recommendations, their risk of infertility dropped substantially for every one of the dietary and lifestyle strategies undertaken. In fact, we found a sixfold difference in ovulatory infertility risk between women following five or more low-risk dietary and lifestyle habits and those following none," lead author Jorge Chavarro, a research fellow in the school's department of nutrition, said in a prepared statement.
"The key message of this paper is that making the right dietary choices and including the right amount of physical activity in your daily life may make a large difference in your probability of becoming fertile if you are experiencing problems with ovulation," senior author Walter Willett, chair of the department of nutrition, added. According to the researchers, infertility affects one in six couples, in the U.S. and Europe and ovulatory problems have been identified in up to 30 percent of those cases.
Why pregnant women don't tip over
Given that a woman's abdominal mass increases by a third during pregnancy, it's a miracle that such a significant shift in gravity doesn't have her tipping over during her final trimester.
Now, a new study describes a surprising set of anatomical reasons why the delicate balancing act works.
According to researchers, the female spine has evolved differently, most likely to accommodate the tremendous demands of pregnancy. Without these evolutionary adaptations, women would probably experience even more back problems than they already do during the gestational period.
"The maternal center of mass shifts forward about three to five centimeters during pregnancy, so that it's no longer beautifully aligned with the hips and feet," said study author Katherine Whitcome, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University's department of anthropology who began the research as a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin.
Whitcome explained that the female body compensates for this shift in several ways. One is to recruit more back muscles. Solely using these muscles, Whitcome said, would quickly cause muscle fatigue and make women more prone to injury. Instead, the female back has evolved to allow three lower vertebrae to form a larger curve to support the growing fetus. In men, only two vertebrae form this curve, called lordosis, she explained.
Females also have a key hip joint that is larger and can flare out further, according to the study, published in the Dec. 13 issue of Nature.
"It's a nifty little package of adaptations. We see it in modern humans, but it's also apparent from the little bit of vertebral anatomy we see in earlier hominids," said Whitcome. "It seems part and parcel of the challenges of bipedalism [walking on two feet rather than four]." These changes would have allowed women in prehistoric times to continue to forage for food, as well as quickly avoid predators, she said.
Whitcome's study included 19 pregnant women between the ages of 20 and 40. The researchers found that when the women were standing, they naturally increased their spine's lordosis, sometimes by as much as 60 percent. Even when the women extended their hips only slightly, their lower backs were extended by as much as 28 degrees.
However, despite what appear to be nature's best intentions, back pain is still a common complication during pregnancy.
"Women, by and large, make pregnancy look so easy, but there are very few women who have experienced pregnancy who haven't had some back pain," said Whitcome. But, she added, "without these adaptations, I think this back pain would be exceedingly worse. I think these adaptations mediate some of the intensity of back pain."
Dr. Miriam Greene, an obstetrician at New York University Medical Center, agreed that "there's plenty of back pain in pregnancy," but said she wasn't convinced that the differences in male and female spines account for the majority of a woman's pregnancy stability.
"I think the reason why pregnant women don't tip over is that the placenta produces relaxin, a hormone released in pregnancy that spreads your pelvis, making it wider, and giving you a wider stance. That's why you walk like a duck when you're pregnant," she said.
Greene said a pregnant woman's center of gravity starts to shift slowly as she gains weight, with the majority of the shift occurring in the third trimester.
To prevent falls and back strain, Greene recommends wearing flat shoes, ditching heavy bags, taking extra care anytime you lift objects, and perhaps wearing a pregnancy belt. Additionally, she said that pregnancy exercise classes can help maintain the strength in your back.