Pregnancy Stages
Pregnancy in the First Term
The first three months of pregnancy are an exciting time that are full of changes for you and even more so for your baby who, is barely twelve weeks old, as he or she is no longer a cell and turns into a teensy human being with a heart that beats and kidneys that work. Incredible isn’t it? With all the changes your baby goes through, you can also expect a lot of changes in your body as well, starting from getting nausea and very tired to bigger breasts, which is not so bad for everyone, and great for some of us. During this whole process it is important you know what is normal and what types of things justify your calling the doctor, whom at this point you will be meeting with regularly.
A New Life Forming In Your Womb
Pregnancy begins when the ovule and the sperm meet, which happens in the fallopian tubes. At this stage, the ovule and the sperm together form into what is called zygote in other words, one cell. The zygote divides many times to conform several cells which then descends through the fallopian tubes towards the uterus. When it reaches the uterus, both you and your baby start to experience big transformations.
Around the fifth day of pregnancy, the blastocisto implants itself in the highly irrigated walls of the uterus, during a process that is called implantation. One part turns into the embryo, the baby, and the other part turns into the placenta, which is the organ that implants itself into the uterus to provide oxygen and give nutrition to the fetus and eliminate waste.
The baby grows inside of an amniotic sack inside of the uterus. The amniotic sack is full of a transparent liquid, which is known as amniotic liquid. This bag in fact, is made up of two thin membranes called carrion and amnions. When a woman says her water bag has broken it means that the membranes the cover the interior walls of the uterus ruptured. The baby floats or swims inside this liquid and is united to the placenta by the umbilical cord.
The placenta starts to form soon after the embryo has implanted itself in the uterus. The maternal blood vessels and fetal are very close to each other in the placenta, which allows several substances such as the nutrients, oxygen and waste, to move from one side to the other. The blood of the mother and the blood of the baby are in close contact but they do not actually mix.
The placenta grows like a tree, forming branches that at the same time ramify into other smaller ones. Around three weeks after fertilization, these blood vessels unite to form the circulatory system of the baby, and the heart starts to beat.
Starting from the ninth week of pregnancy, the embryo in growth is denominated as fetus. Amazingly, at this stage almost all of the structures and main organs of the baby have formed. During the rest of the thirty-one weeks the structure of the fetus grows and matures. On the other hand, the brain, although it forms very early, continues growing and developing throughout the pregnancy and in the beginning of infancy.
Remember that weeks means menstrual weeks, which means the amount of weeks since the last menstrual period, not weeks counted starting from conception. So at nine weeks the baby will actually have seven weeks if they are counted from conception.
Towards the end of the ninth week, the arms, legs and fingers of the hands and toes of the feet start to form. In fact, the embryo starts to move a little in slight and spontaneous ways. If during the first three months you do a sonogram, it is possible to see those movements on the screen. The brain grows quickly and the ears and the eyes show up. The external genitals also come up and by the twelfth week you can already distinguish male and female, although the differences of the sex still cannot be detected by an sonogram.
Towards the end of the twelfth week, the fetus measures around twelve centimeters and weighs around twenty-eight grams. The head looks big and round and the eyelids are sealed. The intestines, which in the tenth week were a little bit inside the umbilical cord, are already well placed in the inside of the abdomen. The nails show up and the hair on the baby’s head starts to grow. The fetus’s kidneys start to function in the third month. Between the ninth and twelfth week, the fetus starts to produce urine that can be seen in the sonogram inside the little bladder of the fetus.