Month One in pregnancy
Whether you are ecstatic about your new state, at the opposite end of the emotional spectrum and feeling blue, or somewhere in between joyful amusement and sheer panic, information is going to be key. In fact, no matter how you feel psychologically ignorance is never bliss when it comes to pregnancy and childbirth. Changes and challenges are going to come fast. For most normal women, pregnancy lasts approximately forty weeks. 280 days. nine months or, using childbirth language, three trimesters of three months each. Statistics tell us that 95 percent of all babies are born between the 266th and the 294th day after their conception. Two hundred and eighty days doesn’t sound like a very long time at all and it isn’t, especially when you consider the monumental metamorphosis that your body is now beginning, both physically and emotionally.
Shaky’? Scared’? Ecstatic’? Happy? Nervous’? Sick? Energetic? Exhausted? Joyous? Think about it: pregnancy is the only time in your life that you will ever be two people at once! Go easy on yourself.
Experts are usually uncertain about the exact date of fertilization, so your pregnancy and due date are timed and predicted on the basis of the first day of your last period. However, because unborn life really begins after one of your eggs is fertilized during intercourse, this roughly sketched time line of fetal development and activity is built on that foundation. Some charts of “fetal growth” start back at the
first day of your last period and not on the day of fertilization. Ovulation occurs around the fourteenth day after your last period and your body releases a healthy egg, ready and able to be impregnated a successful sperm. Your mate actually ejaculates up to 400 million sperm into your vagina during intercourse, but most never make it to the egg waiting in one of your fallopian tubes. The successful sperm is able to pass through the soft mucus being secreted by your cervix. If by chance this sperm arrives a little before the egg has been released, it can survive for up to two days.