Your pregnancy step-by-step

So you are pregnant…. Congratulations! Now you’ll want to work out exactly when your baby will be born! Sorry, that’s not really possible. Even using a pregnancy calculator you can’t predict exactly when your little one will decide to make an appearance. What a pregnancy calculator CAN do is give you a close approximation of the big day! Fewer than five out of every 100 babies actually arrive on their predicted due date. The rest either arrive too early, too late (and may need inducing) or a day or two wide of the mark. The pregnancy calculators on pregnancy and childcare websites are really easy to use. All you have to do is type in the date of your last period and the usual length of your menstrual cycle. The calculator then gives you your due date! Once you have that, you know what stage of pregnancy you are at. You may want to measure your progress in weeks, or months. The whole pregnancy falls into three terms; the first, second and third trimesters. The first trimester is weeks 4 to 12 the second is weeks 13 to 28 and the third trimester refers to 29 weeks to full term at 40. Most pregnancies follow the same path with babies and mums being roughly the same size at the same stage – although there are always those at the extreme ends of the scale of course, and as the pregnancy goes on the size of the baby can correspond less and less to the actual time spent in the womb. This makes guessing the exact stage of pregnancy from the bump or baby’s size is difficult. It’s very interesting to follow your progress on an online pregnancy calendar. Some of these pregnancy calendars are very detailed and will give you the size of your baby at that stage, sometimes comparing it to a fruit to give mum a better perspective on size; for example week eight, your baby is now the size of a raspberry. Some mums use the fruit reference as their baby’s “name” for those corresponding weeks! The pregnancy calendar will also tell you what developments are happening at each week; when the limbs and vital organs are formed for example. The better pregnancy calendars will also tell you what mum should be feeling at this stage, and what symptoms she can expect. Sometimes you’ll find you are ahead in certain phases and sometimes behind, but we all catch up with each other in the end!