This week's period may be the last one you have for a good long while. Enjoy it! OK, maybe not enjoy it, but at least appreciate the fact that if it weren't for that egg-dropping, uterine-thickening, blood-shedding cycle you love to loathe every month, you wouldn't be able to grow the baby you're hoping to conceive! Yes, for once you can consider Aunt Flo a friend of yours.
What You're Thinking:
"Goodbye menstrual cramps, period panties and chocolate cravings! Hello pregnancy cramps, preggy panties and even bigger chocolate cravings!"
Your Body
For the first two weeks of your pregnancy, you won't actually be pregnant. Yep, you heard that right. When your doctor or midwife calculates your due date, she will count 40 weeks from the first day of your last period, not from the day the baby was actually made (usually around Day 14).
While you're on your period, the uterus is shedding its lining and an egg (the egg!) is preparing to launch into your fallopian tube, hoping to hook up with one lucky, fast-swimming sperm.
If you're planning on getting preggers, now would be a good time to put the kibosh on all those bad habits like smoking, drug use and drinking. You'll also want to start taking a prenatal vitamin with folic acid—a B vitamin that prevents brain and neural-tube birth defects. It works best if you take it before you conceive and in the early days of pregnancy, although you'll want to continue until Junior makes his debut in nine months (and beyond if you're breastfeeding).
Your Baby
While this is technically considered the first week of your pregnancy, baby is still only a glimmer in your eye (and an egg in your ovary). The first day of your period is considered Day 1 of the 280 days of your pregnancy even though conception won't occur for another 14 days or so (we know, it's totally confusing).
Time to get down to the business of making a baby! You're doing all the right things—and one "thing" in particular—to start that journey from "party of two and your best bottle of wine, please" to "do you serve chicken nuggets?" Get ready for a wild ride!
"So this is what sex is like without contraception! OMG, OMG, OMG, we're trying to make a baby!"
Happy conception week! This is where that long journey from stretch marks to spit up to soccer practice begins.
This week is all about the numbers: Somewhere between 140 million and 500 million sperm will be trying to boogie their way up your fallopian tubes to reach that single, solitary egg. Only about 200 of them will make it to the end of the road. And only one will earn the right to do a little victory dance in the end zone.
Although there's plenty going on, the truth is, it's all behind the scenes. Your body doesn't know what's hit it yet, and it won't until at least next week.
If you're feeling some cramping, you can probably chalk it up to ovulation. Or that second bowl of hot-sauce-spiked chili you had last night.
At the end of this week, the utterly mind-blowing miracle—conception—will occur!
Once the egg's been fertilized, it will split into two nuclei that contain the genes of you and your partner (like Dad's gorgeous eyes and Mom's great legs).
If egg did indeed meet sperm, the baby they created will begin to rapidly divide again and again and again. The little ball of cells will double in size about every 12 hours (luckily, you'll never grow at quite that rate, even though you may feel like you are).
Although you won't know it for months yet, the gender of your baby and his or her eye and hair color, and even to some extent his or her personality, has all already been determined. The moment sperm met egg and you and your partner each chipped in your 23 chromosomes to create this new person, all of that was instantaneously worked out.
Within three or four days after conception, the egg will start to change from a solid ball of cells (a morula) into a layer of hundreds of cells clustered around a fluid-filled cavity, called a blastocyst. It'll look kind of like a microscopic piece of Freshen Up gum.
Your little blastocyst (aka, teensy, weensy baby-to-be) will begin the long 7-to-10-day trek down the fallopian tubes to the uterus. Congratulations, Mama, you're pregnant ... you just don't know it yet!
Want to up your chances of creating a Mini Me or He? Try the old natural family-planning method to determine when you're ovulating. Taking your temperature in the morning, before you get out of bed every day, can help you pinpoint the best time to grab your stud muffin and get down to business. You can also go the more modern route and pick up an ovulation test kit from the drugstore to determine when you're ovulating, but the low-tech technique is a lot cheaper (and you may want to save that cash for diapers).
Week 3
Welcome to the bizarro world of "pregnancy math," where 40 weeks somehow fit into just nine months, and your pregnancy begins nearly two weeks before you've even done The Deed
What You're Thinking: "I am so ready for this! Am I ready for this? Yes, yes, I'm a strong, confident, capable person! Wait, am I crazy? I cannot believe I might be somebody's mother!"
When your baby implants in your cushy uterine lining later in this week, you might notice a little bit of spotting. Nothing to worry about—in fact, it's your first sign of success.
If you're feeling tired this week, or you're convinced that your breasts are achy or are already starting to enlarge, it may not be all in your head. They're both early signs of pregnancy.
You might also be having major mood swings (according to your partner, anyway—you're pretty sure you're being quite levelheaded and reasonable). This is all due to the hormones that are racing like Danica Patrick through your body. Those hormones are also responsible for the unimaginable exhaustion you might feel at all hours of the day.
That sudden urge to pee every 10 minutes is also an early sign of pregnancy. Unfortunately, you'll keep on peeing with this irritating frequency for the next 37 weeks, so load up on Charmin.
You may even experience the first twinges of morning sickness this week. Once you get that positive pregnancy test next week, you'll realize it actually wasn't your partner's driving that was making you feel queasy (and apologies will probably be in order). It certainly doesn't help matters that your sense of smell is suddenly sharper than a Labrador's and everything you get a whiff of makes you want to barf.
If you've been charting your body temp trying to peg down ovulation and you find your temperature stays high for a few days, congrats: You're probably preggo!
Just because you don't know if you're knocked up yet doesn't mean there isn't plenty going on inside of you.This week starts with what is probably one of the most momentous events in your pregnancy (besides the meeting of egg and sperm and when you actually have the baby): implantation. In other words, your Mini Me or He (technically called a "zygote") will set up shop in the lining of your uterus this week and hunker down there for the next 37 weeks.
As much as you'd like to think of "implantation" as your baby snuggling down into the quilty softness of your uterus and pulling the covers up for a nine-month nap, the truth is a little less bedtime ritual and a lot more Alien. When the embryo hits the uterus, it releases enzymes that actually eat away at the uterine lining so that it can burrow on in. Nice, huh?
Once safely implanted, the little ball of cells will split in two. One part will become the embryo—aka your bundle of joy—and the other part will form the placenta (your baby's 24/7 coffee shop, from where he or she will get all of his or her nutrients). The embryo and your uterine lining will start working together to create an intricate network of blood vessels to supply oxygen and food to the newly forming placenta and the embryo itself.
Near the end of this week, your bouncing mass of cells will start producing its first dribbles of that most famous of pregnancy hormones, human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG). This is the hormone that will be behind most of your pregnancy symptoms in the coming weeks and months. It's also the one that will show up as a plus sign on that home pregnancy test you're going to take in a week or so.
By the end of this week, your little sugar pie will be made of 500 microscopic cells.
You're only a couple of hours pregnant, so you can't blame baby for that growing gut quite yet. Still, if you're trying to conceive, and especially if you think you may have hit the jackpot this month, this is no time to start dieting or to start an exercise program.
If you've been hitting the treadmill already, feel free to continue working out. Aerobic exercise will actually make your pregnancy easier as long as you don't try to break any endurance records. Speaking of breaking endurance records, here are the pregnancy warnings that ought to be printed on the side of every elliptical machine: Keep your heart rate under 140 beats per minute and your body temperature below 102 (i.e., skip the midsummer Arizona triathlon). More realistically, that also means foregoing long soaks in the hot tub and staying out of the sauna for the next nine months.
If you're not already knocking back a daily prenatal vitamin, start now. It's especially important right now to get at least 400 micrograms of folic acid per day. If the idea of swallowing those horse-sized pills makes you gag even before the morning sickness kicks in, you can try to get at least some of your folic acid through your diet. Best sources include beef liver, spinach, black-eyed peas, peanuts and orange juice. Or look for a breakfast cereal that's fortified with folic acid so you can fill your daily quota in a single bowl.
Tapos irritable ka lagi sa paligid mo kaya swerte ko kay JON mahaba ang pasensya niya sa akin pero lately nung di pa namin alam na preggy na me lagi ko siya pinagagalitan every single day at nagkakatampuhan kami o away where in nagtataka naman siya at after ay tumatahimik na lang sabi lang niya sa loob loob niya "parang may iba sa be be ko ah?!" Na fifigure out niya pero di niya maprecdict muna kasi nga sabi ko sa kanya "bhe mukang magkakaroon ako ah kasi masakit boobs ko!"
If hair dye is safe why am I told not to color my hair during the first trimester?
Even though there has not been any evidence of hair dye causing birth defects, we are just not sure of it’s safety. The first trimester is when all of your baby’s major organs are forming. Your doctor may recommend postponing coloring your hair until you are in your second trimester or avoiding hair coloring all together.
In 1978, the FDA proposed warning labels on hair dye that contained two coal-tar ingredients. Researchers from the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, MD found that rodents that were fed these compounds from coal-tar in certain hair dyes were more likely to develop cancer than rodents that were not fed these compounds. In this study rodents were fed large amounts of these compounds, more than what anyone would ingest. It also did not assess the risks of these components being applied to the skin. Other studies on hair dye have shown that only a small percentage of hair dye is actually absorbed through the scalp and gets into the body. Manufacturers have stopped making their hair dye with these ingredients but many have been replaced with compounds with similar structures.
Can hair dye be absorbed into my skin and hurt my baby?
Only a small amount of hair dye gets absorbed through the skin. This amount is so small that it is not thought to be harmful to baby. The research that is available does not show any evidence of birth defects related to using hair dye. Animal studies have been done with doses 100 times higher than what you would use on your hair. These studies have not shown any abnormal fetal development or birth defects in animals. There have been so few studies on hair dye and human pregnancy that we just don’t have enough information to say whether or not hair dye could be dangerous in human pregnancies.
Safety tips for coloring your hair during pregnancy
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