It’s confirmed…………….. YOU’RE PREGNANT. Whoohoo – congratulations.

Both you and your doc have done the maths…………… junior will arrive on the 25th of November. You’ve got 32 weeks to get ready for your little bundle.

FLASH FORWARD………………32 weeks.

You feel like the OOPMA LOOMPA – ready to pop, but there is no sign your baby is ready to move out. It seems Junior has decided to stay PUT.

Your doctor is talking about, INDUCING.

But before your decide to give Junior a kick in the pants, STOP. There may be something wrong with those calculations.

Guessimating time of delivery

Calculating the moment when the dashing handsome sperm, swept the egg princess off her feet, is more often than not, hit and miss. So the working out the day baby should arrive, is subject to a little guess work.

Traditionally the calculation was made using the menstrual cycle, well more specifically the lack of it. The mathematical equation……..

Work out when the last period happened, then add 280 days.

The advent of ultrasound has refined the calculation, but it is still a rough estimate. Only 70 % of women deliver within 10 days of their estimated due date.

Mmm…………. looks like there is something wrong with the maths.

It takes more-or-less 268 days to make a baby

Up until now, the explanation for these failings has been………

“it is hard to know the exact moment of conception”.

But researchers from the United States National Institute of Health have shown, the inaccuracies are not just due to trouble pinpointing the start time. The time baby’s take to develop varies.

On average it takes 268 day i.e. 38 weeks and 2 days to make a human baby from start to finish. Give or take………………..37 days.

37 DAYS. That is more than a month !

Catching a moment in time

The team reached this stunning conclusion, by tracking 125 normal pregnancies, from start to finish. Start times were not subject to guess work. The team were able to use body chemistry to pinpoint the precise start time.

The women in this study were part of the North Carolina Early Pregnancy study, which happened a long time ago, between 1982-1985.

At the time, all the women who enrolled in the study wanted to get pregnant………. so they stopped using any form of contraception. And let nature take its course.

But as nature was taking it’s course, the women in the study agreed to collect pee samples, first thing every morning for 6 months. These urine samples allowed the research team to go back in time…….. to figure out, the moment of conception.

In the beginning…..

Three chemicals were tracked in each urine sample

• human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG),
• estrone-3-glucoronide and
• pregnanediol-3-glucoronide.

These three chemicals are able to accurately paint the picture of what was going on in the baby factory.

The day of ovulation is marked by a switch in the ratios of estrogen and progesterone. Progesterone is the big mamma hormone…. when ovulation happens, progesterone levels spike and estrogen levels drop.

Human chorionic gonadotropin, is the hormone that drives the development of the placenta – since only an implanted egg can produce hCG, the presence of this chemical signifies the fertilized egg has landed.

Counting the days

In 2010, the research team looked up the women who had kindly provided these urine samples. Bet they were surprised !

The women were asked to fill in the blanks about their delivery….

From start to finish

Analysis of this data …………… revealed the surprise.

Human babies don’t all develop at the same speed. Some are fast out of the gate, while others are a lot slower.

The time to implantation seemed to be a significant contributor to this variability. Slow implanters took longer to develop.

125 pregnancies is not enough to really study all the factors that contribute to this variability, but the team did notice, older women tended to deliver later. The calculations suggest, every additional year, added one day to their pregnancy.

So does it matter ?

Don’t be in too much of a hurry

You’re ready to deliver, the date is set …………… and then NOTHING.

PANIC !

Maybe the NOTHING is a sign, your baby is not ready.

Forcing the issue may not be the best thing to do. Let the stork decide when your baby arrives, odds are it knows best.

Further reading

Germ free milk is not good medicine	Babies who arrive via c-section arrive programmed to be fat	Having a baby means you will need to budget for new shoes

If you are an expectant Mom or know someone that is – invite them to participate, so they can create Better Body Chemistry during their pregnancy and raise a HAPPY HEALTHY little one.

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