Health Tips, Health Care Tips, Pregnancy, Baby Care, Men and Women Fitness Care Tips

This Pregnancy Calendar is trying to help you understand your pregnancy and the fetal development taking place week by week through your pregnancy including ultrasound pictures, visual comparisons for how big your baby is and practical advice on being pregnant from the physical to the emotional. You will find lots of pictures from the smallest embryo to the largest baby! Also included is a special section for dads and twins. We hope you enjoy this section. And don't forget to stop by the pregnancy due date forums to talk to others who are due when you are! (See below for the pregnancy week by week calendar links to each week of pregnancy. Not sure how many weeks you are? See our due date and weeks calculator.)

There are a lot of things that you may find surprising about pregnancy. Some women seem to feel pregnant before the test turns positive, while others don't seem to feel anything until the baby starts to move. These are all variations of normal and not something to be concerned with in general. Any time you have a question or are unsure of something, I would encourage you to contact your midwife or doctor.

You might be worried about annoying them, but don't sweat it. This is what they are paid for during your gestation. They know that pregnant women have a lot of questions and that they have the answers. That said don't abuse the phone in the middle of the night. Non-emergent questions should be saved for the day time, regular office hours. Some practitioners even have a special phone line dedicated simply for questions. This is usually answered by a nurse. The nurse takes the questions and answers them, both general and specific to you. If there is something that she can't answer, she will pass the information along to the practitioner for a response.

You will get to know the practitioner through prenatal care. This starts off feeling fairly slow, seeing them about once a month until the third trimester. Then you spend two months being seen every other week. After that, the ninth month is spent with weekly visits. This adds up to thirteen or so appointments. That may sound like a lot, but many moms report that much of this time is spent in the waiting room and not actually with the OB. That said, others may have trouble because they are being seen by a different person at each visit. This makes it very hard to really know the person who comes in during your birth. If this is a problem for you, perhaps, you have chosen the wrong practice and may want to reconsider your choice, instead, opting for a different practice.

The best advice I can give you is to write everything down. This includes questions that you have before your visit or things that you want to ensure that you talk about as well as points of advice given during your visits. This is why is can be helpful to have someone go with you to your appointments, to help you remember what was said.

When you write down what you want to talk about at your visit, think of it like an agenda. Your practitioner has an agenda, something that they talk to every pregnant mom with at this point in pregnancy. You should also have an agenda of questions to ask or things to clarify. The reason is that it's all too easy to get distracted by your practitioner's agenda. 

Most of all remember, that your pregnancy is likely to be at least slightly different than anyone you've known. You are not likely to be a text book pregnancy. You may not have questions every time, but it's worth it to think things through before your visit so that you are prepared to answer questions that your doctor or midwife have for you.

Enjoy your pregnancy!  Read more at http://pregnancy.about.com/od/yourbaby/a/pregcalendar.htm