Pregnancy Week Seventeen
Baby’s Development
In the next two or three weeks, your fetus will experience a major growth spurt. Expect your little one to more than double her weight and add a few inches to her height! In fact, week seventeen is a milestone for many babies as they finally weigh more than their placenta!
Your baby’s skeleton is still mostly cartilage, but calcium is still being absorbed rapidly to aid in the hardening of its little bones. Up until this point, your fetus has looked bony indeed, but fat will start to collect all over its body this week. Not only will this fat give your fetus more of a ‘newborn’ look, but the collection of it is essential to help your baby stay warm and regulate its metabolism.
Although its hearing is only beginning to develop, studies have shown that babies in their seventeenth week of gestation will actually startle at loud noises! While certainly not loud, you are able to listen to your baby’s heartbeat without the aid of expensive Doppler equipment this week. Drugs stores often carry specially designed commercial stethoscopes that allow you to hear your baby’s heart beat at home. Remember to think before you purchase one of these devices. For some mothers, it may be a comfort to hear the rapid whooshing of their fetus’s heart beat but for others, you may find it to be another cause for worry. Take your personality and stress level into account before purchasing!
Your Body and Emotions
The key thing to remember this week is to take steps to reduce your stress. You may think the need to relax in pregnancy is nonsense, that emotions don’t have an effect on the fetus…well, you need to think again. Between 18-20 weeks, your fetus is particularly vulnerable to a chemical created by anxiety called corticopin releasing hormone. When you feel stress or fear, this hormone is released and stimulates your body to release prostglandins. In turn, these chemicals can start contractions and result in preterm labor.
If you are stressed at work or at home, take steps to relax. For the sake of your baby, you need to take on less responsibility or remove people or situations from your life that are making your anxious. Not only will you feel better, but your baby will thrive because of it.
You may start to notice more vaginal discharge this week. Ranging in color from clear to milky, leucorrhea is the result of increased estrogen and blood flow to the vagina. Some women will experience a great deal of this discharge all the way through their pregnancy with the amount only increasing the closer they get to delivery. If you find yourself bothered by leucorrhea, you may want to consider using a thin panty liner to protect your underwear.
As a side note, you may notice that your uterus changes shape this week. Until this point you may have looked like you’re hiding a small melon under your shirt. With your increased growth, your uterus may start to take on a more oval, egg-like shape.
Dad’s Tips
Are you matching your partner’s weight gain pound for pound? Often, men experience sympathy weight gain when their women are pregnant as they either find the constant parade of snacks and treats too hard to resist or try to encourage their partners to eat by setting an example. As noble as this is, her weight will be gone when the baby arrives and yours won’t! Try to keep in mind that your health and fitness is just as important as hers. Don’t binge along side of her and try to keep up regular exercise. You may not have to give birth, but when your child is old enough to be an active toddler, you don’t want to still be lugging around 30 extra pounds from pregnancy!