Today brings two beautiful words: full-term. Now, whenever baby's born, he's likely to thrive. Also thriving? Your nesting instincts, which are behind those sudden urges to bake, clean, or embroider a onesie. (Feminists, take your issue up with nature, not with us.)
This week, you may expel the cervical mucus plug, aka "bloody show," at any time. If you're worried about stretch marks, be patient. They'll begin to fade a few months after you deliver. Stretch marks are caused by broken collagen fibers under your skin's surface. The strength of your collagen is genetic, so if your mom got stretch marks, you probably will, too. The hormone relaxin is causing all of the smooth muscle in your body to unclench. You'll feel like you have loose "rag-doll" joints. You're probably having Braxton-Hicks contractions, which you may or may not notice. How can you tell these contractions from the real thing? If you have to ask, they probably aren't. Real contractions grow progressively stronger, more intense, and more regular.
Baby's now the size of a watermelon!
Your full-term (yay!) baby is gaining about 1/2 ounce a day and getting his first sticky poop (called meconium) ready. He's also brushing up on skills for the outside world: blinking, sucking, inhaling, exhaling, and gripping (it's getting strong!).
Your baby has likely hit the six-pound mark by now, and her length is approximately twenty-one inches. The weight on your abdomen probably feels like twice that. Your baby is practicing her breathing, but she has increasingly less space to practice stretching and kicking. Your baby' intestines are also building up meconium, a greenish-black substance made of baby by-products such as dead cells, shed lanugo, and amniotic fluid. It'll become your little darling's first bowel movement, hopefully after she is out of the womb. Her body fat has increased to about eight percent. By birth, it'll be about fifteen percent. If your baby is a boy, his testes will have descended into his scrotum. While your baby could be born at any time, the longer she stays in, the more time she has to develop the connections in her brain in the pleasant peace and quiet of your womb. At this point, she can do all the things a newborn can, with the exception of breathing air and pooping in a diaper. Just as you're feeling stretched, your baby is being squeezed on all sides. Some of your antibodies are crossing the placenta, giving your baby's immune system some support for her first days in the world. If you breastfeed, you'll later be giving her immunities in your milk.
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