Sharon Perkins - Dad's Guide to Pregnancy For Dummies

By the end of the second trimester, your baby is roughly 14 inches long and weighs about 2 pounds. Her skin is still translucent, but her eyes are beginning to open and close. Your partner is also likely to start feeling movements and even baby’s tiny hiccups. Check out Chapter 5to find out more about the second trimester.

Assuming all goes according to plan and your baby bakes until he’s full term (meaning he isn’t born before 37 weeks) or later, the third trimester can be one of the longest three-month periods of your — and your partner’s — life. Your partner begins to feel uncomfortable as her ever-increasing abdominal girth makes it difficult to move and sleep normally, and you both get antsy about the impending arrival.

To make the most of the time, you and your partner need to take care of business by doing the following:

Picking a pediatrician who you’re comfortable with and who has a similar parenting philosophy as you and your partner

Crafting your birth plan (and hiring a doula if you want one)

Getting your maternity and paternity leave squared away

Creating a phone tree to announce baby’s arrival

Finishing up any odd projects around the house that need to be done prior to baby’s arrival

During the third trimester, your baby is fully developed and focused on growing larger and stronger for life on the outside. See Chapter 8for the full details.

The third trimester is also the last time for many, many years that you and your partner exist solely as a couple, so be sure to take the time to indulge yourselves in the things you love to do together. (take your “babymoon” but don’t plan travel after 36 weeks in pregnancy). Life may feel like it’s on pause for at least the first six months of baby’s existence, so get out now and enjoy the freedom of childlessness. Soon enough, your life will be a lot more complicated and busy — and happy, too. Very, very happy.

Because the first few weeks of pregnancy are likely to be rather uneventful, now is a good time to start a time capsule for the year your baby will be born. Many years down the road, when your child is an adult, it will be a touching, informative look back at the time when she entered the world. For you and your partner, it will be a fun, celebratory action to kick off the pregnancy festivities.

Keep movie ticket stubs, takeout menus, a newspaper from the day you found out your partner was pregnant (as well as clippings of the most important headlines of the year), favorite ads, magazine clippings, and so on. Include pop culture elements that define the year as well as some of your favorite things.

As you choose names, add the list of all potential names to the time capsule. When you choose a paint color for the nursery, put in the paint color card. Any decision you and your partner make for the baby is a good candidate for inclusion. It may seem silly now, but in 20 years it will be the best gift you can give your child.

Chapter 2

IN THIS CHAPTER

Realizing why getting pregnant is sometimes harder than it looks

Improving your health and lifestyle to help your chances

Determining the right time for fertilization (and making it a good time)

Confronting and coping with infertility issues

Talking to your family — or not — about your baby plans

You may have spent years trying not to get pregnant, so the change from not trying to trying can be rather unsettling. Having trouble with something even the most clueless people manage to do effortlessly can cause you to lose sleep at night and can turn sex into a job. Getting pregnant is hard work … sometimes.

In this chapter, we tell you how to make the getting-pregnant process painless and fun — even if it takes longer than you expected.

Getting pregnant requires that several key players be on the field at the right time: namely, good sperm, a mature egg, and a suitable landing place in the uterus. If sperm and egg meet in the fallopian tube (the conduit from the ovary down to the uterus), join together to form a fertilized egg, and then float down to a uterus with a lining that’s exactly the right thickness to facilitate implantation, then pregnancy occurs. If any of those factors are amiss, well, that’s when things get complicated.

Before she’s even born, a woman has all the eggs she’ll ever have. Unlike sperm, no new eggs are produced over time; the original eggs just mature, usually one at a time. Mature eggs are produced from immature ones (called oocytes ), located in the ovaries, through a complex interaction of three hormones during the menstrual cycle. Those hormones — estradiol (a form of estrogen), follicle stimulating hormone (FSH), and luteinizing hormone (LH) — work like this:

1 Day 1 of the menstrual cycle begins when your partner’s period starts. FSH stimulates the ovaries, which produce estrogen.

2 Estradiol production starts to mature a number of egg-containing follicles, small, cyst like structures that contain the immature eggs.

3 One follicle, called a lead follicle, continues to develop while the rest atrophy.

4 Around day 14 of the menstrual cycle, LH kicks in to mature the egg and move it to the center of the follicle so it can release. Ovulation occurs 14 days before the last day of your partner’s cycle, so day 14 is based on an average 28-day cycle. If her cycles are longer or shorter than 14 days, she’ll ovulate earlier or later.

5 The egg releases from the follicle and begins to float down the fallopian tube. This is where you and your sperm come in.

If you’re interested in really getting into the nitty-gritty of how the menstrual cycle works, check out Getting Pregnant For Dummies by Lisa A. Rinehart et al (John Wiley & Sons).

Figure 2-1 shows the events of a menstrual cycle when pregnancy does not occur.

Illustration by Kathryn Born, MA

FIGURE 2-1:Every event in the menstrual cycle has a purpose.