Pregnancy math is a weird thing. I always have “trouble” with date math to begin with since something that is “a week from today” can be considered both 7 and 8 days away (or even 6 if you want to count just the days between today and a week from today). Pregnancy terms make it worse. “Everyone” knows you’re pregnant for 9 months, even it’s really 40 weeks. But the first two weeks don’t count because you’re not pregnant, and the next two hardly count because you’re not late yet, so sometimes you can be almost two “months” into being pregnant before you realize that you are. Which means that 20 weeks, while mathematically the half-way point, doesn’t hardly feel like it and makes the second “half” seem to take extra, extra long.
And let’s talk about that “week” thing, shall we? People always ask how many weeks along you are. It’s tough to answer. I get emails from various sites on a near-daily basis giving me updates on how I might be feeling, what fun new complications being pregnant may have recently caused, how the baby’s growing, and of course, how I should invest thousands of dollars in cord blood banking and start stocking up on diapers right away. They all have a different idea about what week I’m in, even though i’ve given them all the same due date. How do you define when a week starts? I know that on Friday, I will be at 26 weeks, meaning that I’ve completed 26 full weeks of being pregnant. Today, however, most everyone agrees that I’m “in my 26th week”, even though I’m really “at” 25weeks and 5 days. Some sites started me on “week 26″ emails as early as last Saturday (25w1d). Some seem to wait until you’re in the middle of the week (as if the 26th week extends from 25w4d to 26w3d.
Is any of it the end of the world? Of course not. So why am I ranting about this?
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