Pregnancy Week 18

A few weeks ago, you read that your baby opened their mouth occasionally and carefully started practicing swallowing. Baby still didn’t swallow properly, but baby does now! Baby will occasionally swallow some amniotic fluid. Your baby also urinates removing the fluid being swallowed. And you’ve guessed it, it goes into the amniotic fluid.

Baby then swallows some more. It sounds a bit dirty but it isn’t. At this time, your baby’s urine if not comparable to that of a newborn. By taking small gulps, your baby is exercising the lungs, alimentary canal and kidneys.

As well as containing urine, the amniotic fluid also has downy hair and skin cells floating around in it. Your baby also ingests these when they swallow. The fine hairs and skin cells pile up in their intestines which forms the ‘meconium’. Meconium is the first defecation that your baby will excrete after birth. It has a black-green color and is a bit slimy.

Your baby’s head has also grown considerably and is now a third of their total body size. As a comparison, our head is a sixth of our total body size. Your baby can now bend and move their spinal column, including their neck. Baby is now 5.59 inches and weighs 6.7 ounces.

J. Lo buttocks and a rounded body

‘You get a fat belly when you get pregnant’, is what all children say when they talk about pregnancy. You are now fully aware that it’s not only your belly that gets rounder, your whole body does too. We all react differently to pregnancy, but you can’t escape the fact your body changes. When you eat healthily you will soon lose those extra pounds after the pregnancy. That is not to say that your body getting rounder does not go unpunished and will not leave marks.

When your body grows so much in such a short time, the skin is suddenly stretched a lot, as is the subcutaneous tissue. If the growth occurs too quickly, the subcutaneous tissue can tear. It sounds painful, but it isn’t, but neither is it nice. You can see those tears on the outside of your skin. They are the shiny stripes giving your skin a sort of marble texture. These stripes are called stretch marks.