Your Blossoming Baby ( First Trimester )

Congratulations, you are pregnant! Although it may seem early, there are plenty of things you’ll need to do during your first trimester - such as eating well, getting lots of sleep and getting to know your obgyn better!An egg and a sperm meet to form a zygote and a microscopic life start to form inside you. We look at the development of this single cell its first few weeks and the changes you will experience as it starts to grow into a full-fledged baby.

The beginning of life can be traced with a short biology lesson: Pregnancy begins when egg and sperm meet in the fallopian tube. At this very stage, what you have is not quite a foetus yet. It is a zygote - a single cell formed when egg and sperm meet. This single celled zygote divides many times over when it travels down the fallopian tube and int the uterus where it stays until its ready to be released to the world.

Attachment
Around the fourth day of development, implantation occurs when the set of cells attaches itself to the lining of the uterus. Some part of this collection of cells becomes the embryo, which is what the baby is called in the first eight weeks of development. The rest then become placenta.

Floating
Now that your baby is beginning to take shape, he will grow within the amniotic sac in your uterus. This much like developing within a balloon filled with amniotic fluid instead of air. The amniotic fluid is clear and this so-called balloon you’ve imagined is actually two layers of membrane-the chorion and amnion. So when about “water bag breaking”, this refer to the rupture of the membranes. Your baby floats about this fluid and he is attached to the placenta by the umbilical cord.

The Placenta
An integral part of any pregnancy begins to form very early on. Maternal and foetal blood vessels lie very close to one another inside the placenta which allows substances like nutrients, oxygen and waste to transfer back and forth.

Within the placenta, tiny foetal blood vessels form. Three weeks into fertilization, these blood vessels join to form you baby’s circulatory system. The heart now begins to beat.

Little limbs
At the end of your second month of pregnancy, arms, legs, fingers and toes will begin to form. The embryo itself will begin to make little spontaneous movements. Eyes and ears appear and the brain enlarges rapidly during this trimester. Time to increase your omega-3 intake!

If your are anxious about your baby’s gender, take note that external genitalia also emerges at this point, although the difference in gender can only be noted by the end of the second month.

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