Random Preggie Musings – 9 months or 10 months?!?!

So being pregnant for the first time is interesting. There are all these things you discover … some of which you expected and knew and some which are total surprises. It makes for some pretty funny discoveries.

The first of these is the 9 month thing – did you know a pregnancy is not actually 9 months?

Why?

Well first of all you count the pregnancy weeks / months from the first day of your last period – i.e. before you are actually pregnant – so when you conceive you are technically 2 weeks (depending on your cycle) pregnant already. The reason they do this is because there’s very little way for the doctor to establish when you conceived without asking you some pretty hectic and invasive questions.  Can you picture your gynae asking you when exactly you had sex?  They may as well as in what position and for how long! So they use the 1st day of your last period as the start of the pregnancy and save us all some cringeworthy moments.

Then a full term pregnancy is considered 40 weeks – so hello – you’re thinking 10 months right? Well most of us think of a month as 4 weeks – so when we do the maths we get 10 months from the 40 week calculation … but actually … the mathematical geniuses out their will tell you that a month is 4.35 weeks … so it does technically equate to a little over 9 months. But it isn’t exactly 9 months full stop.

This is just one of those weird little things you only really figure out when you actually fall pregnant and are doing the maths of when Jumping Bean will arrive.

And like hello – you have preggie brain as it is and then they throw these complicated mathematical equations at you … rolling eyeballs!