The First Trimester » Weeks

Finding How Many Weeks Pregnant with Ultrasound

Tracey — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 18:12:07 +0000

You think you’re pregnant. You’re pretty sure you’re pregnant. You are pregnant. After getting through this stage, the next thing you want to know is–how far along am I?

If you know the first date of your last menstrual cycle (LMC), it is pretty easy to figure out your due date. (Heck, if you know the date of conception, you can figure out your due date even easier, but we all aren’t recording these things, are we?) But what if you aren’t sure about the date of your last cycle. Maybe yours is highly irregular or you just didn’t keep track.

In this case, you want to have an early ultrasound. Typically, a routine fetal ultrasound is done between 18 and 20 weeks of pregnancy when many anatomic details are visible. However, if there is some question of due date, you could ask your doctor about a scan in your first trimester, after 7 weeks or so.

How An Ultrasound Is Performed

If you haven’t had an ultrasound before, this is how a standard one goes.

You’ll be asked to arrive at the office with a full bladder. You may find this uncomfortable, but a full bladder eliminates pockets of air between your uterus and bladder, which helps create clear ultrasonic images.

When the technician brings you in the room (and in most places, your partner can come in with you), the tech will have you lie on an exam table. He or she will then apply a special gel to your abdomen (which may be a little cold–just what you need on a full bladder). However, the gel helps to conduct sound waves so the ultrasound sends and receives these waves clearly for a good picture.

The tech will then rub a transducer back and forth over your belly. The transducer looks like a handheld scanner that a cashier uses to check the price of that heavy bag of dog food you don’t want to lift from the bottom of the shopping cart. As the smooth end of the transducer is rubbed over your stomach, it bounces sound waves off of dense body parts like bone and muscle. Then, these sound waves are converted into black-and-white or gray images on a monitor.

There is no pain involved (other than that full bladder) and ultrasounds are perfectly safe for you and your baby.

The technician will take your baby’s measurements and explain what you see on the screen and point out the face, toes and what not. Don’t worry if you can’t “see” your baby. Ultrasound images can be hard to make out if you are not a trained technician. They print certain images for for your doctor and you will probably be given copies of some of the images as well.

How Can They Tell How Old My Baby Is?

Once your obstetrician sees your ultrasound, there are a few different ways he or she might interpret it to measure your baby.

a) The Crown-Rump Length – measures the baby from the top of her head to the bottom of her butt and and is very accurate method for estimating the due date based on the baby’s size. This type of measurement can be made somewhere between 7 to 13 weeks of pregnancy.

One important thing to know about this: once your doctor determines the baby’s due date based on the crown-rump length, this due date will not change, even if another ultrasound is done. For instance, if another scan done several weeks later says that one should have a new due date which is further away, one should not normally change the date but should rather interpret the finding as that the baby is not growing at the expected rate.

b) Head Size. This measurement, called the biparietal diameter, measures the diameter from one side of the head to the other. You have to have this measurement taken early in the pregnancy but after 13 weeks. However, taking the head measurement late in pregnancy is unreliable. Early in pregnancy, the size of healthy babies fall into a narrow range. As a baby gets closer to delivery, however, heads sizes of healthy babies vary a lot more.

c) Thigh Length. The doctor looks at the measurement of the longest bone in the body, called femur length, which reflects the growth of the fetus. The same criteria are used here as with a head size measurement: must be taken early in the pregnancy and is only really used to tell how old the baby is.

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Keeping Track of Your Pregnancy

Tracey — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 18:30:26 +0000

Once you have established how many weeks pregnant you are, where do you go from here now?

You are starting an incredible journey and creating a life-long connection to a whole new person to boot. How do you feel? What’s going on with you? What are you thinking?

Keep a Journal

This is a great time to buy a journal and jot down your emotions, thoughts, questions and happenings. A journal can even help with your medical appointments, to keep track of what is going on with your body and symptoms. There are many specific “pregnancy journals”–a good one I like is The Belly Book–that have sections to record the unique things going on through a pregnancy. Any notebook will do as well.

Remember this: a pregnancy journal is a one-of-a-kind keepsake you can keep will after she or he is born and share with your child when he or she is older. Not all children enjoy this–but many do want to know all about them, even when in your belly.

Or Keep a Calendar

Like I said above, keeping a journal of your pregnancy is so ultra-special, you will be so happy you did later. And so will your child. But journaling is not for everybody. A lot of us start off with the best intentions but if writing is not your thing, keep a calendar instead. This way you can just jot down short notes about your feelings or happening (baby’s first kick) on the days they happen. Just as with journals, there are several pregnancy calendars you can choose from. My niece is using the adorable Baby Chronicles Pregnancy Planner because the spiral bind makes it easy to use and keep a long time without pages tearing and you can start the calendar whenever matches the time you want to start it.

Get in touch with your baby now

You can hear your baby’s heartbeat very early in pregnancy. You may not have your first or next appointment for a month and no ultrasound on the horizon until about the 5th month or so, but your baby is active now and you can hear and check. Fetal heartbeat monitors sold in the stores are actually very good now. And one of the nice things about this type of monitor is that Dad, your parents, your friends and other can be involved in your pregnancy. They can actually hear the baby too.

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How many weeks pregnant am I?

Tracey — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 18:03:12 +0000

After finding out that you’re pregnant, the next question you (and everyone else) has is how many weeks pregnant am I?

Generally what you do is figure the baby’s due date. Then from there, you can easily work back to how pregnant you are now.

Think back to when you last period was. What was the first day? Say for instance it was August 20.
Go out 7 days from that date. OK, now you have August 27.
Then go back 3 months from the month you have. Don’t include the month of your last period. That gives us May 27 of next year.

No matter what method is used to estimate your baby’s due date, it is only an estimate! Add 2 weeks on either side of your estimated due date to give yourself a realistic range. About 96% of babies do not even arrive on the calculated due date no matter which method is used. In the end, it’s up to baby.

There are actually several ways to find out, with varying degrees of accuracy. The first thing is you have to know when your last period was. (If you are not sure, check Finding How Many Weeks Pregnant with Ultrasound.)

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