Your baby
The heart is beating very fast at the moment, probably more than 160 beats a minute. Later in pregnancy the rate slows a little, to somewhere between 120 and 160 beats a minute.
Meanwhile your baby is becoming more and more a little person, with human habits already. There is a good chance your child is happily sucking a thumb by now and can grasp with the hands. Now and then your child takes hold of the umbilical cord, for instance. That does no harm, because the cord is well protected by a jelly-like layer.
Another human habit: your child stretches now and then and yawns quite unashamedly while doing so. Such a shame you cannot see it.
You
The midwife will try to listen to the heartbeat with a doptone. Hearing your child's heartbeat for the very first time is, and remains, something special. But do not be too disappointed if you hear nothing yet. Sometimes the twelfth week is just a little too early. Next time you will certainly hear it.
In principle your midwife carries on looking after your pregnancy as long as it goes without complications. If complications are likely, you go to the gynaecologist. Sometimes that is known early on — because you have diabetes, say, or had a caesarean last time. But you may equally be referred to the gynaecologist later in your pregnancy. He or she then decides whether you stay under their care or can go back to the midwife later.
Physical discomforts and changed hormones can make you react quite differently from usual. You may burst into tears over nothing at all, or lose your temper easily. Your sex life may be at a fairly low ebb. Take heart: in the fourth month it will very likely pick up again. Many women find their appetite for sex returns in force just then.
The dating scan
Around this time you are offered a dating scan as a matter of course, to establish exactly how many weeks pregnant you are. The best time for it is between 10 and 14 weeks. In that period every foetus grows at roughly the same rate, so the length of the pregnancy can be established very accurately. Certainty about that matters for everything that follows.
For an abdominal scan, where the probe is moved over your abdomen, you first have to drink plenty of water. Fluid lets sound waves through well, and a full bladder pushes your womb upwards. At around 10 to 12 weeks there is so much amniotic fluid around your baby that the picture is better anyway. Drinking water before a scan is sometimes still needed, but after the fourteenth week no longer.
First trimester
