Your baby
Until now your baby's head was far too large in proportion to the body. Now head and body are in the same proportion as they will be at birth. Your baby's digestive tract has long been ready, and this week the taste buds start to develop as well. Your child's cartilage is slowly turning to bone, so the bones are becoming quite firm. The skull, happily, stays soft enough to pass through the birth canal.
A difference in weight between boys and girls appears. In a first pregnancy a son now weighs 1,030–1,190 grams and a daughter 960–1,110 grams. These figures apply to a first pregnancy only.
You
Having strange dreams all of a sudden? That is not surprising. Dreaming is a way of working through unconscious fears and conflicting feelings. Those unsettling dreams are simply an expression of your worries about whether everything will go well and whether your baby will be healthy. You do not actually dream more than usual, by the way — you just remember it better, because you are sleeping more lightly.
Do you have a dark line running down your abdomen from the navel? That is called the linea nigra, a build-up of pigment. After the pregnancy it slowly fades. You may have increased pigmentation elsewhere too: darker nipples and purplish labia.
Arranging birth announcement cards
You will no doubt want to send out birth announcements once your child is born. These days you can easily design a card yourself online. Or you can choose one at a printer's, or have one designed. Give some thought to the wording as well. Besides the baby's name and date of birth, would you like a short poem, for instance?
Do look through your address book to see who you want to send a card to. That way you know roughly how many you will need and whose address you are missing. If you like, you can write the envelopes in advance. Or make a spreadsheet of the addresses, which you can send to the printer to be printed — or print yourself onto label stickers.
Second trimester
