Week 3

Your Baby’s Development:

This early in your pregnancy, a collection of cells begins the long journey to become your bundle of joy. At this time, conception is likely to have taken place, meaning that the head of the sperm has penetrated the egg and turned into a nucleus. During this week, the newly-fertilized egg (called a zygote) travels along your fallopian tube towards your uterus. The fusion of the sperm and egg cells has already assigned your baby a gender, hair and eye color, plus other unique characteristics. The traveling zygote divides and subdivides to form a mass of cells that finally reaches the uterus and becomes what is referred to as a blastocyst. This attaches to the wall of your womb, which will be its home for the next 38 weeks or so. This process is called implantation and means you are now officially pregnant. Because the length of your pregnancy is based on the date of your last menstrual period, it can seem a bit confusing that even though conception has just occurred, you are already in your third week of pregnancy!

What You Should Expect:

During the third week of pregnancy, you probably won’t notice any physical external changes to your body, but there will be plenty of transformations happening on the inside. You may notice internal changes like gas, constipation and nausea. You may also find yourself needing to head to the bathroom to urinate more often. Since you are experiencing extreme fluctuations in your changing hormones, you may feel more tired and sluggish than normal. As early as the third week of pregnancy, some women experience mood swings and tender breasts, although many women don’t experience these symptoms for another couple of weeks. Lots of women don’t experience any noticeable symptoms during the third week of pregnancy, but those that do often mistakenly attribute the symptoms to PMS.

The good news is that if your diet hasn’t been perfect up to this point, or if you’ve consumed alcohol, the baby is not likely to be negatively affected and you can still expect a healthy pregnancy. If you haven’t already, start taking prenatal vitamins with folic acid and begin to consciously avoid bad habits that might harm your pregnancy such as smoking, alcohol consumption and drugs.