Thursday, June 26, 2008

36 weeks!

So I have 2-6 weeks left.... goodness there's still a lot to do! I uploaded pictures from the baby shower, and I still need to take a recent one, but we've been a little busy.

OH!!! I don't plan on putting many baby pictures on this website. I'm going to be putting them on Flickr, so you can download them better. But I don't want just ANYONE downloading them, so it's going to be required that you be on my Flickr friend's list. This is free, and you just have to have a yahoo.com log in that's registered to Flickr. Once you register to Flickr, you can become my friend. If you have any problems with this, or want help setting it up, please contact me (link on the left) and I'll help you through it.

But here's what's happening this week anyway:
Your baby has likely hit the six-pound mark by now, and his length is approximately twenty-one inches. The weight on your abdomen probably feels like twice that. Your baby is practicing his breathing, but he has increasingly less space to practice stretching and kicking. Your baby' intestines are also building up meconium, a greenish-black substance made of baby by-products such as dead cells, shed lanugo, and amniotic fluid. It'll become your little darling's first bowel movement, hopefully after he is out of the womb. His body fat has increased to about eight percent. By birth, it'll be about fifteen percent. If your baby is a boy, his testes will have descended into his scrotum. While your baby could be born at any time, the longer he stays in, the more time he has to develop the connections in his brain in the pleasant peace and quiet of your womb. At this point, he can do all the things a newborn can, with the exception of breathing air and pooping in a diaper. Just as you're feeling stretched, your baby is being squeezed on all sides. Some of your antibodies are crossing the placenta, giving your baby's immune system some support for his first days in the world. If you breastfeed, you'll later be giving him immunities in your milk.

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