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2 Weeks Pregnant (Counting from the first day of your last menstrual period)
 The Baby At the end of this week, it's going to happen. A ripe egg cell will jump out of your ovary and will be caught by grabby tentacles and sucked into your Fallopian tube. There, it will float downstream towards your uterus, waiting for visitors. That could be a flood of sperm cells; each milliliter of ejaculate contains about 2,500,000 of them. On average, some 500 million sperm cells will leave the body with each ejaculation. These sperm cells will fanatically start looking for your egg cell. They'll swim as hard as they can to cover the 6 ¾ inches (17 centimeters) that separates the entrance of the vagina from the egg cell. One of the sperm cells will be the winner of the race and this chosen one will stick his head into the egg cell. The gates will be closed immediately and all the other sperm cells will miss the boat. The winning sperm cell will lose his tail and the historical moment is complete: the egg is fertilized!Once in a while, an ovary may release more than one egg. In that case, more than one sperm has the chance to win the race. If all the eggs are fertilized, the resulting babies will be fraternal, or non-identical, twins (or more). Fraternal twins can be two boys, two girls, or a boy and a girl. Even more rarely, an egg is fertilized, and then splits completely into two separate packages. Each of these zygotes will go on to become an individual baby - identical twins. Obviously, identical twins are always either both boys or both girls. So if you see a set of twins and one is a boy and one is a girl, don't ask if they are identical - it's not possible! The egg cell will split itself into two nuclei that contain the hereditary characteristics of you and your partner. A small miracle, a new human being is in the making! His or her big adventure in your Fallopian tube has begun, and... you still don't know anything about it. By the way, the sperm cell that has fertilized your egg cell has already determined if you'll have a boy or a girl. If it took an X-chromosome with it, it'll be a girl and if it brought along a Y-chromosome a little boy-to-be has started its journey. Since the mom is always a "she" let's assume in this case it'll be a boy so we can call him "he."The cell division has begun and it won't take long before the little lump of cells, which is called the 'morula', will travel through the Fallopian tube to the uterus. While it keeps on dividing, it takes the fertilized egg about four days to reach the uterus. Sometimes it might take longer, if the little lump of cells can't decide where to settle down. Then it'll keep bobbing about on the surface of the uterus. During this so-called 'diapause', the egg will stop dividing and will rest and wait until it has found a good spot to nestle. In that case, the baby will be ready a bit later and might therefore be born a week or so after the expected date.
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Did you know that a sperm cell is the smallest cell in the human body and an egg cell the biggest one? |
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Did you know that the lump of cells splits up into two layers? The cells of the inner layer will eventually form the embryo while those of the outer layer will become the membranes and placenta. |
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 MotherYou may have noticed this week that your vaginal discharge is watery and stringy. This means that you're fertile! (Remember natural family planning? Changes in cervical mucous in combination with temperature change is a fairly reliable indicator of ovulation). The cervix creates this stringy mucous so that the sperm cells that enter you can stay alive longer and swim around more easily. Sperm can last as long as 48 hours (and sometimes longer!) They can wait in the cervix or Fallopian tube until a fertile egg cell descends. When that happens the sperm must be quick, because an egg cell is only ready to be fertilized for between one and four hours.Although you still don't know anything and won't feel that you're pregnant, a lot is going on in your uterus. As soon as an egg becomes fertilized, signals are send out to the uterus, which enlists a hormone to see to it that a nice, soft bed is created in the wall of the uterus. This human chorionic gonadotropin hormone (hCG) not only sees to it that the bed is made for your fertilized egg, but also that (in almost all cases) you won't have another period. Isn't that something?
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By making love when you're ovulating, when your mucous discharge is stringy, you increase your chances of getting pregnant. Making love more than once every other day may decrease the quality of the sperm cells. |
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